Perhaps the wildest burst of comic verbal invention in all of Ulysses occurs in the list of eighteen foreign dignitaries known collectively as the "Friends of the Emerald Isle," whom the Dublin government has honored with invitations to attend its splendid state execution. The names evoke the cultures of these esteemed guests in a crudely mocking spirit consistent with other overblown parodies in Cyclops, and Joyce's deft imitation of the sounds of their languages finds a ready place in the chapter's ceaseless clever chatter. But the names also revel in multilevel multilingual puns that strikingly anticipate the word-play of Finnegans Wake. Anyone willing to spend some time working through these verbal intricacies will become acquainted (from a safe distance) with a remarkable rogues' gallery of high-class thieves, murderers, sex addicts, card sharps, street brawlers, bribe-takers, crotch-scratchers, candy-suckers, world-conquerors, self-promoters, self-exculpators, and self-destroyers. The spirit in which they are presented can be gauged by their acronym "FOTEI," which puns on an Italian word that means "I fucked."

As in the Wake, the foreign names require one to wade through dense layers of implied meaning in search of recognizable human outlines. In undertaking this search I will refer repeatedly to an article by Patrick O'Neill, "Games Names Play: Translating Onomastic Comedy in Ulysses," Qorpus 12.2 (June 2022): 29-44. In addition to considering how various translators have rendered Joyce's names in other languages––findings which I will mention only sparingly––the essay offers many perceptive readings of the originals. O'Neill remarks that these sentences display "the pure pleasure of playing with the ludic possibilities of ostentatiously foreign names and naming conventions," but the people in them "are all, by definition, foreigners, and therefore, in the bigoted world of the denizens of Cyclops, naturally deeply suspect. A central function of the catalogue is thus its onomastic echo of the flaunted xenophobia of the chapter, spicing cultural references of various kinds with highly unflattering national stereotypes, personal slurs, and very broad comicry" (29-30). Class antagonism also figures in the portraits, as most of the foreigners are aristocrats, government officials, or moneybags.

The "semiparalysed" and grossly overweight "Commendatore Bacibaci Beninobenone" has a name whose Italian works out to something like KissesKisses FairlyWellVeryWell or KissKiss PrettyGoodJustFine. The Italian rhythm of the alliterative syllables is a joy in itself, but it is also fun to imagine what kind of man this Commendatore may be. O'Neill remarks that his name, "suggesting a personal disposition that is kindly and benign (benigno), provides a caricature of a complacently smiling public man, a political animal kissing hands and babies while cynically and provisionally approving all positions, however conflicting, taken by potential supporters and voters. Italian commendatore ('commander') is also the appropriate title for a Knight Commander of an order of chivalry––who in this case turns out a few pages later to be a thieving Italian pickpocket." Interpretive inference is required to hear benigno (benign) in benino, and indeed O'Neill reads imaginatively between the lines throughout this and his other portraits, but such loose reading feels appropriate to the evocative verbal details in Joyce's text.

A Frenchman follows––"Monsieur Pierrepaul Petitépatant," or PeterPaul LittleAmazing. A wonderfully French sound is captured in this name, whose mincing alliterative syllables seem packed with possible meanings. O'Neill tries out a few: "while it is obvious (patent) that his stature is small (petit), and that he apparently just pitterpatters along, no doubt occasionally robbing Peter to pay Paul, he is clearly amazing (épatant) in at least one way. More precisely, his claim to distinction is due to his little man, his penis, his petit in French slang (MacArthur 529). The small but amazingly endowed gentleman is of course in jocular accord with the popular stereotype of the French as great lovers." An immense gladhanding Italian politician who uses his easy familiarity to pick people's pockets is followed, then, by a precise little Frenchman who follows only the urgings of his massive schlong.

Next comes the Ukrainian "Grandjoker Vladinmire Pokethankertscheff," or Vladimir Pockethandkerchief, whose name calls for a darktoned barrelchested delivery. O'Neill notes that the given name, "originally made famous by the eleventh-century St Vladimir, Grand Duke of Kiev, is composed of the Old Slavonic elements volod ('rule') and meri ('famous, glorious') (Hanks 643)," but in Joyce's manipulation of the name he "has definitely strayed off such paths of glory, is now flat in the mire, and appears to be in urgent need of a pocket handkerchief to clean off his ugly mug (Italian ceffo)." Turning a duke into a "joker," presumably by the phonemic transpositions duke→juke→joke, probably indicates that Joyce is playing some other linguistic game, and the absence of a "c" in "Poket" may point to another, so there is no doubt more to say. But O'Neill's portrait of a grimy Slav lying Flat in the Mire lays a vivid sensory foundation for further interpretation.

