Twice Translated Texts: Beckett into English and Chaikin into Theater

Twice Translated Texts: Beckett into English and Chaikin into Theater RUBY COHN "Hate thought of rereading it for translation and massacre but suppose I must." Samuel Beckett inc1uded this sentence in a letter that he wrote me on January 20 , [973. He expressed the same sentiment in other letters to other people; yet he continued over the years to translate from French into English or vice versa, imposing upon himself his own H I must." In Beckett's translations scholars have ferreted omissions, additions, discrepancies and outright changes from the originary language. Following in their traces, I will first comment on Beckett's writerly translation of Textes pour rien to Texts for Nothing'; then I hazard glimpses into Joe Chaikin's actorly adaptation of the English texts for performance in the theatre. In January [950 Beckett completed the last volume of his trilogy of novels - in French. L'lnnommable ends in defiant resolution: "i} faut continuer, je De peux pas continuer, je vais continuer...2 Beckett translates into English monosyllables : "you must go on, I can't go on. I'll go on."3 For months, however, Beckett could not fathom how to "go on," since he had jettisoned plot, decimated character and committed to words his doubts about the validity of words. He told Israel Shenker: "In the last book - "L'Innommable" - there's complete disintegration. No "I," no "have," no "being." No nominative, no accusative, no verb."4 There are, however, anonymous voices - one that the putative writer records, and one that addresses the reader directly. At times, these two voices are indistinguishable but they always subvert the authority of the narrating, "I," along with its "have" and "being." Textes pour rien has sometimes been read as a salvage operation of fragments of L'lnnommable, and it is true that the two works share a rhetoric of progressive non-definition. However, the brevity of the texts intensifies the apparent perplexity of narration and the focus on the unreliability of words. On Christmas Eve, 1950, Beckett started an untitled text in French. In the new year [951 came another, then still another and so on until they totaled Modern Drama, 4[ (1998) 7 8 RUBY COHN thirteen, Beckett's preferred number. The project occupied him from December 24, t950, to December 20, 1951 , with a two-month hiatus between September 6 and November 7,1951, before he embarked on the last two texts of the sequenceS Beckett has been disparaging of these thirteen texts, but then that was his attitude toward most of his work. However unsatisfactory he may have found the texts, Beckett did type them up and send them to Les Editions de Minuit, the Paris publisher he had recently acquired. Six of the texts were published piecemeal in periodicals, but only in 1955 were all thirteen gathered , along with three stories written some five years before the texts, so that the book's title embraces stories and texts - Nouvelles et textes pour rien.6 Two years after completing the texts, Beckett became marketable because of the original production of Ell attendant Gadat, and his publishers requested translations of his French work. He produced an English Godot rather quickly, but the novels were more difficult. and Textes pour den proved particularly recalcitrant. Although Text [ was published in 1959, Beckett worked at the others sporadically.' Only in December 1966, fifteen years after completing the original French, did Beckett report in a letter to his friend Tom MacGreevy that after "5 weeks of fierce assault" the entire translation was conquered. French "pour rieo" designates a bar's rest in a musical score, or a momentary silence, but the phrase also puns on worthless, as in English "good for nothing,,,gBeckett's title subsumes the drive of the texts - towards lero, nothing , non-being or death, which are and are not synonymous. Already in Beckett 's French trilogy, the word "rien" occurs 658 times, and yet the effect is less concentrated than in these short texts." Individually and globally, the texts cast doubt on the usual parameters of human definition - especially time, place and memory. A voice is nevertheless humanly resona!1t, and all thirteen texts claim their origin in...