I went to Dublin for three days between 3rd and 6th September 2000. The trip was a birthday gift, and was booked already on the 31st December 1999. Finally, I took off from Z�rich to Dublin on

Sunday, 3 September 2000:

with a Crossair machine, and landed there at 10.40h. Stayed in a B&B place about 30 minutes walking from Stephen's green. So first thing after I deposited the luggage, I took off for the green. Till then I had hardly seen any Dubliners. Obviously they were all there basking in the sun. Stephen's green (which is supposed to have provided the model for Central park) is really quite inviting. Close to the entrance to Leeson street there is a statue of Joyce. From the park, I went off to the Grafton street - one of the few pedestrians only zones in the city. After a cup of coffee at the Bewley's cafe on the Grafton Street, I went to the National Museum located very close to Grafton. The ground floor of the national museum is a fantastic place with exhibitions on prehistoric Irish people. There are all kinds of stone weapons, and also a woman's skeleton, about 3000 years old. Just imagine seeing a skeleton that old, of a person who would have had similar feelings, fears, and expectations, like us today!

Equally impressive was a wooden boat. A huge one.

Another section of the exhibition consisted of old gold - from about 1500 BC. These people were capable of incredibly beautiful work as you see in the illustrations shown above.

A dinner at the Pasta Fresca ended my first evening in Dublin.

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Monday, 4 September 2000:

On Monday morning I bought a booklet on the heritage walks in Dublin, and planned to do all the three walks.

I started at the Trinity college campus (photograph below) - opened by Elizabeth 1st in 1592 with the intention of civilizing the Irish!- and spent the entire morning there. (I found out later that Trinity is the center of Dublin. Wherever I went, I ended up at Trinity.)

Could take part in a guided tour of the campus. Joseph, a former alumni, was the guide, and his speciality was that he walked backwards all the time, climbing up steps, avoiding any spiked dividers etc. The tour was interesting, and ended at the Long Room.

The Long Room is nearly 65 meters in length and houses nearly 200'000 of the library's oldest books, many from the 19th century. The length of the room is adorned with busts of scholars including that of Jonathan Swift, Cicero, Socrates, Plato, etc.

There is also an exhibition of the Book of Kells - gospels written and illustrated in 800 AD. The book is great, but the exhibition around that book, about illustrations, about book binding etc, is equally great. Something I had not seen so far. The illustration above shows the first three words 'XRI' (a short form for Christ) about the birth of Jesus in Mathew's gospel. There are two angels at about 9 '0clock position, rats, peacocks (symbol of Christ because of its getting new feathers in spring = rebirth) etc, etc on this one folio. The Book of Kells is not insured because even if it is stolen nobody on this earth can pay enough money to buy the book. A laser scanner was used some years ago to make reprints of the book, one reprint costs more than $18'000!

After Trinity, I started on one of these heritage walks - the cultural heritage walk. It is a well described walk, but the problem is one walks mainly on the busy roads, and at the end of the walk, I felt I had inhaled enough of the poisonous fumes from the vehicles that I gave up the idea of doing the other two walks. What a pity that people all over the world simply poison all the living area! I was told that ten years ago Dublin was much worse as far as pollution was considered. This year 100'000 new cars are supposed to be bought by Dubliners. Just cannot imagine what it means to the city!

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Still, this walk brought me to the Winding Stair bookstore, and to the Dublin's Writers' Museum, and finally to the Joyce Center.

What a nice idea, the idea of a Writers' Museum! Have a never come across anywhere anything similar. Well, after all I as never before in a city which could talk of four Nobel laureates for literature - Yeats, Shaw, Beckett, Heanny! In the museum one can see the manuscripts, details about works, many nteresting photographs, and many objects the famous writers of Dublin used. In this way you can get introduced to Maria Edgeworth, Lady Gregory, Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, Patrick Kavanagh, Joyce, Yeats, Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan, Sean O'Casey, Bram Stoker, etc, etc. I could not help wondering what if India would catch on to this idea. Bangalore, where I was two weeks ago, can boast of quite a few great writers.

