Bloomsday

Every year on June 16th, Bloomsday, James Joyce’s Ulysses is read worldwide. Its hero, Leopold Bloom, is one of the most renowned Jewish characters in 20th-century literature, and Joyce the writer who translated exile into modernity. Critics and scholars continue to debate what kind of Jew Leopold Bloom is. But is that the point? In one of the few existing recordings of his own voice, Joyce points to an idea: language, as a vast poetic system, is the primal terrain of human, political, and ethical experience. Moses’ defining trait is having delivered the “tables of the law, graven in the language of the outlaw.”

For several years, Centro Primo Levi marked Bloomsday, tracing Joyce’s footsteps in Trieste, his friendship with Italo Svevo, and the birth of a text that redefined literature while delving deeply into an ancient understanding of language. 

This year, the American Sephardi Federation’s curator, Yves Seban, will read from  James Joyce’s texts and from the Italian translation. The public reading induces vertigo and exhilaration, exhaling the dream-like quality of Joyce’s prose.

Some background

In the late 1990s, when the art galleries were still in Soho, the Paula Cooper Gallery offered its space to anyone who wanted to read full works by James Joyce and Gertrude Stein in twenty-four hours.

The readings ended when the galleries moved to Chelsea. Seban participated in most of those readings and began to develop his own version, which included excerpts of Italian translation by the late Luigi Schenoni (Musée des Arts Océaniens et Africains, Paris, 1997; Festival des Allumés, Nantes,1998; Galerie du Jour-agnès b.,1999; and the Chiba Joyce Parlor, Japan,1998).

About Yves Seban

A long-time collaborator of the American Sephardi Federation, Yves Seban’s background starts in the mid-80s Paris fashion world, working for French luxury brands, notably for French fashion icon agnès b.  

Yves then turned to translation of art texts, scripts, film reviews, while transcribing/translating, in-studio, the LouiseBourgeois’ personal diaries, and is writing a screen-adaptation of Jun’ichiro Tanizaki’s Some Prefer Nettles. Among his contributions to the Sephardi Festival are two filmed interviews with Albert Memmi and Helène Cixous, recipients of the Pomegranate Award.