Bloomsday
Next: June 16, 2027
One Dublin day, one great novel.
The story
Where it comes from
Bloomsday celebrates Thursday, 16 June 1904, the single day on which James Joyce set his novel Ulysses, published in Paris in 1922. It follows Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus and a crowd of Dubliners from morning until the small hours. Joyce chose the date to remember his first evening out with Nora Barnacle, the Galway woman who became his wife. Admirers were already keeping 'Bloom's day' by 1924, and in 1954, on the 50th anniversary, a group including the writers Patrick Kavanagh and Flann O'Brien held the first known Bloomsday in Ireland, retracing the novel's route through Dublin.
How it's celebrated
In Dublin, people in Edwardian dress gather at the Martello Tower in Sandycove, where the novel opens, read passages aloud at places from the book and stop at Davy Byrne's pub on Duke Street for Bloom's lunch of a gorgonzola sandwich and a glass of burgundy. Since 1994 the James Joyce Centre has run a week-long Bloomsday Festival, and readings and walks take place in cities around the world.
Did you know
- The 1954 pilgrims meant to end in the old red-light district of the novel's 'Nighttown', but they never got past Davy Byrne's.
- Joyce left Ireland in October 1904, a few months after that first date, and after 1912 he never went back.
- Two full Chinese translations of Ulysses appeared in the 1990s, one by Jin Di and one by the husband-and-wife team Xiao Qian and Wen Jieruo, whose edition became a bestseller.
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