Oldal 140 [140]
OCR
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. «139 +
