Samuel Beckett as World Literature

Thirthankar Chakraborty, Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781501371943
• eBook ISBN: 9781501358814
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

The essays in this collection provide in-depth analyses of Samuel Beckett's major works in the context of his international presence and circulation, particularly the translation, adaptation, appropriation and cultural reciprocation of his oeuvre. A Nobel Prize winner who published and self-translated in both French and English across literary genres, Beckett is recognized on a global scale as a preeminent author and dramatist of the 20th century. Samuel Beckett as World Literature brings together a wide range of international contributors to share their perspectives on Beckett's presence in countries such as China, Japan, Serbia, India and Brazil, among others, and to flesh out Beckett's relationship with postcolonial literatures and his place within the 'canon' of world literature.

PART I

Translation

1

Bilingual Beckett

John Fletcher

If his novels and plays had failed to find an audience, Samuel Beckett would still be remembered as a literary translator. His career as a translator began, as it does for most people, by chance. In accordance with the terms of an exchange agreement between Trinity College Dublin (TCD) and the École Normale Supérieure (ÉNS), Samuel Beckett was appointed to serve for two years as lecteur d’anglais at the prestigious Grande École. He arrived in Paris in the autumn of 1928, aged 22. He was soon introduced to fellow-Dubliner James Joyce, who asked him to translate into French ‘Anna Livia Plurabelle’ (usually abbreviated ALP), a section of ‘Work in Progress’, the forerunner of Joyce’s magnum opus Finnegans Wake (1939); ALP was later incorporated as the book’s eighth chapter.

Beckett asked his friend Alfred Péron, who had served for two years as the ÉNS lecteur at TCD, to collaborate with him on the translation. They were the perfect team: both were bilingual and both were totally familiar with Dublin and its river, the Liffey, of which Anna Livia, as her name implies, is the embodiment. But when the galleys of their translation arrived Joyce blocked publication and decided to seek the opinion of others in his circle, chiefly Eugene Jolas and Adrienne Monnier. His reasons for what amounted to a slight to Beckett (with whom he had coincidently quarrelled over a personal matter, the infatuation – not reciprocated – felt by his mentally ill daughter Lucia for the young Irishman) are unclear, but it would seem that Joyce, having become interested in the practice of translation, chose to coordinate a team of translators himself. ‘Work in Progress’ was after all a kind of metatranslation, so Joyce’s action, morally dubious though it was, had some logic. The irony is that the version published in 1931 in the Nouvelle Revue Française differs little from the Beckett/Péron version: as every translator is aware, it is easy to criticize the work of others, but hard to improve on it.

Over the years critics have begun studying Beckett’s verse increasingly closely (the verse translations less so), beginning with my article ‘Beckett’s Verse: Influences and Parallels’ (1964) and continuing with Lawrence E. Harvey’s Samuel Beckett: Poet and Critic (1970). The poems were reissued from time to time in volume form by John Calder Publications with, invariably, numerous misprints, so a scholarly, textually impeccable edition was badly needed. In 2012 Faber and Faber published The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett: A Critical Edition by Seán Lawlor and John Pilling. This monumental work of scholarship rendered superfluous all previous editions of Beckett’s poetry and verse translations. Unlike earlier critics, Lawlor and Pilling devote many pages to the verse translations, which they rate highly. And rightly so: critics have noted how exceptional is Beckett’s capacity to disrobe his own voice and come to the work of the writer being translated.

The same qualities that were shown in occasional pieces of self-translation, undertaken selflessly to oblige a scholar or literary critic, are all evident in Beckett’s renderings of other writers, especially poets, and above all in his versions of a dozen poems by Paul Éluard (1895–1952). Two poems in particular stand out: ‘À peine défigurée’ (‘Scarcely Disfigured’) with its haunting second line ‘Bonjour tristesse’ (later adopted by a modish young novelist for the book that made her rich) and ‘L’Amoureuse’ (‘Lady Love’), one of the greatest love lyrics in the French language. Beckett does full justice to both poems: in each case he turned a French chef-d’œuvre into an English masterpiece.

Unsurprisingly perhaps, Beckett was a great translator, not only of Joyce but of many texts from the 1930s to the late 1950s. To begin with, Samuel Putnam’s This Quarter published a special edition dedicated to Italian writers with three translations by ‘S. B. Beckett’. Two years later, in the same journal, Beckett published verse translations of André Breton, René Crevel and Paul Éluard. One of the most interesting among these is his translation of Guillaume Apollinaire’s Zone. Confronting the delicate issues of translating Apollinaire, Beckett chose to translate his works as literally as possible so that we cannot reproach him for being unfaithful in his versions. He also undertook various commissions for Jolas’s Transition, Nancy Cunard’s Negro Anthology (1934), E. L. T. Mesens’s London Bulletin and UNESCO’s Anthology of Mexican Poetry (1958). Beckett’s French was of native standard, he was fluent in Italian and German, and his Spanish was good.

