A Tongue Not Mine: Beckett and Translation (review)

Beckett scholarship has long probed the author's status as a self-translator, but Sinéad Mooney makes a compelling case for rereading Beckett's œuvre in light of his early third-party translations that predated his translations of his own work. In that sense she understands Beckett's entire literary output as operating on a continuum, and proposes 'translation' as the guiding rubric for interpreting the aesthetic principles, thematic motifs, and political undertones of his project. The study progresses chronologically through Beckett's career, starting with his translations of the 1930s. Mooney contends that these translations of Rimbaud's 'Le Bateau ivre', Joyce's 'Anna Livia Plurabelle', and Nancy Cunard's Negro anthology, among others, have long been marginalized in scholarly criticism but anticipate many of the themes and subjects of Beckett's mature work. Her second chapter walks us through the literal moment, in February of 1946, of Beckett's conversion to writing in French: when composing 'La Fin', previously known as 'Suite', he 'drew a line across the page, translated the previous paragraph into French, and continued the rest of the story in that language' (p. 81). In this and subsequent chapters devoted to Beckett's trilogy, his largely English-language theatre, and his late self-translations, Mooney's readings emphasize the allegorical underpinnings of Beckett's plots and the subtle commentaries they suggest about translation, bilingualism, and the nature of originality. For Mooney, an original Beckett text is written as if it were in translation, with its 'foreignisms' (p. 134), seemingly intentional syntactic errors, and awkward voices. Where other scholars have been reluctant to find political messages within Beckett's prose, Mooney claims that his work cannot be divorced from the historical and nationalistic context in which he was writing. Beckett's refusal to make his translation of Waiting for Godot sound more Irish thus responds to post-Independence national anxieties in his homeland by maintaining what Mooney calls 'translationese', an aesthetic sense that a text resists any claim to Irishness and is 'native to nowhere' (p. 184). The study explains Beckett's language choice, and his later return to writing primarily in English first, as part of his continual process towards extreme self-impoverishment and the increasing dehumanization of his characters and language. The final chapter analyses his late texts, from the untranslated Worstward Ho to Stirrings Still/Soubresauts, and Mal vu mal dit/Ill Seen Ill Said, to show how Beckett writes himself into a tradition that links translation and death. Through close readings that reveal Beckett's translations as even more death-bound than their originals, Mooney persuasively suggests that his compulsion to self-translate was an artistic practice that modelled his general resistance to finality or resolution. Mooney's study deftly navigates between a wealth of scholarly materials and archival sources, and weaves these and her own readings into a convincing argument.