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MY WAY WITH THE WORK OF SAMUEL BECKETT
Sentences like that, says Hugh Kenner, are worthy of Virgil. Especially
the end of the book, the love of Moll and Macmann, the scene with Moll,
Macmann and Lemuel — in which the word "death" is not heard so much
as once, but the writing evokes its constant presence — is peerless as world
literature. Ihe rhythm of the sentences — inconstant, nervously clutching
and endeavouring to cling on in time, seeking and searching — evokes the
concept of waiting, of a death-rattle.
By the seventies I was studying English intensively (Hugh Kenners seminal
work Samuel Beckett: A Critical Study and that of Lawrence E. Harvey:
Samuel Beckett, Poet and Critic were of great assistance)? and French, for
the sake of Flaubert, Deleuze, Barthes, Blanchot, Foucault, and the French
reception of Nietzsche. The encounter with the Three Novels, however, has
become the experience of a lifetime. I looked words up in the French and
English versions, though it was a long way from a translation. At this time
I was also dealing with other authors. I worked on the translation of the
Three Novels from 4 October 1984 until 13 July 1985, when it was ready for
the printer. In 1979 Samuel Beckett sent me the French edition de luxe of
the Trilogie (Minuit, 1971). I devoted a lot of time to reading, checking the
words in the text and trying to translate Textes pour rien, which consists
of thirteen prose-poems springing from the same root as the Three Novels,
and the asthmatic, death-rattle rhythm of which has much in common with
his composition L’Innommable (1953) | The Unnamable (1958). Deirdre
Bair’s 1976 biography (it is almost unheard of for a person’s biography to be
published during his lifetime) helped me a lot in finding my bearings and
furnished a lot of interesting details about the work and Beckett’s life alike.
My career as a translator began to take an upward turn in 1982, when
I succeeded in translating and publishing the prose-poem Mal vu mal dit.
Even since then this book has been my livre de chevet, and in my view one of
the most valuable of Beckett’s works, translated at last. 1 sent a copy to Beckett,
who thanked me for it with his characteristic aristocratic courtesy. In May
that year I went to Paris for two weeks with the express intention of making
contact with him. He left his phone number for me at Minuit publishers; and
so on 19 May 1982 I rang him up. We talked for about twenty minutes, and
even today I can hear how deeply he sighed during the conversation. I spoke
in French, but he would begin every sentence in English and then suddenly
change to French. It was as if he were thinking in English. I asked for his
permission to translate the Three Novels into Hungarian. He consented and
encouraged me to write to him.
7 Hugh Kenner: A Reader’s Guide to Samuel Beckett, London, Thames and Hudson, 1973, 92,
106, 189.
# Lawrence E. Harvey: Samuel Beckett: Poet & Critic, Princeton, Princeton University, 1970.
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