JAMES JOYCE: A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST IN HIS YOUTH [1957].

Description

We present the first post-war edition of ” A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” (original title: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) by James Joyce (1882-1941) – an Irish writer, considered one of the greatest creators of 20th century world literature, a precursor of stream of consciousness and modernism. Published in 1957 in Warsaw by the State Publishing Institute (PIW) in the prestigious series “Novels of the 20th Century” .

The novel, first published in 1916 in New York , is largely autobiographical – it depicts the intellectual and moral maturation of Stefan Dedalus, the writer’s alter ego. It reveals a picture of Dublin at the turn of the 20th century, the family environment, Jesuit schools and boarding schools, and finally the atmosphere of University College Dublin. In the ending, the protagonist presents his writing credo and with the words “I will not serve” leaves Ireland to take up an artistic challenge. The novel is a thematic and formal introduction to Joyce’s masterpiece, “Ulysses” (1922) .

The figure of Sigmund Allan, the translator of this novel, remains a mystery to this day. His translation was first published in 1931 by the publishing house “Rój” and it was the first Polish edition and the first book publication of Joyce in Poland . The first postwar edition dates from 1957 . Fascinatingly, the two texts differ significantly – it’s not about the modernization of spelling or grammar, but about important changes affecting the interpretation of the work. For example, the 1931 edition reads: “in the forge of his soul forge the not yet born sense of his race,” while in the 1957 edition of PIW: “in the forge of his soul forge a sense of my nation not yet born”. Who was Sigmund Allan and who oversaw the changes in the translation – remains a subject of debate among researchers to this day .

This is the first post-war edition – a valuable testimony to Joyce’s return to official reading circulation after years of Stalinist censorship, belonging to PIW’s “Novels of the Twentieth Century” series, sought after by collectors. The presented copy is clean and preserved in very good condition. It is a must-have for a collector of world literature, a lover of Joyce’s prose and a bibliophile looking for a representative edition of one of the most important works of modernism.

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