Ulysses, the novel by the Irish modernist writer James Joyce, is celebrated each year on the 16th of June and the celebration is called Bloomsday. The book is set on June 16th, 1904. The story starts off that morning and ends that night. It is a story of two protagonists and how their paths cross during the day; a young recent graduate, and artistic-type, Stephen Daedalus and a middle-aged, Dublin-born, jewish man who works in advertising, Leoplod Bloom. It is hailed as a masterpiece of modernist fiction. Joyce chose to set his novel on that day because June 16th, 1904, is the day that he first met his wife.

I was rereading some chapters of the book again in June this year as we approached Bloomsday, and around the same time I had discovered that the German word for poetry comes from the German word for "to condense." So, just as an experiment, I set myself the task of trying to condense the first chapter of Ulysses. Here are the results. What do you think of it? Should I do some more chapters? Maybe even the whole book? 😄 I took some artistic liberties within this experiment, readers of Ulysses will perhaps be able to spot where I deviated.

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