The song of the sirens

At the end of the "Eumaeus" chapter of Ulysses, in the company of Leopold Bloom, the learned young Stephen Dedalus sings snatches of a four-part song by Johannes Jeep (1582/83-1644), entitled "Dulcia dum loquitur cogitat insidias," or "Von der Sirenen Listigkeit," from the collection Studentengärtlein. A translation from Don Gifford's Ulysses Annotated:

    From the Sirens' craftiness
    Poets make poems
    That they with their loveliness
    Have drawn many men into the sea
    For their song resounds so sweetly,
    That the sailors fall asleep,
    The ship is brought into misfortune,
    And all becomes evil.

Stephen, in an advanced state of inebriation, loses the words a bit and comes up with the mangled line "Und alle Schiffe brücken" — something like "And all ships are bridged/broken." Any Joyceans wishing to sing the complete four-part song next Bloomsday can find a score in modern notation in Vol. 29 of Das Erbe deutscher Musik.

Presumably Joyce came across Jeep's music in Zurich. In 1939, he sent a note to Georg Goyert, his German translator, enclosing an encyclopedia entry about the composer. "Er hat tatsächlich existiert," Joyce remarked — "He actually existed."