Samuel Beckett culled his trilogy of novels for striking images and phrases throughout his later career, but during 1950s he revisited Molloy, Malone meurt and L'Innommable in a more direct sense, when various parties requested English versions of his new work. What Beckett called the losing battle of translating trilogy (Knowlson, 438) was fought in period between 1950 and 1958. This article discusses Molloy because it forced Beckett to devise a long-term strategy to deal with hopeless thankless chore of translation (Harmon, 355), while also leaving sufficient room for new creative endeavours. His decision from Malone Dies onwards to self-translate most of his work was largely result of a troublesome collaboration on Molloy with Patrick Bowles, a young South African writer.Until recently, little was known about this joining of forces. Bowles's article in P.N. Review (1994) and James Knowlson's impressive authorized biography (1996) have outlined basic facts, but second volume of Samuel Beckett's letters (2011) and Richard Seaver's memoirs (2012), as well as information available in archives, offer new information that calls for a critical reassessment of both text and process through which it came about. The present article offers a first step in that direction, by approaching English Molloy from perspective of letters, notebooks, manuscripts and like, also known as Beckett's grey canon (Gontarski, 143). Our purpose is to shed more light on a relatively obscure period in Beckett's literary career and to chart textual history of Molloy in English. To this purpose, an overview of translation's preserved draft stages seems in order:AAs chronological overview reveals, textual history of Molloy in English does not begin with Beckett-Bowles collaboration. The idea to translate novel was already on Beckett's mind in late 1940s, six months after its completion in French, but well before it found a publisher. George Reavey wrote to him in Dublin that Cyril Connolly was looking for a text of around 30,000 words to include in Horizon, but plan never materialized. On 8 July 1948 Beckett replied that he would not be able to translate first part of Molloy by that time (Bair, 402). years later first English sample from Molloy appeared in October 1950 issue of Transition, together with a specimen from Malone Dies. Again, French novels had yet to appear, but Jerome Lindon of Les Editions de Minuit had by now accepted them. The fragments are identified not by their titles but numbers and II. The ensemble is called Two Fragments and Beckett is credited as author and translator. Shane Weller's recent Faber edition of Molloy discusses substantive differences between Transition specimen and Grove/Olympia editions (qtd. in Beckett 2009, vii).Equally interesting is Beckett's selection of text, beginning: I left shelter of doorway and began to lever myself forward, slowly swinging through sullen air (1950, 103). In Minuit first edition, this is when Molloy sets out on his crutches: Ce qui par contre me parait indeniable, c'est que, vaincu par l'evidence, par une tres forte probabilite plutot, je sortis de sous l'auvent et me mis a me balancer lentement en avant, a travers les airs (1951, 97). The English rendition in Transition deletes first part of French sentence, to pick up pace in full syntactic swing. Molloy embarks on a series of ruminations that comes to a peculiar close: And cycle continues, joltingly, of flight and bivouac, in an Egypt bounds, infant, (1950, 105).Beckett worked on fragment between June and September 1950, when paying a sustained visit to his mother in Ireland (Cohn, 193). May Beckett was suffering from Parkinson's disease and eventually passed away on 25 August (Knowlson, 383). These biographical circumstances imbue phrase without with special significance. …