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Ulysses trans. by Glenn Anderson Manga Classic Readers (review)

I April 2009, Robert Berry began posting pages from his wordfor-word graphic adaptation of “Telemachus,” the first installation of what would become “Ulysses” Seen, subsequently licensed by the James Joyce Centre and since featured in a number of Joycean outlets.1 Berry’s work is a virtuoso rendering of Joyce’s novel, informed by and indebted to the research of hundreds of others, yet unmistakably the product of a single aesthetic consciousness. But his was not the only Ulysses comic to debut that year or even that month—and the other, a manga Ulysses, demonstrates a vastly different approach to the process of adaptation: collaborative, transnational, and unpredictable. The Japanese publisher East Press released Ulysses as part of its Manga de Dokuha (“Reading through Manga”) series, which adapts works of classical and modern literature to the manga format, with the graphics handled by the Variety Art Works studio collective. The series began in 2007 with Tōson Shimazaki’s 1906 naturalist classic The Broken Commandment,2 before moving on to works by other canonical Japanese authors as well as writing by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Leo Tolstoy, and eventually texts by a host of European authors from Dante Alighieri to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe to Marcel Proust. Some of these—including Moby-Dick, The War of the Worlds, and The Great Gatsby3—were translated back into English or reverted to the original text. (Perhaps for this reason, the Ulysses volumes were printed in Canada, thus avoiding any potential copyright entanglement.) Unlike the infinite canvas of Berry’s long-term adaptation project, the artists behind the Ulysses manga had to meet the constraint of fitting everything into a single volume: 376 pages of text and images in all (and, to the frustration of this reviewer, unnumbered). Many aspects of the book are necessarily sacrificed to the imperative of compression, including almost everything in the way of Homeric correspondence. True, the manga provides the provisional (though never official) “name” of each episode, but beyond the incongruous reproductions of nineteenth-century paintings placed before each of the three major sections, there are few other nods toward the Odyssey—or, for that matter, much else in the Stuart Gilbert or Carlo Linati schemas: no colors (since the book is grayscale), no organs, few sciences, and little verbal technique.4 For experienced readers of the book, this last will likely prove most striking; for instance, the twelve tightly packed pages of Stephen’s “Proteus” soliloquy become nine pages of paraphrase, linked through