Portals of recovery

Fritz Senn’s first book published by Piccola Bib-lioteca Joyciana, titled Ulyssean Close-ups (2007), introduced readers to a few pointed essays on Ulys-ses, written in a markedly Sennian fashion of super-close-reading. Senn’s approach to reading is philo-logical, deeply discerning of words’ layered history, of their malleable networks of connotations, echoes, nuances, and of their cunning semantic and phonetic permutations. The present volume evolved from a few days that we spent with Fritz at the Zurich James Joyce Foundation, talking about all things Joycean and moving between issues of translation, reading, Homer, and many others. We amassed quite an archive of audio recordings, eventually transcribed, edited, and published in Scientia Tra-ductionis1 Sometime later, a modified version of our conversation was published in Papers on Joyce2. Thus a few days expanded into a few years. But the topics kept re-surfacing, older formulations de-manding re-formulations as Fritz kept writing, lec-turing, and producing an ever-expanding archive of thoughts on topics that are central to his scholarship and to our academic interests. In this volume, Fritz shares some of the new results of his work by fur-ther elaborating on the Joycean text-world, transla-tion, and on the broader issues of reading, interpre-tation, the workings of language(s), and on the capricious nature of “meaning”.
Readers familiar with Joycean Murmoirs3 are al-so familiar with the record of Fritz’s vast network of friends and acquaintances and with a broad range of his scholarly activities. He was at the very center of those first Joyce events that morphed into a world-wide phenomenon of Joyce studies celebrated dur-ing Joyce symposia and conferences for well over half a century now. And while the pages of Mur-moirs offer multiple insights into Fritz’s scholarly preoccupations, the purpose of our interviews, and now of this book, has been to focus solely on his tools of the trade and to foreground his thoughts on –and experiences with – (re)reading, (re)translating,and (re)visioning Joyce’s works.
It bears repeating that the joy of talking to Fritz Senn about all matters Joycean, Homeric, readerly and translatorial is that, “a far-fetcher by constitu-tion,” as he described himself to us, he cannot help but weave enticing associations between seemingly disparate elements of texts under discussion. ...