62 (U132.375)

 Sss. Dth, dth, dth! Three days groaning in bed,

The 62nd Cast. Page 132, line 375.

　Sss. Dth, dth, dth! Three days imagine groaning on a bed with a vinegared handkerchief round her forehead, her belly swollen out. Phew! Dreadful simply! Child’s head too big: forceps. Doubled up inside her trying to butt its way out blindly, groping for the way out. Kill me that would.

Episode 8. A little earlier, at a street corner, Mr. Bloom met Mrs. Breen, an old flame of his, and heard from her that Mrs. Purefoy had been admitted to the maternity hospital with a difficult labour. This is the thought now passing through his mind.

To begin with, I am not quite sure what “Sss. Dth, dth, dth!” is supposed to be. It is clearly some sort of onomatopoeia, but even after looking at published Japanese translations and annotation books, I could not make much of it. Is Bloom imagining Mrs. Purefoy’s groaning? Even so, the sound does not seem to fit very well.

So I tried checking whether Joyce uses “sss, dth” anywhere else. And in fact, about eighty lines earlier, there it was. When Bloom meets Mrs. Breen, he says “Dth! Dth!”

—Yes, Mrs Breen said. And a houseful of kids at home. It’s a very stiff birth, the nurse told me.

—O, Mr Bloom said.

　His heavy pitying gaze absorbed her news. His tongue clacked in compassion. Dth! Dth!

—I’m sorry to hear that, he said. Poor thing! Three days! That’s terrible for her.

（U130.288）

Since Joyce writes “His tongue clacked in compassion,” this must be the sound of tongue-clicking. But why would Bloom click his tongue here?

I checked how one says “tongue-clicking” in English dictionaries.

One finds expressions like:   click [clack, cluck] one’s tongue

And under the second sense of “cluck,” I found this:

2. to express sympathy or disapproval by saying something, or by making a short low noise with your tongue
(Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English)

So there it is: in English, one can apparently click one’s tongue as an expression of sympathy.

As for the vinegar-soaked handkerchief wrapped around the forehead, it was presumably meant either to reduce fever or to relieve pain, but I have not been able to discover whether this was actually a recognized medical custom in the West.

In Japan, in earlier times, people used to place a pickled plum on the temple when they had a headache. Apparently this was thought to work because benzaldehyde, one of the aromatic compounds in umeboshi, produces a relaxing effect.

I suspect vinegar may have been imagined in much the same way.

Forceps

"File:Plate showing the birth of a baby, using forceps (2 of 4) Wellcome L0050179.jpg" is licensed under CC BY 4.0

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