The Grandjoker is followed by an Archjoker, "Leopold Rudolph von Schwanzenbad-Hodenthaler." The given names of Bloom and his father apparently precede the Germanic compound because they are Hungarian, and the surname is "satirically invoking an archduke of the old Austro-Hungarian aristocracy (Senn 153n1)." Twice, through the German device of a Doppelname or hyphenated surname, male genitals are placed in troughs. Schwanz is a crude name for the penis, like English "cock" or "prick," and Hoden are testicles. The schwanz goes in a -bad (spa, bath), and the hoden find themselves in a -thal or -thaler (valley). Both roots, O'Neill notes, are "common in German place names and family names (Karlsbad, Rosentaler)," but here they serve a more intimately personal function. Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner translate the family name rather inelegantly as "Dickbath-Testicularvalley." In a more suavely idiomatic vein, O'Neill suggests that "an approximate English parallel on a similar stylistic level would be something like “Cockbath-Ballsdale.” The English do love such bizarrely suggestive names, and the barhounds in Cyclops have already mocked them for it, but in this case one is asked to imagine a rich Austrian lowering his fat junk into a tub.

Staying with the aristocracy, but changing genders for a moment and veering from Austria into Hungary, the narrative now introduces "Countess Marha Virága Kisászony Putrápesthi." Virág, meaning "flower," was Rudolph Bloom's surname, but Hungarians also use it as a female given name. Like a velvet glove over an iron fist, it jars with Marha, which sounds like Martha or Maria but in Hungarian means “beef.” This woman may have a delicate appearance, but she is a virago. Marha's family hails from the capital (budapesti means “from Budapest”), but the city is putrid and pestilential, and no doubt her family is as well. The word preceding the family name has Hungarian meanings––"a little (kis) woman (asszony), unmarried (kisasszony 'Miss')"––but English speakers will inevitably hear that Marha likes KissAssOnly. O'Neill judiciously notes that it is hard to say whether this "describes an active or a passive preference on her part, but in either event it is evocative of the Blooms’ topsy-turvy sleeping arrangements." Bloom's preferred mode of marital address-––the "prolonged provocative melonsmellonous osculation" of Ithaca––may, it seems, be genetically determined.

None of Joyce's annotators––including Gifford and Slote, who are more thorough than others––is willing to take a stab at "Hiram Y. Bomboost," but O'Neill jumps into the gap and characterizes the name as American. His logic is largely unstated but seems clear enough: American capitalists are Bombastic Boosters, and 19th century Americans were quite fond of Old Testament names. Two strong namesakes can be found in the Hebrew Bible. Hiram was an effective 10th century BCE Phoenician king of Tyre who allied himself with King Solomon. The middle initial in Joyce's name, however, may undo the glory of the given name: "Since relatively few male names begin with the letter y...Hiram’s middle name may be a culturally corresponding “Yoram,” borne in the Bible by a king of Israel who, unlike Hiram, came to a distinctly bad end (Hanks 890)." If both allusions are present, then the name works a lovely change on Bombast and Boost: the American capitalist experiment has always been characterized by Boom and Bust cycles. Americans may wish to read the name with a Texas accent: "Hiram Y. Bomboost at your service, ma'am. Ah have more acres in oil rigs than anyone in the Panhandle."

Returning to the European nobility and continuing eastward from the Austro-Hungarian empire, Joyce introduces the Greek "Count Athanatos Karamelopulos." Athanatos means "deathless" and suggests that the count's parents had some grand pre-Christian namesakes in mind: the divine beings that Homer calls Athanatoi. A self-congratulatory reference to Athens may also be floating around in the word. As with Hiram, however, the grand beginning suffers a comedown in the surname. Its ending, -pulos, could suggest a play on the Greek polis, "city." More likely it misspells the suffix -opoulos, a very common patronymic signifier (e.g., Papadopoulos). But neither option saves Athanatos from bathos. If polis is meant, then he is Deathless CandyCity. (Perhaps Athenians like sweets more than other Greeks?) Or it could be that, as O'Neill reasons, he is "a descendant (-opoulos) not of any Olympian being but of an ancestor sweetly named Sweetmeat."

