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IT HAS EMERGED that a commemorative €10 coin, released for sale by the Central Bank of Ireland yesterday to commemorate James Joyce, contains an error in its transcription of a line from Ulysses.
The coin, which features lines from the start of the third episode in Joyce’s celebrated 1922 novel, depicts the words flowing from Joyce’s head to mark the ‘stream of consciousness’ style for which the book is celebrated.
However, the passage included in the coin inserts a surplus word – including the word ‘that’ where it was not written by Joyce.
The passage from the book, according to the full text on Project Gutenberg, reads:
Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes. Signatures of all things I am here to read, seaspawn and seawrack,
The text on the coin, designed by sculptor Mary Gregoriy, includes the extra word ‘that’: ‘Signatures of all things that I am here to read’.
10,000 of the coins, which can be bought from Central Bank headquarters on Dame Street or through its website, have been minted and are on sale for €46 each.
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