The fact that Beckett undertook literary translation to keep the wolf from the door until the royalties from Godot poured in and the Nobel Prize made him rich (although nearly all that money was given away) does not detract from the fact that he was a master of the art. He was modest about it, never departing from his conviction that translation was impossible (traduttore, traditore). Fortunately that did not stop him translating his French works into English and vice versa. In this task, in the early days, he worked with a collaborator but soon decided that no one could do the job as well as himself, so there were limits to his modesty. In writing my books on Beckett I would ask him to check my translations of quotations from his work. He never demurred; on the other hand my drafts came back heavily emended. He did the same with John Spurling’s quotations from Éleuthéria in our book Beckett: A Study of His Plays (1972), where his emendations were extensive. In addition to correcting the odd misreading, he edited Spurling’s drafts by cutting out words which he deemed unnecessary so that his texts are invariably shorter than Spurling’s. He also struck out Spurling’s more elaborate readings, opting in one case for a literal translation: ‘It seemed to me that these were the things that held me prisoner’ became ‘these were my prisons’ (Fletcher and Spurling 1972: 54). In one instance he completely rewrote Spurling’s draft:

All right, let’s keep quiet, so sorry, goodnight, let’s go to bed, sorry we dared speak, we philistines, about anything except the price of margarine. Oh yes, I quite understand your music. I quite understand that you were all glassy-eyed with the stuff.

is revised as:

So silence please, at least that decency, good night all and happy dreams. We were mad but it’s over, mad to dare speak of anything higher than the price of margarine. Oh I can hear it from here, your music. You were all tight naturally.

Being a well-known playwright, it comes as a surprise that Spurling’s version is less speakable than Beckett’s.

From 1945 onwards, Beckett’s apprenticeship as translator served him well when it came to his adopting the French language as a medium for literary expression. Beckett once tried explaining, in bad French, as a joke, why he changed his language (‘pour faire remarquer moi…’). He told Niklaus Gessner: ‘[I]n French, it is easier to write without style’ (Gessner 1957: 32), but on the contrary, as shown later in this chapter, his French is far from lacking style. He told Israel Shenker that after returning to his flat in Paris after the Liberation, he chose to write in French quite simply because ‘I just felt like it’ (Shenker 2005: 161), but this too fails to explain the profound reasons of his choice, for there can be no doubt that he did have a choice. To understand his reasons, we are left with closely examining his oeuvres, particularly from 1942 to 1946, which was a period of transition in Beckett’s early career.

To begin with, although Beckett’s case is rare, it is not unique. The English writer William Beckford, for instance, wrote his strange novel Vathek (1786) in French towards the end of the eighteenth century, his reasons being that the French public would better appreciate his ironic oriental fantasy when compared to the English who were less familiar with the then popular genre in France. Almost two centuries later, the young American Bruce Lowery wrote his novel La Cicatrice (1960) first in French and subsequently translated it to English. Beckett’s bilingualism is thus not unprecedented, albeit he must be the only writer to exploit all its possibilities: he writes his texts either in French or in English and then translates them into the other language on numerous occasions.

However, Beckett did not turn to French without, little by little, having his reasons. Besides the poems he had written in French before 1937, he translated Murphy in 1939 with the help of Alfred Péron. By the time we get to Watt, written during the Occupation while Beckett was in hiding in Vaucluse, deprived of all contact with people who spoke his mother tongue, we find instances of Gallicisms that Beckett unwittingly included in his English text. Here are some examples:

• ‘I do not rise, not having the force’ (la force).

• ‘I was not found under a cabbage’ (cf. dans un chou).

• ‘But does the penny fare end here, at a merely facultative stop’ (arrêt facultatif).

• ‘Certain fish, in order to support the lower depths […]’ (supporter).

• ‘He quoted as well from his ancestors’ experience (aussi bien) as (que) from his own’.

• ‘We should ever have embraced, and never on the mouth’ (embrasser).

• ‘Dives from a dreadful height, before a numerous public’ (public nombreux).

• ‘That old put’ (putain).

Several of these Gallicisms, particularly the last one, were voluntarily comic. They were attributable to the fact that Beckett was listening to French throughout the day, despite it not being his mother tongue so that translations such as ‘facultative stop’ would have appeared no doubt amusing. But the other examples, such as ‘as well… as’ are results of an assimilated unconscious mental habit. This is definitely the case when he writes ‘to support’ with its French meaning, which is repeated several times in the novel.

