Fritz Senn
👤 SpeakerAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And the ones that aren't crossed out were abandoned.
When the Janke papers surfaced in 2005 and were donated to the foundation the following year, they made quite a stir in the Joyce world because these document an in-between stage between these notebook entries and first narrative versions of Finnegan's Wake.
And actually, Hans, we knew him just, we just knew him from a few visits.
And he still loved to speak Swiss German because he had spent some years as a child and as a youngster here in Zurich with his mother and his stepfather, Giorgio.
So he came a couple of times, but we didn't know him well.
And then one day in 2005, he contacted us and said, you know, I still have some papers from Joyce inherited from my mother.
And I would like you to have a look at them and assess and evaluate them.
But don't expect too much.
It's mostly just personal documents every day, you know, notes, nothing special or important.
And then when that suitcase arrived, and it just arrived by regular mail, there was no insurance, there was no customs declaration.
It was just like a simple parcel, you know.
But I suppose that was the best kind of disguise for such valuable materials.
We were, of course, all hugely excited.
We couldn't believe what we saw.
It was a historical moment for us because it catapulted us into another league of research libraries because we had a substantial bequest directly from the family.
Part of this bequest was the collection of the beach letters that she sent to Joyce, because they had been for a long time forgotten.
Nobody knew where they were, and they turned up in this bequest.
And so Ursula and myself, we actually formed a project very early on to edit the letters, but it
actually took us, in the end, 10 years to get the whole job finished.