Portals of recovery: Piccola Biblioteca Joyciana 14

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,