James Joyce lived in Trieste, Italy, between 1905 and 1915, scraping by as an English teacher and occupying a series of ___16___ apartments in the new section of town in its last years as Austrian-controlled city. Here he wrote most of Dubliners and the whole A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and devised the outline for Ulysses. Trieste, in other words, was where Joyce became ___17___ the greatest writer in the English language in the twentieth century, though it would be decades before anyone became aware of this. This city with its ___18____ and multiethnic population, which Joyce called “Europiccola” inspired the development of his own ___19___ literature. Of course, inspiration does not equal happiness, and this was a decade of ___20___ frustration for Joyce. There was the grinding poverty and dreariness mixed with the surging anger and self-doubt caused by his inability for years on end to find a publisher for Dubliners. It was a(n) ___21___ period of near starvation and heavy drinking that led, in turn, to ___22___ of rheumatic fever. His wife, Nora Barnacle, though she loved him, did not understand him or his work. Once in a rage he threw the manuscript of A Portrait of the Artist into the fire, before it was quickly retrieved by his sister Eileen.       Only in 1913, after eight years of professional misery in Trieste, did he receive a(n) ___23___ letter from Ezra Pound, who had heard about Joyce from the poet William Butler Yeats, and offered to help him in any way he could. The next year, indirectly through Pound’s support, Joyce found a publisher for Dubliners --- it had taken nearly a decade. Pound’s moral and emotional support proved crucial in ___24___ Joyce to finish A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and begin Ulysses. Joyce seemed happy in Trieste more in ___25___, when he remarked that “the lax rule of the Austro-Hungarian emperor” was preferable to “democratic Utopias.”
【題組】16. (AB) interminable (AC) polyglot (AD) squalid (AE) excruciating (BC) retrospect (BD) rousing (BE) arguably (CD) bouts (CE) unsolicited (DE) cosmopolitan