"Writing to the self-accompaniment of a tongue that is not mine": The Figure of Translation in Beckett's Work

There is hardly any writer in the 20th century whose work speaks more about the crack within "home" than the writings of Samuel Beckett; one might indeed state that one of the fundamental figures inscribed across his textual world is a continuous, active disinvolvement and distanciation from any notion of, or nostalgia for, pre-exilic "home," spatial or linguistic. According to a famous anecdote, when the author of En attendant Godot was asked if he was English, he answered, "Au contrairé' (qtd. in Ellmann 5). The answer has been glossed by criticism to illustrate Beckett's square refusal of identifications (linguistic, national), his uneasy status as an (Anglo-)Irish writer who turned to write in another idiom, but also his adopted role as a translator. For not only did Beckett translate himself between English and French so that, starting with the Trilogy, his "original" writing becomes indistinguishable from self-translation, but the structure of translation is embedded in his work, written in whichever language, even in the earlier English-language texts that precede the birth of the bilingual oeuvre. In the following I will attempt to show how translation-whether between languages, or thematized in the one-language of writing-becomes one of the constitutive figures and defining principles of composition of the Beckettian text, always underway from a "source language" without ground and origin, towards a never-to-be-attained language of arrival.

"L'exil: connais pas"

Beckett's translations are intrinsically linked to both his creative and critical writing. His early, unacknowledged translations or "dispatching" of Proust have not only fed into the arguments of his early book-length study but are, as Shane Weller demonstrated, at times indistinguishable from the voice(over) of Beckett the critic.1 From the 1920s to the early 1950s he regularly contributed translations of avant-garde, mostly Surrealist, poetry to various literary magazines and (always unsigned) translations of art criticism and theory to the new transition, re-launched by Georges Duthuit in 1945; he translated Anna Uvia Plurabelle into French in collaboration with Alfred Péron, the same friend with whom he would translate his own Murphy into French; and even though he virtually ceases to take on odd translation jobs for a living from the late 1950s onwards, there are notable exceptions-his adaptation of Robert Pinget's Ta Manivelle in 1960 as the radio play The...