Beckett's French

Abstract

There is a growing interest in Beckett as a writer in two languages, and as the translator of his own works. Beckett Translating/ Translating Beckett, edited by Alan Warren Friedman, Charles Rossrnan and Dina Sherzer (Pennsylvania State University Press, 1987), addresses many of the varied issues involved. Raymond Federman's essay in that volume, 'The Writer as Self-Translator', calls for a full-scale study of Beckett's bilingualism and self-translation, and this has already been provided in Brian T. Fitch's Beckett and Babel: An Investigation into the Status of the Bilingual Work (University of Toronto Press, 1988). The common concern of critics in this area is with what happens in the passage from one text to another, and with the differences to be found between Beckett's English and Beckett's French. Yet there is a previous question to be asked, and critics have indeed asked it: why ever did Beckett choose to write in a foreign language? I should like to ask it again and to reconsider that choice, for I am sure that we have not learned all that it can tell us about language, and about the self. The case is in part specific to Beckett, but what it implies about the effect of moving into another language is instructive for anyone concerned with literary translation. I shall concentrate on the moment when Beckett might well have thought that he had crossed into French definitively. I mean of course the anni mirabiles of 1 947-1 950, the brief period during which he produced, with enviable speed, what is arguably his essential work. After Watt, composed in France during the War but written, quite naturally, in English, and after a number of preparatory texts in French, come Molloy, Malone meurt, En attendant Godot and Ulnnommable, hybrid works, divided between French signifiers and Irish signifieds. The fatherland and the mother tongue, loose metaphors but also dangerous intimacies against which the writer in Beckett seems to have found it necessary to react, reasserted themselves during the 1950s in the English versions of the works, and enabled Beckett to become one of the very rare bilingual writers.1