Continuing eastward, Ottoman Turkey or one of its Arabian provinces has sent a representative named "Ali Baba Backsheesh Rahat Lokum Effendi." Ali Baba evokes the famous story in One Thousand and One Nights, but it threatens to descend into the childish patter of “Ba, ba, black sheep.” Although the eye keeps things Arabic, checking the tongue's impulse to recite the nursery rhyme, there is no glory in baksheesh. This word, originally Persian, spread through the Arab world and far beyond as a term for handouts and bribes. Ali Baba, whose fictional ancestor was honest and enterprising (he did have a bit of the thief in him, however) thus finds himself tarred with westerners' stereotype of Arabic panhandlers begging alms and Arabic officials demanding payoffs. The string of Turkish words that follows seems to give him back some dignity, but it too falls flat. Effendi is a respectful title applied to government officials––people to bow down to. Rahat Lokum, however, is a name for the gelatinous cube-shaped candies also known as Turkish Delight. Having previously been devalued by sheep-shearing and bribe-taking, Ali's officiousness now is demeaned by jelly-slurping, as the Greek's was by caramel-chewing. Both of them, like England's king in Lestrygonians, spend their days "sucking red jujubes white."

No one in this list of worthies has a name more delightful to read aloud than "Señor Hidalgo Caballero Don Pecadillo y Palabras y Paternoster de la Malora de la Malaria." This deliciously lilting mockery of over-long Spanish noble names (four honorifics followed by five names) means something like Master Nobleman Knight Lord Minor Sins and Words and Our Father of the Bad Hour of the Malaria. O'Neill touches on the Catholic religiosity in the portrait: "Spanish naming conventions are adjusted to assign him an alliterative given name suggesting minor transgressions followed by a palaver of long-winded excuses and prayerful repentance and a family name combining an 'evil hour' (mala hora) and an attack of malaria. Since the Triestine malora means 'hell'––as in 'go to hell' (McCourt 53)––the segment Paternoster de la Malora means 'Our Father who is in Hell'." Such a hell, filled with the divine presence and rife with infectious disease, is typical of Joyce's urge to blaspheme. Telemachus opens with a Black Mass, and Circe elaborates on its mixing of good and evil, divine and satanic. Here, the blasphemy comments on the devout Catholicism typical of Spaniards. Don Pecadillo commits minor sins, evades their consequences with glib excuses, and periodically wipes the slate clean by confession and penitential prayer.

The Far East finally receives some representation in the person of "Hokopoko Harakiri." Here, beyond noting Joyce's usual deft mockery of the cadences of foreign languages and the by-now-familiar alliteration, it is probably enough to quote from O'Neill. The name, he writes, "suggests a Japanese who sometimes engages in ceremonial hocus-pocus and sometimes, no doubt for relaxation, dances the hokey pokey. Since both these phrases are occasionally associated, rightly or wrongly, with Hoc est corpus––from the liturgical formula of the Mass Hoc est enim corpus meum ('This is my body')––it has a certain appropriateness that the hocus-pocus involved should precede a significant bodily ritual, namely suicide by self-disembowelment. García Tortosa’s rendering as 'Abricadabri Harakiri' suggests, entering into the spirit of the thing, a stage magician’s flourish, 'abracadabra,' to accompany the ritual opening up (Spanish abrir 'to open') of what will very soon be a corpse (cadáver). All other translators are content to leave well enough alone."

Anti-Chinese bigotry could not hope for a much better string of syllables than "Hi Hung Chang," but the name is based on the real-life Li Hung Chang (1823-1901), a Chinese ruler who paid a state visit to London and the Court of St. James in 1896. Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner note that he was viceroy to the Chinese emperor from 1870 to 1895: "In their obituary, the London Times remarked, 'For about a quarter of a century, as far as the outside world was concerned, Li Hung-chang was or seemed to be practically the Chinese Government' (8 Nov. 1901, p. 13, col. a). 'The honor of his inclusion may be due to an incident which made him notorious: the breach of promise given to rebels defeated at Suchow and their execution' (Fritz Senn, Trivia Ulysseana II, p. 245)." By changing one consonant of his name, Joyce insinuates that the Chinese viceroy is a murderous criminal. O'Neill remarks that "Mr Chang appears onomastically predestined to end his days on the gallows high."

