{"id":541621,"date":"2026-07-09T21:00:11","date_gmt":"2026-07-09T21:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/541621\/"},"modified":"2026-07-09T21:00:11","modified_gmt":"2026-07-09T21:00:11","slug":"talking-italian-frank-mcnally-on-joyce-beckett-and-250-years-of-language-studies-in-ireland-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/541621\/","title":{"rendered":"Talking Italian: Frank McNally on Joyce, Beckett and 250 years of language studies in Ireland \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

When James Joyce<\/a> was promoting his \u201cWork in Progress\u201d (eventually to become Finnegans Wake) in 1929, he gathered around him 12 apostles to help spread the word.<\/p>\n

Among them was Samuel Beckett<\/a>, soon to be an important writer himself but then newly out of college and teaching in Paris, where he had become Joyce\u2019s friend and acolyte.<\/p>\n

Not only was the young man happy to help explain his fellow Dubliner\u2019s genius to the world, he dutifully accepted Joyce\u2019s suggestion for the title of his contribution to a collection of essays on the WIP.<\/p>\n

As Beckett biographer Anthony Cronin put it, Joyce \u201cran a tight ship\u201d. Although the critical symposium was Sylvia Beach\u2019s initiative, Joyce\u2019s micromanagement included even dictating the number of dots between the names in Beckett\u2019s title: \u201cDante\u2026 Bruno. Vico.. Joyce\u201d. <\/p>\n

The dots pedantically represented the number of centuries between and since the lives of the great Italian writers to which the WIP\u2019s author was placing himself as successor.<\/p>\n

The second man on the list, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600), had been one of the great discoveries of Joyce\u2019s time studying Italian in UCD<\/a> between 1898 and 1902.<\/p>\n

Considered a heretic in his own life, Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome and remained a controversial figure long afterwards. By the 1890s, a rehabilitation campaign was under way, including a statue at the place where he died.<\/p>\n

Still, the notoriety lingered. When the student Joyce expressed admiration for Bruno\u2019s ideas, his affable Italian lecturer, the Jesuit Father Charles Ghezzi, felt the need to remind him that Bruno had been a \u201cterrible heretic\u201d. To which the anticlerical Joyce countered: \u201cYes, and he was terribly burned.\u201d<\/p>\n

The philosopher was also sometimes called Bruno of Nola, after the town where he was born, and by extension Bruno the Nolan. This, combined with one of his key ideas, about the essential unity of opposites, gave rise to a running joke in Finnegans Wake.<\/p>\n

At least nine times in that book, the author puns on the names \u201cBrown\u201d and \u201cNolan\u201d, the point of which might have been lost to non-Irish readers until Beckett, in his essay, made the link between the Italian heretic and Browne & Nolan, a Dublin publishing firm synonymous with schoolbooks.<\/p>\n

(It\u2019s a minor tragedy that Brian O\u2019Nolan, aka Flann O\u2019Brien and Myles na gCopaleen, studied German at UCD, not Italian. He could have taken Joyce\u2019s joke to whole new heights.)<\/p>\n

Fr Ghezzi was one of those \u201cthoroughly sympathetic, liberal\u201d teachers from whom, according to biographer Richard Ellmann, Joyce benefited at every stage of his education. And as Ellmann also points out, he was rewarded by becoming a character \u2013 or part of one \u2013 in Ulysses, albeit disguised as Almidano Artifoni.<\/p>\n

The euphonious name was taken from another real-life teacher, whom Joyce knew in Trieste but who never visited Dublin. So although that man\u2019s name is immortalised in Ulysses, Ellmann suggests the character\u2019s \u201cbenign\u201d personality was Ghezzi\u2019s.<\/p>\n

In combination, they make several appearances in the Wandering Rocks episode, set between 2.55pm and 4pm on June 16th, 1904, and meticulously tracing the movements of all the book\u2019s protagonists as they criss-cross the streets of Dublin.<\/p>\n

Thus, Joyce\u2019s composite tribute to Italian pedagogy narrowly misses catching a Dalkey tram near Trinity College<\/a> and later walks past Holles Street, just ahead of the noted eccentric Cashel Boyle O\u2019Connor Fitzmaurice Tisdall Farrell.<\/p>\n

But the author also gives him the honour of closing the chapter, with a disappearing act as the viceregal carriage of Ireland\u2019s Lord Lieutenant \u2013 which has shot across the city and chapter like an arrow \u2013 nears its destination at Ballsbridge:<\/p>\n

\u201cOn Northumberland and Lansdowne roads, His Excellency acknowledged punctually salutes from rare male walkers, the salute of two small schoolboys at the garden gate of the house said to have been admired by the late queen when visiting the Irish capital with her husband, the prince consort, in 1849 and the salute of Almidano Artifoni\u2019s sturdy trousers swallowed by a closing door.\u201d<\/p>\n

To the many distinctions of Joyce\u2019s time in UCD, we can now add that it marked the halfway point towards a remarkable milestone being celebrated in Dublin this weekend.<\/p>\n

For 2026 is the 250th anniversary of the introduction to Ireland of third-level studies in modern European languages. That happened in 1776, when Trinity College Dublin established chairs in Italian, French, German, and Spanish. It was a first not just for this country but anywhere in the world then.<\/p>\n

TCD and UCD have formed a united front for the semiquincentenary, hosting jointly the latest biennial conference of the Society for Italian Studies, which began on Thursday (July 9th) and brings together 300 scholars from several continents.<\/p>\n

Joyce and Beckett both feature in papers, as does Fr Ghezzi. But the many discussions will also include, for example, one about the influence of Irish theatre on film-maker Pier Paolo Pasolini.<\/p>\n

A radical figure in 20th-century Italy<\/a> and the victim of a still-unsolved murder in 1975, Pasolini had an early fascination with the \u201cpoetic regionalism\u201d of JM Synge and WB Yeats. As a student in Bologna, he staged productions of, among other works, The Playboy of the Western World.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When James Joyce was promoting his \u201cWork in Progress\u201d (eventually to become Finnegans Wake) in 1929, he gathered…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":541622,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,60,8933,43],"class_list":["post-541621","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ireland","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-irish-diary","tag-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541621","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=541621"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/541621\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/541622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=541621"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=541621"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=541621"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}