Collected Poems in English and French (9 page)

Following the assassination of the President of the Republic, Paul Doumer, on 7 May 1932 by the White Russian, Gorguloff, it was decided that a check should be made on the papers of all foreigners who were then living in Paris. Since Beckett did not possess a valid
carte de séjour
, he was forced to leave his hotel, and, as he could not legitimately register elsewhere, he spent several nights sleeping in the Studio Villa Seurat of the painter, Jean Lurçat, on the floor. In order to obtain money to leave the country, Beckett called on Edward Titus, the editor of the literary review,
This Quarter
, at his offices in the rue Delambre. Earlier, Titus had expressed interest in publishing an English translation of Rimbaud's poem,
Le Bateau Ivre
, and it was with this in mind that Beckett now completed a translation of the poem, begun by him some time before. He had already produced several translations from the Italian of Montale, Franchi, and Comisso, which Titus had published in
This Quarter
in 1930; a little later he had translated poems and prose by Breton, Éluard and Crevel for the special number on Surrealism which was to appear, edited by André Breton, in September 1932. Beckett had accepted this earlier work as a paid commission and, in
view of his difficult financial situation, he asked Titus for a thousand francs for
Drunken Boat
. In the event, he was offered seven hundred francs for the poem, which allowed him to travel to London and live there for a short time, near the Gray's Inn Road. It was during this stay in London that Beckett tried to organise for himself a career in literary journalism, but a call on Desmond McCarthy failed to bring the commissioned reviewing that he had hoped for. Soon after this the money paid to him by Titus ran out and Beckett was forced to return home to Dublin where he could stay for nothing in the family house in Foxrock. The following year his father died, leaving Samuel, his second son, a small annuity, intended as the equivalent of his share in the family business, which was continued by his brother, Frank Edward. The money enabled Beckett to travel further in Europe and eventually allowed him to settle in Paris in 1937.

It was Beckett's custom to type out three copies of anything that he wrote and there is no reason to suppose that he acted differently with the translation,
Drunken Boat
. Nothing is known as to the whereabouts of Titus's typed copy, nor of the reasons for his failure to publish the poem in
This Quarter
. The review continued however, only until the end of 1932, when publication was discontinued. Similarly, there is no trace of the original manuscript or of the third copy. The top copy of the text was, however, given by Beckett in the mid 1930s to an Irish friend, Nuala Costello, in whose private library it has been kept until last year. It was while he was on a fox-hunting holiday in Ireland that my co-editor, Felix Leakey, met, quite by chance, the owner of the typescript and spoke to her of the Samuel Beckett collection in Reading University Library. She recalled that Beckett had gifted to her an early work that might well interest me as the founder of the Beckett Archive. This proved to be the typescript of the unpublished ‘spoof’ lecture which Beckett had given to the Modern Language Society at Trinity College, Dublin. This lecture, which is referred to in the Beckett bibliography by Raymond Federman and John Fletcher,
Samuel Beckett: his works and his critics
, as ‘probably lost’, is about an imaginary literary movement in France, entitled not as had been thought ‘Le Convergisme’ but ‘Le Concentrisme”, whose exponent is said to be one Jean du Chas, the author of a ‘Discours de la Sortie’; the lecture is clever and extremely funny. This typescript, with some manuscript corrections in Beckett's hand, is now on permanent loan to Reading University Library. On a second visit to Ireland by Felix Leakey, the owner of ‘Le Concentrisme’ produced for him the typescript of another early piece by Beckett, also described in the Beckett bibliography as ‘probably lost’. This was the present translation by Beckett of Rimbaud's
Le Bateau Ivre
. The preservation of the typescript of
Drunken Boat is
even more surprising, since it
survived a fire in the owner's house only because it had been folded away in her copy of
The Oxford Book of French Verse
, between the pages in which the original Rimbaud poem is printed. As the facsimile reproduction reveals, the pages of Beckett's typescript have been charred by fire. It is therefore as a result of a series of coincidences that Beckett's translation has found its way into the Beckett collection in Reading and that; thanks to the kindness of its owner and Samuel Beckett, we can publish the text for the first time in this volume.

This note on the circumstances of composition and publication first appeared in the De Luxe edition of the poem and its translation published by White-knights Press 1976 and was written by James Knowlson to whom the publishers are greatly indebted for this and other assistance in preparing the present edition.

Zone

This translation first appeared in
Transition 50
, a post-war issue edited by Georges Duthuit in October 1950. It was republished in 1972 by Dolmen Press, Dublin in association with Calder and Boyars.

Adaptations from Chamfort

The first six maxims appeared in
The Blue Guitar
, Facoltà di Magistero, Università degli Studi di Messina, Volume 1, No. 1 in December 1975, and the last two were written in 1976 while this volume was in preparation.