Conflicting Narratives In and Out of the Archive: Anthony Burgess and the Italian Blooms of Dublin

Drawing on a variety of archival sources, this paper aims to explore the dissonant and conflicting narratives that emerge from the surviving drafts of the Italian translation of Blooms of Dublin, a musical adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses by Anthony Burgess (1986). I will investigate the genesis of this translation and the way it unfolds in the rich archival records held at the Anthony Burgess Foundation Archives, the Harry Ransom Center, and the Archives of Teatro Verdi in Trieste. By examining the surviving archival traces of this collaborative venture―an unfinished translation project that can be detected only in the archive―, the study aims not only to reconstruct the working methods that were adopted for this translation project, but also to lay the groundwork for further explorations into Burgess’s approach to translation. In exploring the conflicting narratives that emerge in and out of the archive, this paper will attempt to provide some new insights into the dynamics that underlie collaborative (self-)translation (Hersant, 2017, 2020; Manterola Agirrezabalaga, 2017; Huss, 2019; Rulyova, 2020; Verhulst et al., 2021) by examining a case of failed collaboration. It will also show the challenges involved in studying translation-related materials that exist in split collections.