James Joyce: Frasi in inglese
James Joyce era scrittore, poeta e drammaturgo irlandese. Frasi in inglese.
“He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul.”
"A Little Cloud"
Dubliners (1914)
Contesto: He tried to weigh his soul to see if it was a poet's soul. Melancholy was the dominant note of his temperament, he thought, but it was a melancholy tempered by recurrences of faith and resignation and simple joy. If he could give expression to it in a book of poems perhaps men would listen.
“History, Stephen said, is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.”
Origine: Ulysses (1922), Ch. 2: Nestor
Stephen Hero (1944)
Contesto: This triviality made him think of collecting many such moments together in a book of epiphanies. By an epiphany he meant a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself. He believed that it was for the man of letters to record these epiphanies with extreme care, seeing that they themselves are the most delicate and evanescent of moments. He told Cranly that the clock of the Ballast Office was capable of an epiphany. Cranly questioned the inscrutable dial of the Ballast Office with his no less inscrutable countenance:
—Yes, said Stephen. I will pass it time after time, allude to it, refer to it, catch a glimpse of it. It is only an item in the catalogue of Dublin's street furniture. Then all at once I see it and I know at once what it is: epiphany.