From there I went on to No. 35, North Great George Street which houses the James Joyce Center. Boy, this is a nice place. You can start your tour by watching a short video programme about 'Faithful departed' - about Ulysses, Joyce family etc. The Guinnes library consists of most of the books written about Joyce and his works, and of course, copies of his books too. There are books and books. One shelf is full of translations - I found translations of Ulysses in Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, and almost all European languages BUT there is no single translation of the book into any of the umpteen Indian languages. Somebody is waiting there to make a name! The nice thing about the library is that the visitor is allowed to take out any book, and work with it. I discovered three very interesting books here - An annotated and illlustrated edition of Dubliners by J.W. Jackson and B. McGinley, 'Bloomsday' by S. Field and M.P.Levitt, and Harry Blamires' 'The New Bloomsday Book'. I bought the first one, and am going to order the last.

One of the rooms has a tape recorder lying on a table. Just switch it on, and you will hear Joyce reading Ulysses. He reads as he wrote - no pause, no intonation, no punctuation - but within ten minutes I was mesmerised by the reading. The house also has a table around which Paul Leon and Joyce used to sit in Paris, discussing how to make Finnegans Wake more difficult to understand!

Of course, there is a cute little cafe at the center. Sitting in front of the black door of No. 7, Eccles Street (the door was rescued when the house was demolished some years ago) I had some very good and much needed cake, and a cup of Bewley's coffee. That was my first break of the day.

At the Joyce center, I also found information that next morning at 11.am there will be a reading of the first chapter of Ulysses at the James Joyce Tower at Sandycove! Well, the center closed at 5 pm, so I had to walk out. I walked back via the Parnell Square, O'Connell Street, Trinity College to Grafton Street, had dinner, browsed in a bookshop, debated with myself shall I / shall I not, decided on 'not', and went, as I had planned, to the

The Dublin Literary Pub Crawl. We assembled at the Duke Pub, Duke Street off Grafton Street at 19.30. There were certainly about 50 people. Derek and Frank were guiding us through this crawl. At 19.30h, there was a short song by Jim, then Derek and Frank dawned two caps, and started off - acting an episode from Waiting for Godot. They were wonderful. After this acting bit (which lasted about 15 minutes) they said, 'Well here starts the quiz. After each episode, we will ask you two questions. Keep the answers to yourself, and at the end we will ask the questions again.' The prize was a T-Shirt, and two small bottles of Guinnes. After that they acted the Christmas dinner scene from The Portrait. It was time for a crawl. That brought us to Trinity where they acted a bit of Oscar Wilde. He was a scholarship student of Trinity. Once he was given the job of compiling nursery rhymes and to that compilation he added two of his own creations. 'Jack and Jill' and 'Humpty Dumpty'. Till then I did not know that Oscar Wilde was the author of the nursery rhyme: Jack and Jill went up the hill?.!

20 minutes in a pub, an episode outside. This went on till 10.30 in the night. Derek and Frank also included contemporary writers like Behm. He (I hope that I get the name correctly here) was a great irish man who was actually a drinker with a writing problem, they said that he used to say that of himself. He once went to USA, and fell asleep during a TV live show, decided that he has to cure himself of alcohol, went to a clinic where he stayed for 4 months, decided he was cured, boared a train in New Jersey to Toronto, and hit the bottle again somewhere on the way. Ended up in pubs in Canada where he was finally discovered by a journalist. When asked, 'What do you think of Canada', Behm replied, 'It would be nice when it is finished'. The journalist did not give up and asked him why he came to Canada. Behm replied, "...well,...one night in a pub in Dublin, I looked up and saw a big advertisement - 'Drink Canada Dry' ...."

So, you can imagine how nice this Literary Pub Crawl was - at least the literary part of it. This was my Monday in Dublin.

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Tuesday, 5 September 2000:

On Tuesday morning, I decided to go to Sandycove to the Joyce Tower, walked through the Herbert Park (simply beautiful park!), found finally the DART (Dublin Area Rapid Transit) station at Sandymount, got a train to Sandycove. The view from the train of the Dublin bay is not all that beautiful. Anyway, I had to be at the Joyce tower at 11.00, and when I got off from the train, I realised that it was quite a long way off. But I managed to end up at the tower on the dot of 11.

