The title, Telemachus, should be pronunced fast. Phonetically, it goes something like this: “Tell-em-eck-us.” At least, that’s how it sounds on YouTube.
For a long time, I pronounced it all wrong as “Telly-marcus.” It slid sluggishly from the back of my palate with typically Australian nasal inflections and no use of our thin, parched lips.
I had the same pronunciation issue with my PhD thesis, but deliberately and in reverse. It’s called “Sensitive Plants” after the Shelley poem. He would have pronounced it, ‘pell-aunt.’ But I always called it ‘Pl-ant.’ My thesis was going to pivot from English to Australia literature during the nineteenth century, so it seemed like a clever pun at the time. But I never got to write the Australian chapters. Instead, I shifted to the influence of Shelley on Joyce. During that period, I got into Ulysses forever and the concept for TMAC emerged.
