6th Croatia: The Joyce of Wandering

16-17 June 2016, Pula

Every 16th of June literature enthusiasts and Ireland fans celebrate Bloomsday – the day 's takes place, inspired by the day Joyce had first laid eyes on the love of his life, . For the sixth year, the Croatian coastal town of Pula commemorates Joyce, the Irish literary genius who lived there in 1904, the year of Ulysses.

Bloomsday Croatia takes it back to where it all started: the coastal town of Pula; Joyce's first station in his self-exile from with Nora Barnacle, who would later become his wife. Initially, the couple had set out for Trieste, but ended up in Pula, an Austro-Hungarian naval port.

Travel and literature became discoursively entangled in the 20th century, so Joyce's innate desire to explore and wander are the focus of the sixth edition of the Bloomsday Croatia festival. As the most mindpicking and meaning-elusive episode of his James Joyce's epochal Ulysses, Circe is the episode of choice. The hallucinatory episode is a metaphor for the cognitive travel; for Bloom it is the hero's journey into the mind, the sublime and the unconscious, his threading forth into the novel enviroment, just like that of Joyce's in the year of 1904 where he lived in the military port of Pula, an Austro- Hungarian coastal symbol of transit and change. A similar texture of the wandering hero is to be found in Stephen Dedalus, the ultimate Joycean hero who's coming of age was encapulated in the breathtaking psycho-geographic journey A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man. Its first century is to be celebrated in Pula, alongside the centennial marking of the Easter Rising, the famous year 1916 which Joyce observed from the south of Europe. That event, which was solving the conundru of the Irish existential itch, did not leave obvious marks on Joyce's mindscape, yet it is alluded to in various forms and places throughout Ulysses. Therefore, the premise of wandering and change in its capacity to form the spiritual and intellectual transfomation is visually manifested in the Pula tram which, scholars argue, influenced the public transportation scene in and the walking potato – Joyce's, or rather Bloom's talisman of satirical quality. Bloom's lucky charm, his lucky talisman, is the most vivid remnant of the Potato Famine as the defining national tragedy. The potato as a means of transaction becomes the probing and examining political tool in Ulysses, thusly paralelling socio-political situations of The Croatian lands in Joyce's time, but also in the current republic, namely the spiritual blight and hunger.

The festival that marries entertainment and the academia welcomes the biggest living translators, the second translator of Ulysses, academician Luko Paljetak, who had corrected over 5000 translation mistakes of the original translation from 1956. Paljetak, an avid Joycean, will address the cultural gaps and difficulties in conveying the Irisman's intentions and tackle his erotic, but rather turbulent romantic episode with the love of his life, and how in fact the Pula episode conceived not only their first son Giorgio, but also the erotic textures of Ulysses. A more personal and biographical approach is to be given by anoter academician, professor Boris Senker, whose grandfather had resided in Pula and later on, together with Jimmy Joyce, became one of the protagonists of the play Pulysses. The two fictionally conjoined characters undergo an internal and physical journey that mirror each other, and thus the two characters likewise mirror one another. The grumpy Irish bard seems to be a lifelong viral inspiration to the Mantua born artist Andrea Jori. His mindscape was inhabited by the Joycean spirits excorcised in the intricate and somewhat psychedelic potraits of the multifaceted Joyce couple.

Traveller's itch and wanderlust are thematized further in the enactment of The Cat and The Devil, Joyce's lovely short story, or rather a letter to his grandson Stephen from which the youngest Pulaners learn about journey, wanderlust and Joyce himself through an interactive open-air play performed by Teatar Naranča. The journey is rounded up symbolically at night, in a Circerian oneiric manner, through a guided tour in Joyce's 'Pulanesque' footsteps: step by step, step on a step, step next to a step stealthing through the Nighttown of Pula to discover what lies underneath the lights of the town, beneath the Roman blocks, and Austro-Hungarian facades. The festival promises an illuminating ending!

Since we have gone potatoes this year, the active exploration does not end on Bloomsday, but in the following days as Bloomsday Croatia invites the visitors and the travellers with that frying itch, to capture their moments in a Joycean and Odyssean manner with a spud that will make a perfect travelling bud. It only takes a potato-selfie to win a trip to the National Park Brijuni, the archipelago where Jimmy+Nora celebrated his 23rd birthday eating Istrian goat cheese. Drop by Caffe Uliks (Caffe Ulysses), take a sip or a glass of one of three Joyce cocktails (Molly, Poldy, Stephen) or a Joycean Irish coffee, grab a spud, take that selfie and snatch those tickets to the islands!

All events are free of charge and open to public. Enjoyce Bloomsday and Pula with us!

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