Oivalluksia

by James Joyce, Tuomas Kilpi (Translator)

Oivalluksia on valikoima James Joycen aiemmin suomentamatonta proosaa ja runoja. Kirjan nimikkoteksti on lyhyiden proosafragmenttien kokoelma, johon Joyce tallensi arkea ja elämää lapsuutensa ja nuoruutensa Dublinissa. Teos sisältää lisäksi kaksi pitkää pilkkarunoa. Pyhä istuin -runossa Joyce irvii säälimättömästi kanssakirjailijoitaan. Kaasua polttimesta -runossa pistävän ivan kohteena on kustantaja, joka ei sopimuksesta huolimatta suostunut julkaisemaan Joycen teosta.

62 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2018

About the author

James Joyce was an Irish novelist, poet, and a pivotal figure in 20th-century modernist literature, renowned for his highly experimental approach to language and narrative structure, particularly his pioneering mastery and popularization of the stream-of-consciousness technique. Born into a middle-class Catholic family in the Rathgar suburb of Dublin in 1882, Joyce spent the majority of his adult life in self-imposed exile across continental Europe—living in Trieste, Zurich, and Paris—yet his entire, meticulous body of work remained obsessively and comprehensively focused on the minutiae of his native city, making Dublin both the meticulously detailed setting and a central, inescapable character in his literary universe. His work is consistently characterized by its technical complexity, rich literary allusion, intricate symbolism, and an unflinching examination of the spectrum of human consciousness. Joyce began his published career with Dubliners (1914), a collection of fifteen short stories offering a naturalistic, often stark, depiction of middle-class Irish life and the moral and spiritual paralysis he observed in its inhabitants, concluding each story with a moment of crucial, sudden self-understanding he termed an "epiphany." This collection was followed by the highly autobiographical novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916), a Bildungsroman that meticulously chronicled the intellectual and artistic awakening of its protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, who would become Joyce's recurring alter ego and intellectual stand-in throughout his major works.
His magnum opus, Ulysses (1922), is universally regarded as a landmark work of fiction that fundamentally revolutionized the novel form. It compressed the events of a single, ordinary day—June 16, 1904, a date now globally celebrated by literary enthusiasts as "Bloomsday"—into a sprawling, epic narrative that structurally and symbolically paralleled Homer's Odyssey, using a dazzling array of distinct styles and linguistic invention across its eighteen episodes to explore the lives of Leopold Bloom, his wife Molly Bloom, and Stephen Dedalus in hyper-minute detail. The novel's explicit content and innovative, challenging structure led to its initial banning for obscenity in the United States and the United Kingdom, turning Joyce into a cause célèbre for artistic freedom and the boundaries of literary expression. His final, most challenging work, Finnegans Wake (1939), pushed the boundaries of language and conventional narrative even further, employing a dense, dream-like prose filled with multilingual puns, invented portmanteau words, and layered allusions that continues to divide and challenge readers and scholars to this day. A dedicated polyglot who reportedly learned several languages, including Norwegian simply to read Ibsen in the original, Joyce approached the English language not as a fixed entity with rigid rules, but as a malleable medium capable of infinite reinvention and expression. His personal life was marked by an unwavering dedication to his literary craft, a complex, devoted relationship with his wife Nora Barnacle, and chronic, debilitating eye problems that necessitated numerous painful surgeries throughout his life, sometimes forcing him to write with crayons on large white paper. Despite these severe physical ailments and financial struggles, his singular literary vision remained sharp, focused, and profoundly revolutionary. Joyce passed away in Zurich, Switzerland, in 1941, shortly after undergoing one of his many eye operations. Today, he is widely regarded as perhaps the most significant and challenging writer of the 20th century. His immense, complex legacy is robustly maintained by global academic study and institutions such as the James Joyce Centre in Dublin, which ensures his complex, demanding, and utterly brilliant work endures, inviting new generations of readers to explore the very essence of what it means to be hum

Reviews

[Mika Lamminpää · Rating 5 out of 5]

Jee, uutta Joycea suomeksi! Tuomas Kilpi on suomentanut proosakatkelmia ja pari ennen julkaisematonta runoa niteeseen Oivalluksia (2018). Tällä vuosikymmenellä on tullut paljon uutta Joycea suomeksi, ja asialla ovat olleet etenkin pienet kustantamot. kuten Savukeidas, Ntamo ja Basam Books. Nyt tähän pienten mutta kunnianhimoisten kustantajien joukkoon on liittynyt Oppian, jonka luotsina toimii toimittajana ja suomentajana tunnettu Tuomas Kilpi.

Aiemmin on suomennettu Joycen runokokoelma Kamarimusiikkia (2012, suom. Ville-Juhani Sutinen), joka sisältää yllättävän perinteistä ja kaunista lyriikkaa. Tämän valikoiman runot ovat häijyjä kiukunpurkauksia kotimaata ja petollista kustantajaa kohtaan. Kosto on harvoin niin suloista kuin näissä runoissa. Myös proosafragmentit ovat jokseenkin yllättäviä, ainakin jos odottaa sellaista tajunnanvirtavyörytystä kuin Odysseus (1964) ja Finnegans Wake (ei vielä suomennettu). Ei tämä Dublinilaisiakaan (1965) muistuta, koska nämä fragmentit ovat niin luonnosmaisia. Kiehtova kurkistus neron työhuoneeseen tämä kumma pieni kirja on.

[Siina · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm glad Oppian publishes classics and stuff we haven't had in Finnish before. Oivalluksia is a collection of texts from James Joyce. Mostly they are fragments and two poems too. First I was kind of skeptic, since the book is basically a collection of very shorts texts without background, but oddly enough I could see the setting immediately. It proves how good of a writer Joyce was, since he breathes life to even single lines. The poems were entertaining too, although I'd always love to read the original, since you never know whether the inner most was captured with the translation. I actually haven't read Joyce before, but I wanted to try and this was the easiest approach, since the book is only slightly over 60 pages long. Perhaps I just would've wanted more, you know? A slightly sporadic collection, but interesting still.

[Perttu Ojanperä · Rating 3 out of 5]

Joycea aiemmin lukematta tästä ei paljon kostunut.