Robert Nicholson, the curator of the James Joyce Tower was just getting ready to start the tour of the tower. At the very outset, he apologised that the planned reading could not take place. the week of 3rd September being The National Heritage Week, it was planned that 'Telemachus, the opening episode of James Joyce's Ulysses will be read and dramatised by Paul O'Hanrahan.' But Paul had to get the permission by Stephen James Joyce, the grandson of James Joyce. Stephen (seems to be a very uncooperating character) did not give his permission for the reading. Robert Nicholson read part of the letter by Stephen Joyce (without comments) and said that instead of Paul, he himself will make the tour. It was a very pleasant two hours that I spent there. When I started reading Ulysses, I had no connection to the location, did not know that what I was reading was based on actual incidences, that there is indeed a tower (one of the 26 such towers in the area) in which Joyce spent a week with a friend called Gogarty (who became Buck Mulligan) and a British guy called Trench (who became Haines). Everything that you read in that chapter is related to something that took place. Even the whistle from the ship! Even the bathing place - the forty foot bathing area near the tower. Robert Nicholson did a great job, reading from Telemachus, explaining to us the background of the chapter, recreating a bit of how it could have been when Joyce lived there. I spent a few minutes afterwards talking to Nicholson who tried to help me to get my bearing with the 'Oxen in the Sun' chapter.

When I got back to Dublin, soon I found myself in front of Sweny, the Chemists on Lincon's Inn. So I had to go in and ask for that lemon scented soap. Got a really lemony looking/smelling soap too!

From there I went off to National Gallery (nothing great) and finally to the Chester Beatty Galleries in the Dublin Castle.

Currently there is an exhibition there on the Rosenback manuscripts of Ulysses. Again a very well made exhibition. You can see Joyce's writing - among other things both the beginning and the end of the Ulysses are exhibited. I read there that Joyce took 1000 hours to write 'Oxen in the Sun' chapter. I hope that I do not need so many hours to read and enjoy it. CB galleries was also worth a visit because there I saw many manuscripts, and editions of Quran - in various arabic scripts, one of the first editions of 'The Tale of Genji', etc. That evening was my last in Dublin. I went back to the Trinity college, to watch the play

This was the Irish premiere. The play opened last year in London. Frank McGuinnes teaches at the University of Dublin. A very special play, the theme is about Irish subjugation by English, William (Shakespeare) comes as the rescuer. The acting was good, the technical details were brilliant, but the actors - all of them - simply screamed their head off. At the end, I just could not bear the loudness, and left the theatre. That was a pity considering that it is a very good play.

Well, that was my last evening in Dublin. I left next morning and flew back to Z�rich having had three most rewarding days in a city I have come to love because of the love it shows towards literature!

(Copyright of all the illustrations belong to those who made the pictures and produced - Dublin Tourist Authority - the post cards�/�brochures.)

Afterword:

Sounds like you had a great time in Dublin, Chandra. Even though i live in Manchester, England, i have, suprisingly, never been there. I do plan to go some time this year though, and will definitely be there on Bloomsday next year. I have never really appreciated the georaphic nature of Joyce's writing, the way in which he uses real sets to base his writing in. I would expect that to know Dublin completely changes one's outlook on his work.

Good to hear about your travels,

Thanks,

bod

Bod

The funny thing, you know, is that I never wanted this trip to become a 'pilgrimage' - though I decided to go to Dublin because of Joyce. While I was there, I was most impressed by the love the Irish have for their literature. Some cynics might say that this is all an industry but I prefer to think that it is genuine interest (pride) and love for literature. And as you say knowing Dublin certainly has changed my outlook on Joyce's Ulysses. I was looking for all kinds of meanings, all kinds of interpretations reading his works. Particularly that first chapter in Ulysses. It has got a different meaning for me now. Imagine standing on top of that tower, leaning on the wall, looking at the Dublin bay, and listening to the whistle of the ship moving out of Kingstown (now called Don Laoghaire). It is as simple as that. The contents are real, not fictitious. Somehow I feel closer now to the book. Am half way into Oxen in the Sun. More on that soon.

But do make it to Dublin. Bloomsday may indeed be a bit too commercial, but it may be worth still for all the talks one can hear on Ulysses. And when you go there, do write a detailed account of your adventures. BTW in 4 years it will be 100 years of Bloomsday!

Chandra