The next few people hail from northern Europe. Denmark is represented by "Olaf Kobberkeddelsen," whose name sounds like O Laugh, CopperKettleSon! What is the joke? It may be simply that his ancestors traded in cookware, but O'Neill lays out some intriguing details: "the Old Norse personal name Kettil referred to a sacrificial cauldron or kettle (Hanks 801).... Olaf’s name is not without its Irish connections: his given name is also that of the ninth-century Danish founder of Dublin, Olaf the White. The informal Australian cobber, meanwhile, of undetermined origin, means 'friend', and one of Joyce’s fellow students and friends at UCD was Thomas Kettle (1880-1916), whose family name also derives from the Old Norse Kettil (Hanks 341)." The connection between Ireland and Denmark suggested by the name Olaf is especially interesting in light of the fact that two immense and ornately decorated Celtic cauldrons were discovered in Denmark in the 19th century, both called kedelen. The Gundestrup Kedelen, found in pieces in a bog and reconstructed, is made of silver, not copper. The less complete Rynkeby Kedelen is bronze. Quoting from P. W. Joyce's A Social History of Ancient Ireland, Gifford notes that for ancient Celts a meat-boiling caldron was "a most important article in the household...the special property of the chief." Could the joke be that the Danes who conquered Ireland in the 9th century were themselves descended from ("sons" of) prehistoric continental Celts, and that modern Danish dealers in copper kettles fall far short of the glory of the ancient kedelen?

From the nearby Netherlands comes "Mynheer Trik van Trumps." The suggestions here seem much more straightforward: this Dutch Mister is a tricky card player who always has a trump card to take tricks––perhaps because he holds a few up his sleeve. The uncomplicated focus evidently gives translators plenty of space in which to operate. Among other efforts, O'Neill reports these three: "Aubert evidently suspects darkly that this 'Trik van Tromps' is not above cheating (French tromper 'to cheat'), a suspicion also adumbrated in Mallafrè’s 'Mynherr Truk van Trompis'. García Tortosa’s 'Triki van Traque', meanwhile, is definitely a tricky character, possibly also good at backgammon (Dutch triktrak), no doubt often drunk (Spanish traqueado) and consequently of threadbare appearance (traqueado), but evidently still a bit of a firecracker (triquitraque), apparently determined to go out with a bang (traque)."

Poland has sent "Pan Poleaxe Paddyrisky." His title Pan historically meant "lord" or "master"; today it is equivalent to "mister" or "sir." His given name recalls Shakespeare’s story of how King Hamlet “smote the sledded Polacks [or poleaxe] on the ice” (1.1.63), and his surname seems to be modeled on Ignacy Jan Paderewski (1860-1941), the famous pianist and composer who advocated for Polish independence during the Great War and served as his nation's prime minister and foreign minister at the war's end in 1919. Perhaps out of respect for this accomplished and dignified gentleman promoting national independence, Joyce does not give his character any distinctly criminal qualities, but as with Olaf Kettleson he does ally him with the Irish––an indictment in itself. Paderewski becomes "Paddyrisky," a stereotypical paddy forever drinking his PaddyWhiskey and wading into brawls with his shillelagh (or poleaxe). O'Neill notes how several translators deal with these suggestions, concluding with one who refuses to play the game: "Possibly worried by the pervasiveness of the tricky Irish risk factor, Morel’s 'Pan Pasderiski' engages in discreet dehibernicization, resulting happily in a complete lack of risk (pas de risque)."

The inclusion of a Polack evidently spurred Joyce to include a Czech, "Goosepond Přhklštř Kratchinabritchisitch." The title distorts Gospodin, a Slavic form of address with a range of meanings very comparable to the Polish Pan, but it also suggests that this Master or Mister or Lord is involved in animal husbandry. It is hard to know whether Joyce intended for the man's given name to be pronounceable, and if so what qualities it may evoke. Perhaps he meant simply to satirize a language which, more even than Welsh, sees no need for vowels. The pronunciation of the surname, though, could not be more obvious. Probably because he stuffs goose feathers into his garments to ward off the eastern European cold, this gospodin is forever scratching an itch in his britches.

Gabler's edition adds one name not found in any previous printings of Ulysses. By the end of 1921 Joyce had already afflicted the unfortunate printer Maurice Darantière with endless handwritten revisions to the galley proof pages of his novel. Most of them took the form of added text, including two closely-handwritten pages he asked to have inserted into the Cyclops episode that contained the names of the members of the FOTEI. Joyce was still not done, however. In January 1922, the final month before the book's publication, he wrote a note to the print shop asking to have still one more name inserted into the list. But it was too late––someone in the shop wrote "trop tard" on the note, probably in a state of extreme exasperation––and this name did not see the light of day until the 1980s.

