James Henry: The Translator of Ulysses into Irish

Abstract

Ulysses was published in 1922. It was not translated into Irish until seventy years later. In December 1991, the translation of Joyce’s masterstroke into Irish was finished by James Henry (Séamas Ó hInnéirghe) and called Uiliséas.1 A polymath, Henry was first introduced to Ulysses by a relative living in Buffalo, New York, who sent him the novel while Henry was a medical student at University College Dublin, in the 1930s.2 The translation took Henry, who suffered from an autoimmune disease, approximately eight years to complete from 1984 to 1992. Working mainly from the living room of his Belfast home on an electric typewriter, Henry, a retired medical doctor and career Royal Air Force officer, accomplished the translation (Thompson, 28 April 1993, and McCafferty). Henry was born in July 1918 in the seaside village of Doohoma (Du Thuama), County Mayo. Doohoma is located on Blacksod Bay on the Erris peninsula (south of Belmullet), which runs along the North Atlantic in the center of the Gaeltacht and the Sloblands of Connaught. Henry’s father, Phelim Henry, operated a hotel in Doohoma called “Henry’s,” which is now called the “Sea Rod Inn” (McCafferty). The hotel also served as the town store and locale of the part-time undertaker for the village (McCafferty). As described by Henry in a letter he sent to a friend in the United States, Professor Richard J. Thompson of Canisius College in Buffalo, it was in this hotel that Henry learned to understand Irish while listening to his father and “his cronies as they rattled off their yarns” (Thompson, June 1993). Henry explained to Thompson that, with the exception of one class conducted daily in English, all of his primary education was in Irish (Thompson, June 1993). In 1934, at age 16, Henry left County Mayo to study medicine at University College Dublin, and he wore a thin mustache and slicked back hair (McCafferty). In Dublin, he worked at the Jervis Street Hospital and met his future wife, May (McCafferty). As World War II was ending, he enlisted in the Royal Air Force where his career took him to, among others places, Africa and the Middle East (McCafferty). From the time he left County Mayo until he began his translation of Ulysses, he “never spoke[,] wrote or heard a word of Irish” (Thompson, June 1993).