translate this to persian:
“O, ROCKS!” THAT’S WHAT she says, “O, rocks.” To what? “The transmigration of souls.” Well, isn’t
that your reaction? Except that’s not what she’s responding to. The real question, and real annoyance, is
about a word. And maybe about her husband. She’s Molly Bloom, the female leading figure (one can hardly
call her a heroine) of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Molly is earthy, musical, chiefly uneducated, intuitive, and
unfaithful. Very right-brain, except for the infidelity, which is probably lobe-independent. She is the source
of the world’s most famous fictional monologue (we’ll exempt Hamlet here as dramatic), but that’s not our
subject here. Her husband, Leopold, is the more cerebral of the two by far. He’s intellectually curious,
philosophically inclined, ineffectual, a great reader. Her literary tastes run more to steamy romances with
titles like Sweets of Sin, and when she encounters a new word, she turns to her hubby. The word in this case
is “metempsychosis,” a true jawbreaker meaning, yes, the transmigration of souls, the closest to which she
can get, or so he later reports, is met-him-pike-hoses. Not all that bad, really. Bloom defines it, and she
offers the interjection with which I started this paragraph, followed by a request: “Tell us in plain words.”
And there, friends and neighbors, is about 90 percent of what we need to
know about the Bloom marriage.
Since I’ve already abused Shakespeare, we might as well trot him out again.
To his question, “What’s in a name?” we might equally ask, what’s in a word?
Novels are full of words, of course, but they tend to be on offer in bulk.
Novelists get paid, sometimes literally, by the word. And sometimes it feels like
it. Think I’m kidding? Read some Thackeray and get back to me. Actually, you
can still find open by-the-word payment for short fiction, often from the literary
magazines, but the rate of payment is so low that it doesn’t threaten anyone’s
amateur status. Besides, we’re not really interested in words by the bin here.
More in words by ones and twos.
Sometimes the same word in different contexts. A bit earlier in our novel,
Joyce tells us that Bloom “ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls.”
Contrast that with the F. Scott Fitzgerald short story “May Day,” published at
almost exactly the same time (appearing in Tales of the Jazz Age, also in 1922),
where the flappers and fraternity men “ate their buckwheat cakes with relish.”
Ewww. What, they were out of maple syrup? Here we go, then: one word, two,
to my mind, very different revelations about the writer. “Relish” is one of those
wonderful English words with two very different meanings: you can relish an
opportunity but you shouldn’t put relish on it. Right? Joyce clearly knows this
doubled meaning and exploits it in his sentence, the very first one in which
Bloom appears in the novel, right at the beginning of the “Calypso” episode.
He’s thinking about that secondary meaning involving diced pickles and
mustard. Chiefly, he’s thinking that he wants the other one clearly predominant,
but if a little of the messy relish hangs around, that could be fun, too. Fitzgerald?
Not. How can I say that with such certainty? Word placement, for one thing.
Joyce situates it right after the thing it’s modifying, “ate.” Not “organs,” not
“fowls.” After the verb. To verb something—do, watch, listen, eat—with relish
is to do it with enthusiasm and energy. Bring a noun into the picture, though, and
we might just be talking condiment. In “May Day,” the operative phrase is
“cakes with relish.” That’s what the eye perceives and the tongue rejects. At
least, mine does. Yes, Fitzgerald may mean, in the first instance, that they, too,
“ate” with gusto, but the secondary meaning arrives neck and neck in a photo
finish with the primary, and the gusto flies right out the window. Conclusion?
Someone here is more precise with language than someone else. It need not
work to Joyce’s credit; you may see him as excessively concerned with detail or
anal or something, Fitzgerald as more relaxed, more open to possibility. Or you
may simply put it down to work rates, to Joyce’s painstaking composition by
accretion, adding as he goes, or to Fitzgerald’s frantic pace in those early days,
cranking out short story after short story. That’s not what I see, but it’s anyone’s
call.