Today we celebrate Joyce’s 144th birthday and the 104th year since the first publication of Ulysses . A novel written slowly, lived intensely, and released with steadfast resolve. It arrived blue-clad, austere, unmistakable. A book that had already travelled far before it ever reached a reader’s hands. There is something quietly defiant about publishing Ulysses at forty. Not young genius. Not late-life summation. But the midpoint, after years of uncertainty, exile, illness, debt, and the...

Oliver St. John Gogarty (1878–1957) was an Irish poet, surgeon, and wit whose flamboyant life embodied the exuberance of Dublin’s literary revival. A close friend—and later caricatured rival—of James Joyce, he served as the model for Buck Mulligan in Ulysses. Educated at Trinity College Dublin, Gogarty was both a skilled ear surgeon and a celebrated raconteur, known for his sharp humour and classical allusions. A senator in the Free State’s first Seanad, he combined nationalism with...

Joyce's landmark modernist novel not only captivated readers in its original English but also reached a global audience through numerous translations, each of which was a monumental task given the novel’s complex structure, rich intertextuality, and intricate wordplay. During the course of the past century, Ulysses  has been translated into German, French, Czech, Japanese, Spanish (+ Catalan, Galician and Basque), Italian, Greek... in fact, we can now enjoy Ulysses  in forty languages,...