James Joyce Reads ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ from Finnegans Wake

Mike Springer | Life in a cultural petri dish | February 4, 2012

For all you Joyceans out there I have a special treat for you. It’s a 1929 recording of Joyce reading a melodious passage from the “Anna Livia Plurabelle” chapter of his ‘Work in Progress’ which, in 1939, would be published as ‘Finnegans Wake’ – Joyces famously unreadable work of comic fiction.

The recording was made in Cambridge, England, at the arrangement of Joyce’s friend and publisher Sylvia Beach who afterwards wrote;

How beautiful the ‘Anna Livia’ recording is and how amusing Joyce’s rendering of an Irish washerwoman’s brogue!