Audiobook · read by volunteers
Chamber Music
James Joyce (1882–1941)
Read by Annie Coleman Rothenberg · 1 chapter · 25 min
About the book
Chamber Music is James Joyce's first collection of poems, and it shows a very different side of the author later known for sprawling novels. Here are delicate love lyrics, musical in sound and shaped by the Elizabethan song tradition, with images of gardens, rain, evening and music itself. The poems were first published in May 1907, and the collection began with thirty-four pieces before two more were added. The book did not sell well when it came out, though it drew some favourable attention from critics, and it has been read ever since as a quiet prelude to the work that followed. Annie Coleman Rothenberg reads the whole sequence in about twenty-five minutes, an intimate and tuneful listen for lovers of lyric poetry.
Introduction
James Joyce (1882-1941) is remembered for novels such as Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses and Finnegans Wake, but he began as a poet. Chamber Music, published in 1907, is the only collection of poems he issued in his early years, and it reflects his taste for the lyric tradition of the Elizabethan song writers and for the verse of his contemporaries.
The collection originally included thirty-four love poems, and two more were added before publication. Although the book did not sell well, it received some favourable attention from reviewers. The poems are short, graceful and carefully made. Many were intended to be sung, and a number have since been set to music by composers. They are quite unlike the experimental prose that made Joyce famous, yet attentive readers can hear the same fascination with sound and rhythm.
This recording is a single track of about twenty-five minutes. It is read by one LibriVox volunteer, Annie Coleman Rothenberg. It will suit anyone who enjoys love poetry in the traditional manner, and it offers readers of Joyce a chance to hear where one of the century's great writers began, long before the sprawling novels that made him a legend. The poems are brief, and many of them take the form of songs, with refrains, soft images and an almost old-fashioned grace. Readers who know only the novels may be surprised by their tenderness. Heard aloud, they show how closely Joyce listened to the sound of words even at the start of his career, and how much of his later experiments with language grew from that early musical sense.
Public domain
James Joyce died in 1941: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text