"Scarcely Disfigured": Beckett's Surrealist Translations

Samuel Beckett, a Passeur of Surrealism

Samuel Beckett was in his mid-twenties when he translated a great many texts (prose, poems, essays, articles) by the French Surrealists. His translations were made in a formative period when the "young Irish poet," as he was called by Parisian expatriates, was the author of only a few poems, critical essays, and reviews, and when, working in the wake of James Joyce, he was straining to find a voice of his own for his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Between 1929 and 1932, Beckett translated professionally from French for several journals and anthologies. He rendered a great many Surrealist texts into English for Transition, the literary review edited by Eugene Jolas that was critical in linking British, American, and Continental avant-gardes.¹ He also translated works for Nancy Cunard's Negro Anthology (1934), including texts by André Breton, Benjamin Péret, René Crevel, and the Belgian poet and film-maker Ernest Moerman.² Most important, however, were his translations for the "Surrealist Number" of This Quarter, a special issue co-edited by Edward Titus and André Breton in September, 1932 (vol. 5, no. 1).³ It contains the greatest concentration of Surrealist texts translated by Beckett, especially literary texts; more than fifty out of the volume's two hundred pages are assigned to him via the lapidary phrase: "rendered into English by Samuel Beckett" (TQ, 76, 98, 128, 165).⁴

Introducing the special issue, Titus underscored its historical significance for Anglophone readers:

Owing to the fact that dyed-in-the-wool surrealists have consistently refused to explain themselves in any but their own publications, which circulate chiefly in France and some of which have become exceedingly rare, and that, with some few inadvertent or expedient exceptions, they have declined to contribute to non-surrealist publications in France or elsewhere, their work has been practically inaccessible to English and American readers. After much persuasion, and on condition that an issue of This Quarter were exclusively devoted to surrealist work, M. André Breton and his colleagues have consented to collaborate in the production of the present surrealist issue, which contains contributions, many now printed for the first time, representative of nearly every aspect of written and pictorial surrealist work.

(5-6)

The issue is rather eclectic. It contains a number of theoretical articles, poems signed Paul Éluard, Tristan Tzara, and Benjamin Péret, and pieces of "prose expérimentale" by René Char, René Crevel, and Marcel Duchamp. It further comprises drawings and engravings by Max Ernst, Man Ray, and Yves Tanguy. It contains excerpts from André Breton's two Surrealist manifestoes, alongside the first English rendering of the screenplay for Un Chien andalou (1929), by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dali (TQ, 149-157). It also has a long section entitled "Surrealism and Madness," entirely "rendered into English by Samuel Beckett" (128); it consists of extracts from Nadja, the poetic novella first published by Breton in 1928, and a section of "Possessions" excerpted from The Immaculate Conception, a work co-authored by Breton and Éluard in 1930.⁵ Beckett also translated "L'Union libre" and "Le Grand secours meurtrier" (72-75), two poems taken from Breton's Le Revolver à cheveux blancs (Revolver with White Hair, 932); an extract from Breton's Les Champs magnétiques (Magnetic Fields, 1920), entitled "Factory" (75), as well as a passage from his Poisson soluble (Soluble Fish, 1924); and another from Le Clavecin de Diderot (Diderot's Harpsichord, 1932) by René Crevel (158-165). Finally, Beckett also transposed into English a dozen poems by Paul Éluard, written in free verse or in prose (86-98), among which "L'Amoureuse" ("Lady Love," TQ, 86), "À perte de vue dans le sens de mon corps" ("Out of Sight in the Direction of my Body," TQ, 86-87), and "À peine défigurée" ("Scarcely disfigured," TQ, 87).⁶

Beckett's translations were well received by Edward Titus, the editor of the review, who singled them out in his introduction: "We shall not speak of the difficulties experienced in putting the material placed at our...