December 7, 2018
Thanks to Alissa Simon, HMU Tutor, for today’s post.
“We should like to think of the readers as a homogeneous group of friends, united by a common appreciation of the beautiful, – idealists of a sort, – and to share with them what has seemed significant to us.” – Eugene Jolas, editor of TRANSITION: A Quarterly Review
TRANSITION: A Quarterly Review was first published in 1927. Only twenty seven issues exist, all published between 1927 and 1938. This eclectic quarterly (not to be confused with the more contemporary Transition Magazine) published all sorts of work. It intended to support modernist and surrealist writers. In the first issue, Jolas wrote: “Of all the values conceived by the mind of man throughout the ages, the artistic have proven the most enduring. Primitive people and the most thoroughly civilized have always had, in common, a thirst for beauty and an appreciation of the attempts of the other to recreate the wonders suggested by nature and human experience. The tangible link between the centuries is that of art. It joins distant continents in to a mysterious unit, long before the inhabitants are aware of the universality of their impulses.” Though issues of this journal are difficult to find, a friend lent me a copy of the 26th issue, published in 1937. It has many stories to tell.
TRANSITION: A Quarterly Review, Number Twenty-Six, 1937. Photo credit: Alissa Simon
The journal includes articles, essays, and literary works in either German, English, and French. In other words, the recipients of this journal were educated and, most likely, tri- or bilingual. Also, I assume that the audience was interested in material that not just broke the rules, but defied them. It includes prints of both art and music, poetry and drama. The Contents page lists the following categories: verse, prose, the ear, the eye, cinema, the theatre, workshop, inter-racial, and architecture. Published in black and white, it does include images from Mondrian, Man Ray, and Joan Miró (among others). I was, personally, most surprised and pleased at the inclusion of a hand-written composition of “Gyp’s Song” from Second Hurricane by Aaron Copland, dated January 21, 1936. He calls this a piece of Gebrauchsmusik, or music composed for an amateur group.
The literature section contains a couple of astonishing things. First of all, it has an original publication of Work in Progress by James Joyce. This was published in periodicals which allowed the artist to continue writing and perhaps fund the remainder of their writing. Joyce calls his piece: Work in Progress, Opening pages of Part Two, Section Three. Of course, Work in Progress was finally completed in 1939 and published as Finnegan’s Wake. That this piece exists at all is one of luck due to the chance meeting of Joyce and Jolas. Furthermore, it is so rare anymore to see a partial work. Either we have less patience or time for serial publications, but it is neat to pick up Joyce’s story at the line which begins: “It may not or maybe a no concern of the Guinnesses but.” Furthermore, the Contributor section says nothing of Joyce himself and reads in a style different from all of the other contributors. It reads:
“The fragment of James Joyce’s “Work in Progress” which appeared in TRANSITION No. 23 (February 1935). “Opening and Closing Pages of Part II, Section II”, will be published in book form early in 1937, under the title of “Storiella as she is Syung”, by the Corvinus Press, London. This edition, which will be limited to 150 hand-printed copies, will include reproductions in color of two illuminated lettrines by Lucia Joyce.
“No further fragments of “Work in Progress” will be published in book form, as the book will appear in its entirety some time in 1937, probably some six months after the issuance of the trade edition of “Ulysses” in Great Britain. One thousand de luxe copies of “Ulysses” were published in London by John Lane on October 3, 1936.”
It should be noted that an edition of “Storiella as she is Syung” was auctioned in 2007 for $14,400, but in 1936, Joyce had trouble publishing this text. He struggled to write Work in Progress due to the poor reception of early chapters, as well as failing health, and rising conflicts prior to World War II. In fact, the first sections of the book had been published by the popular magazine The Dial. The editors at The Dial asked to rewrite his text and finally refused to publish the rest of it. And it is at this time that Joyce happened to meet the Jolas’s who became interested in carrying it in TRANSITION. We are so lucky that they did, considering it allowed Joyce to finish and then publish all of Finnegan’s Wake two years before his death.
Finally, a portion of Franz Kafka’s Metamorphosis is included in this edition of TRANSITION. While the story is listed in the Contents page, there is no information about Kafka in the Contributors section. While it was surely an oversight, I find this deletion significant. Kafka died in 1924 almost ten years after the initial publication of Metamorphosis and nine years before the first translation into English. Originally translated into English by Willa and Edwin Muir (still very popular today) in 1933, Eugene Jolas, then, translated this version for TRANSITION himself. It is not an easy version to find, perhaps only because it exists in pieces of the serialized magazine.
In looking through this quarterly, I am amazed at the amount of strings attached to each work. There are social, historical, personal, anecdotal, artistic and cultural implications of nearly every aspect. For more fun, I suggest following just one of these threads: research Eugene Jolas, or the Muirs, or publishing in the 1930s, or wartime effects on literature, etc. This edition alone could go in so many different directions. Of course, this is always true. Art of any form interacts with culture in complex ways, some of which seem invisible in the moment of publication. Reflection offers such a deep wonder which impresses me beyond words. Researching this quarterly has turned into a minor obsession, a wormhole of sorts that takes me away from my daily tasks and leads me into the lives of so many others.
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