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[Aetat. 18-20 ] J O Y C E 87a close and you are near the silence. It is growing dark for you.* Manywrite of such things,t but they do not know. You have only opened theway—though you have gone as far as you could upon it—to the end of'John Gabriel Borkman' and its spiritual truth—for your last play stands, Itake it, apart. But 1 am sure that higher and holier enlightenment lies—onward.As one of the young generation for whom you have spoken I give yougreeting—not humbly, because I am obscure and you in the glare, notsadly because you are an old man and I a young man, not presumptuously,nor sentimentally—but joyfully, with hope and with love, I giveyou greeting.Mr Henrik Ibsen,Arbens Gade, 2,KristianiaFaithfully yours,James A. Joyce.This is the sort of letter that the recipient discards hastily and the writerfiles away; Joyce did in fact keep the English draft of it. 3 5With whomdoes 'higher and holier enlightenment' lie? Presumably with the youngcorrespondent, but Joyce had also in mind Gerhart Hauptmann. Duringthe summer of 1901, which he spent with his father in Mullingar,^hetranslated two of Hauptmann's plays. The first, Vor SonnenaufgangJBe-^fore Sunrise), 36was the play which had made Hauptmann famous a dozeny#arri5efore^ while Michael Kramer was Hauptmann's most recent work(1900). Joyce wanted to study how Hauptmann had begun and where hewas now going, and he could still feel himself a discoverer of these playsbecause neither of them had as yet been included in the Heinemannedition of Hauptmann's works. Vor Sonnenaufgang described the problemof an idealistic socialist who falls in love with the sister-in-law of atreacherous friend; he discovers however that her heredity is bad andidealistically throws her over. The theme seems wooden enough today,but interested Joyce because it dealt with the problem of Ibsen's Ghostsin another regional (Silesian) setting. Then too, his own hatred of forcewas leading him to conceive of socialism as a possible antidote to it, andso the dramatic use of a political theme might prove relevant to his purposes.He found the Silesian dialect too much for his inadequate German;the simpler passages he rendered in an Irish country dialect, butthe difficult ones he could not translate at all, and simply marked his textwith asterisks to indicate omissions. Of the two plays, Michael Kramerwas much more to his taste: he could sympathize both with the fatherwho wanted his son to yield all to art, and with the gifted son who ismaddened and destroyed by his love for a waitress. Joyce, perhaps more* Joyce added this sentence after finishing the draft.t Joyce originally wrote, 'Many write of such things sentimentally . . .