Despite his Gallicisms, Beckett dedicated some of his time to writing a pure French, free from reminiscences of his mother tongue. We find in ‘Suite’ (1946) Gallicisms that Beckett took care to eliminate when revising the text for a 1955 re-edition of the short story, entitled ‘La Fin’. The following are some examples:

1946:

• Je vous suis très obligé pour ces vêtements.

• Un petit garçon demanda à sa mère la cause de cela.

• Il offrit d’envoyer chercher un taxi.

• les longs mois de calme, oblitérés en un instant.

• il était très amical et hospitalier (friendly and hospitable).

1955:

• Je vous suis reconnaissant.

• Un petit garçon demanda à sa mère comment cela était possible.

• Il proposa d’envoyer chercher un taxi.

• les longs mois de calme, anéantis en un instant.

• il était bon.

Likewise, when translating Murphy, Beckett let instances of Anglicism into his text. For example, the translation of ‘eight sixes forty eight’ (2006: 40) becomes ‘huit six quarante-huit’ (2013: 65) – where it should have been ‘huit fois six quarante-huit’. In Godot, he had written ‘l’une de trois choses’ and then changed it to ‘de deux choses l’une’ only when the director Roger Blin remarked that the phrasing was not French. Furthermore, we also find instances of Anglicism in Malone meurt (‘Songe aussi que la chair n’est pas tout, spécialement à notre âge’) and in L’Innommable (‘il ne faut pas faire attention aux apparences’ is translated as ‘pay no attention to appearances’). If we look further, we would no doubt find more such instances.¹

In addition to clear instances of Anglicism, because Beckett strove to retain his style, we find that the French version of Murphy retained much of its Englishness. Here is one example:

She stormed away from the callbox, accompanied delightedly by her hips, etc.

(2006: 9)

Elle quitta le kiosque en coup de vent, voluptueusement suivie de ses hanches, etc.

(2013: 15)

Verbal humour resides mainly in the way words are used; it is a comic genre that cannot be easily translated from one language to another. Nonetheless, Beckett did his best to translate as many of his wordplays as possible. He was obliged to remove the ones he wasn’t able to translate, adding elsewhere adjustments in their place. The pun in Murphy, for instance, ‘Why did the barmaid champagne? – Because the stout porter bitter’ (Beckett 2006: 85), and all its lengthy development is omitted and replaced with the brief phrase: ‘il fit une plaisanterie de fort mauvais goût’ (2013: 139). The translation is all the more strange considering the joke is not in bad taste at all. Similarly, an entire paragraph describing Murphy’s pleasure in traveling on bus number eleven during peak hours (between Walham Green and Liverpool Street) is removed, clearly since it was too difficult to convey this in a Parisian context. A few words spoken as an aside by the author are added instead, as if in compensation: for example, we are told that Neary curses the night of his birth, by adding, ‘car il avait toujours été un fils respectueux’ (2013: 50).

When it comes to his short prose, Beckett does not attempt to write in the manner of Murphy and adopts from the start a more French personality. As he masters the French language, he restrains his initially immense inclination to indulge in popular puns and wordplay. For popular language was to Beckett a revelation since the time he arrived in France following his extensive studies in the literary language. His fascination with the riches of this language has left traces throughout his oeuvre; when translating Murphy, for instance, we find a language that is more colloquial than the text in the English original:

My God, how I hate the char Venus and her sausage and mash sex […] How can I care what you DO?

(2006: 26)

Putain de putain, ce que ça m’emmerde, la Vénus de chambre et son Eros comme chez grand-mère […] Qu’est-ce que ça peut me foutre, ce que tu FAIS?

(2013: 41)

Much the same way, in the essay entitled ‘Le Monde et le Pantalon’ (1945), we encounter inappropriate language that a native French speaker would never use in a text of this nature; we find words such as ‘emmerder’, ‘déconner’ and ‘foutre la paix’ throughout this critical study. We find here a Beckett who, dazzled by the discovery of a popular and unexpected linguistic universe, cannot resist using slang language even where it does not suit his purpose.

This transition period did not last for long. Beckett quickly learned to tame this tendency, so much so that the obscenities, through being less frequent, carry an added force:

Il faisant cette étrange lumière qui clôt une journée de pluie persistante, lorsque le soleil paraît et que le ciel s’éclaircit trop tard pour pouvoir servir. La terre fait un bruit comme de soupirs et les dernières gouttes tombent ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Samuel Beckett as world literature Thirthankar Chakraborty and Juan Luis Toribio Vazquez
• PART I Translation
• PART II Adaptation
• PART III Circulation
• Index
• Imprint