Biography of an early Gaelic to English translator

Her inclusion in the latest edition of the Oxford Companion to English Literature is cause for the Irish Times to sketch a eulogy of Charlotte Brooke, an oft-overlooked woman who pioneered the translation of Gaelic poetry and folk songs into English in the eighteenth century.

Irish novelist pens biography of Byron

Edna O'Brien has written a new biography exploring the personal life of nineteenth-century English poet Lord Byron, entitled Byron in Love: A Short Daring Life.

Heller McAlpin of the Christian Science Monitor writes:

O’Brien, a passionate, iconoclastic writer herself – her early, sexually frank “Country Girls” novels were banned and burned in her native Ireland when they first appeared in the 1960s – is well suited to her subject. She has pored over reams of Byron’s letters and journals and digested Leslie A. Marchand’s 1957 three-volume “Life of Byron” to present a vivid portrait of the man whom Lady Caroline Lamb, one of his scores of jilted lovers, called “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know.”

As captured by O’Brien, Byron was at once brilliant, magnetic, and monstrous – an arrogant son; an insatiable seducer of both sexes; an incestuous adulterer; a spendthrift; a wildly original, popular, and vilified poet; a cruel and neglectful father; a passionate traveler; and a generous friend. He idolized Napoleon and loved Greece.

O’Brien notes, “The word Byronic, to this day, connotes excess, diabological deeds and a rebelliousness answering neither to king nor commoner. Byron, more than any other poet, has come to personify the poet as rebel, imaginative and lawless.”

But who's really read it?

The Irish Times explores the curious contradiction between the many Dubliners who love celebrating Bloomsday without ever having read Joyce's book.

“I met an Australian man earlier and he said he’s read it from cover to cover,” said Breda again, rolling her eyes. “For God’s sake, we have it in our bones!”

@Bloomsday

So today is Bloomsday, the date on which all of James Joyce's odyssey Ulysses takes place in Dublin in 1904, and there are plenty of commemorative events happening all over the world, especially in Ireland's capital, from pub crawls to non-stop readings to vast dramatic reenactments.

But what I find most interesting are the fifty-four characters who will Twitter the simultaneous events of the dense "Wandering Rocks" chapter throughout the day. It's the most interesting use of the hot, new mini-blogging website I've ever heard, and it makes me second-guess the attention deficit of the Internet age.

An archive of the event can be found here.

University at Buffalo Opens Joyce Exhibit

On June 13 the University at Buffalo in New York unveiled an exhibit of "priceless manuscripts, photographs, paintings and personal memorabilia of the 20th century's most influential writer," James Joyce.

"Discovering James Joyce: The University at Buffalo Collection" is the world's largest collection of Joyce materials, including more than 10,000 pages of manuscripts and correspondence and a complete library of Joyce criticism.

The gallery will be showcased in Buffalo for free until Sept. 13 and will then embark on a national tour.