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GÁBOR ROMHÁNYI TÖRÖK In June 1984 I received a contract from a publisher to translate the Three Novels. By then both French and English versions had been lexiconized. I began to compose in October and finished in July 1985. That was from the literary perspective the most fulfilling time of my life. I am using the word “compose” deliberately. In this work the musical and poetic qualities of Beckett’s sentences reach their zenith. I would gladly quote at length from these books, but space does not permit. I shall merely remark as follows about the cruellest of all. The Unnamable is a revolutionary new style of writing, audible literature. While Molloy and especially Malone Dies are much more conservative, the latter is full of traditional images and regularly composed sentences of musical worth. The word-avalanche of The Unnamable rolls on through relationships formed in words, deprived of time and space, or without cause and effect, through chance events, goals, devices, possibilities, probabilities, conditions, identities, differences, measurements, proportions, mutual influences, events, variations, movements, and processes towards the solitary reward, the final silence, to which it will only be entitled if and when it has, at least in passing, related everything. The Hungarian Three Novels was published over thirty years ago, in May 1987. I did not understand at the time, and I do not to this day, how a novice literary translator like me was given a publisher’s contract for the translation of one of the strangest and most debated books of the twentieth century, and at a time when Budapest was traditionally rich in all sorts of schools and cliques of translators. How could it have come about that after Beckett’s Nobel Prize of 1969 not a single influential “professional” literary translator jumped at this golden opportunity? I can state without any trace of exaggeration that the publication of the novel meant a breakthrough in my translating career. Good news came from the Parisian publisher Minuit: Beckett was satisfied with the Hungarian Three Novels. It was about then that I found out that the Beckett Archive had been operating in Reading, England, since 1971, and that all his literary documents were regularly collected there — published and unpublished, manuscripts and drafts of works already published, so that all these things should be stored there to assist the work of researchers. I wrote to Beckett asking for his support for my proposal to spend a short time in the Reading Archives, as I wanted to study his unpublished works in manuscript form. He replied that he could arrange for my stay of about three months in Reading. Thus, I went over there in October 1988. Professor James Knowlson looked after me personally and ensured that my time there and my work in the Archive were perfectly free of trouble. I made a thorough study of the manuscript of the novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women, written in 1932 but then still unpublished. I read it several times, made a lexicon of it, and when it was published posthumously in 1993 I immediately began to translate it. It + 140 +
