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  • "Primeval mud impenetrable dark":Towards an Annotation of Comment c'est/How It Is
  • C. J. Ackerley (bio)

A working premise: that when Beckett writes first in English, and that text is later put into French (by himself, or by another), then what ensues is a translation. This is the case with Murphy and Watt, Beckett's two first published novels, the translations of which he was closely involved with; but it is equally true of Dream of Fair to Middling Women and More Pricks Than Kicks, the translations of which he did not approve during his lifetime.1 However, when Beckett writes first in French, then rewrites in English—his native language, whatever his reasons might have been for having chosen another—then what emerges is not a translation in the usual sense of that word, but a re-writing, a re-creation. Works such as Molloy or En attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot thus have a dual ontology, neither entirely English nor entirely French, yet grounded in both. This distinction, I suggest, applies equally to the works of Beckett's middle period, such as All That Fall, of which Tous ceux qui tombent is a translation, and broadly to the later works, such as Words and Music, where the French Paroles et musique cannot do justice to the echoes of Yeats; or Worstward Ho, which Beckett considered to be untranslatable.2 The issue may be more complex with respect to late texts conceived and/or written in French and English either simultaneously or very nearly (Cascando, Catastrophe); but the distinction applies to Comment c'est, written first, with considerable pains, in French; then reworked, with comparable agonies, into English.

Beckett's bilingualism and the bilingual text have been much discussed, and it is not this essay's intention to revisit these issues, [End Page 789] nor to confuse others and myself with ineffable ontologies. My concern, rather, is an issue that, to my awareness, has not been addressed: the annotation of a bilingual text. The problem may be simply put: if a text has a dual or bilingual ontology, then, in this case, notes in English may not properly respect the French original; conversely, a French commentary may be unfair to its English re-creation. Furthermore, any would-be annotator is unlikely to be equally versed in the two languages and cultural codes. To speak personally: as a professional annotator, I have long been immersed in the minutiae of Beckett's writings in English; but I cannot say this of those in French. I have written book-length annotations of Murphy and Watt, and smaller treatments of Beckett's poems and the later plays for television, but always with reference to their English texts. The latter afforded a challenge: given the diminuendo al niente effect of so many echoes, and the attenuated nature of so many allusions, the problem was to derive a way to annotate the barely visible or audible: the ill-seen, the ill-heard. My solution was to affirm that an echo, however faint or diminished, is nevertheless an echo of something; and an allusion, however attenuated, is equally an allusion to something. The problem was thus pragmatically redefined, for any given effect, as that of identifying the often distant source and then determining the appropriate range and resonance of voice and echo.3 This emphasis is not incompatible with what Anthony Cordingley, following others, has termed Beckett's "poetics of ignorance," which "neutralizes the content of his inevitably learned language by employing references in a private way, such that they no longer affirm their source meaning but are rather the raw material for his own creation (poetics)"; but it first foregrounds the referent rather than the process of reference.4

That experience has affinities with the immediate problem: having to annotate the largely invisible and almost inaudible forced me to accommodate my practice to a different set of conditions and develop new strategies. Beckett's bilingual texts challenge me as an annotator to develop a pragmatic strategy that will do justice to both versions. A major problem arises: however competent and versatile I might be as an annotator of Beckett's English texts, I...

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