Romania joins Joycean Bloomsday celebration with Bucharest event this weekend

The festival dedicated to Irish writer James Joyce, Bloomsday, will take place in Bucharest on Saturday, June 15. The event, which celebrates Joyce's Ulysses, will take place in the Sf. Anton square in the Old Town. Bucharest will thus join 40 cities in the world celebrating Bloomsday, for the second year in a row, however, the Romanian celebration will be held one day before the official Bloomsday. The event will include reading sessions from Ulysses and musical accompaniments to Joyce's work. Three Romanian actors will read from the book, and a tenor plus a piano player and a string quartette will provide the music. Bloomsday is celebrated across the world on June 16 every year, during which the events of Joyce's novel Ulysses, which is set on 16 June 1904, are relived. The holiday was named after the main character in the novel, Leopold Bloom, whose life and thoughts are being followed, as well as other character's, over the course of a single day in Dublin. Bloomsday, a term which was not used by Joyce himself, was invented in 1954, on the 50th anniversary of the events in the novel, when artist and critic John Ryan and the novelist Brian O'Nolan organized what was to be a daylong pilgrimage along the Ulysses route. Ulysses’ will for the first time be read around the world this Sunday, June 16, according to the Irish Times. Some 15 countries and 26 cities will be involved in this reading session, and the event will start at 21:00 Irish time on Saturday, June 15, and is expected to end at about 15:30 Irish time on Monday, June 17. editor@romania-insider.com (Photo source: Irish Embassy on Facebook. In picture, Irish ambassador to Romania Oliver Grogan, at the 2012 event; photo credits: Silviu Tudor)