The name was "Borus Hupinkoff," a play on Boris Godunov, Tsar of Russia from 1598 to 1605. Pushkin wrote a play about Boris in 1826, and Mussorgsky's opera was first performed in 1874. Gifford notes that both works represent him as consumed by guilt over having murdered the rightful heir Dmitri––reason enough for Joyce to include him in an assortment of distinctly criminal rulers. But the real joy of the name lies in its submerged ambiguities. Boris tends to bore us, and he is also evidently belligerent: O'Neill notes that the Slavic root bor means "battle" (Hanks 716-17), and rus originally referred to the bloodthirsty Swedish Viking invaders who laid the foundation for the later Russian state. The surname suggests that this violent ruler suffers from the violent disease of whooping cough. Gifford reports an amazing fact: "in May 1907 Joseph Conrad's son Borys had a severe and disturbing attack of whooping cough while Conrad was writing Chance and reading proof of The Secret Agent." As Joyce was correcting Darantière's page proofs, then, he recalled Conrad doing the same thing for another great novel nearly fifteen years earlier, and the memory of his poor child wracked by coughs suggested a homicidal Russian ruler with the same given name and a surname that could evoke the disease. The mind reels at such associative gymnastics.

Germanic names return as Joyce concludes his list with two wild parodies of the Teutonic preference for absurdly long compound words, names and titles. "Herr Hurhausdirektorpresident Hans Chuechli-Steuerli" is Swiss-German, as suggested by the diminutive -li endings. Hans likes little cakes (Swiss-German chuechli) and little taxes (German steuern), and he has risen to the directorship of a whorehouse. Slote, Mamigonian, and Turner note that "Hurhaus, while comprehensible to a German speaker, is not properly a German word; it plays off kurhaus, which means sanitorium." That Hans is both Director and President of this esteemed institution is a redundancy for which most cultures would see no need, but Germans are different. Famously, they like to address eminent academics as Herr Professor Doktor, and Joyce, having echoed that in "Herr Hurhausdirektorpresident," now introduces a Professordoctor whose glory extends to a further eleven words––a monstrosity not reproduced here because it will not fit on a line of type.

Professor "Kriegfried Ueberallgemein" appears to be the most highly distinguished scholar ever produced by academic institutions. O'Neill remarks that he "exercises his historical expertise in an impressive range of educational and other associated institutions," with the exception of "the parodically deflating titular presence of the noun Suspensorium ('jockstrap')." Kriegfried, reminiscent of the Wagnerian Siegfried, means WarPeace––"a combination that history has shown to be not only all too general (allgemein) but all too general everywhere (überall). Kreutzer (224) also notes that the name can in fact be read as based either on 'über-allgemein' or on 'überall gemein', translatable respectively as “even more than universal” and 'just plain nasty (gemein) everywhere'...(Kreutzer 243)." To all these semantic quibbles can be added a quite straightforward musical allusion. Haydn's stirring Deutschlandlied (1791) was paired in 1841 with the lyrics beginning "Deutschland, Deutschland über Alles" ("Germany over all") that so endeared it to Hitler's Nazis. O'Neill observes that Deutschland became the German national anthem only in August 1922 and so can only be heard operating in the name "erroneously," by an act of readerly retrospection. Surely, though, Joyce could have heard it before then and connected it with the rising German nationalism which had quite recently spread its WarPeace over his part of the world, driving him out of Trieste. In either case, the thought of Nasty Germans Over All rounds out the catalogue of nasty foreigners in a suitably apocalyptic way.

High social status notwithstanding, these eighteen individuals seem like people on whom one should not turn one's back for even an instant. Sure enough, no sooner has the narrative named them than a petty disagreement escalates into an "animated altercation" in which "cannonballs, scimitars, boomerangs, blunderbusses, stinkpots, meatchoppers, umbrellas, catapults, knuckledusters, sandbags, lumps of pig iron were resorted to and blows were freely exchanged." Long before the state-sanctioned bloodletting begins, some members of the foreign delegation are themselves "bleeding profusely." The official-sounding collective name that Joyce gives them at this juncture, FOTEI, drives one final nail into their coffined reputations. O'Neill remarks that they are honored with "their very own personal acronym," but "Perhaps 'honoured' is not quite the right expression, for Enrico Terrinoni has observed in an interview (Kearns 2017: 175) that the acronym is actually a mischievous play on the Italian fotei." Actually, the word is fottei, the first person singular passato remoto of fottere: fuck, fuck over, ruin, screw. Such is the esteemed delegation's treatment of others, and such is the text's treatment of them.

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