'I CAN MAKE NOTHING OF IT': Beckett’s Collaboration with on the English

Samuel Beckett culled his trilogy of novels for striking images and phrases throughout his later career, but during the 1950s he revisited Molloy, Malone meurt and L'Innommable in a more direct sense, when various parties requested English versions of his new work. What Beckett called "the losing battle" of translating the trilogy (Knowlson, 438) was fought in the period between 1950 and 1958. This article discusses Molloy because it forced Beckett to devise a long-term strategy to deal with the "hopeless thankless chore" of translation (Harmon, 355), while also leaving sufficient room for new creative endeavours. His decision from Malone Dies onwards to self-translate most of his work was largely the result of a troublesome collaboration on Molloy with Patrick Bowles, a young South African writer.Until recently, little was known about this joining of forces. Bowles's article in the P.N. Review (1994) and James Knowlson's impressive authorized biography (1996) have outlined the basic facts, but the second volume of Samuel Beckett's letters (2011) and Richard Seaver's memoirs (2012), as well as information available in archives, offer new information that calls for a critical reassessment of both the text and the process through which it came about. The present article offers a first step in that direction, by approaching the English Molloy from the perspective of "letters, notebooks, manuscripts and the like," also known as Beckett's "grey canon" (Gontarski, 143). Our purpose is to shed more light on a relatively obscure period in Beckett's literary career and to chart the textual history of Molloy in English. To this purpose, an overview of the translation's preserved draft stages seems in order:AAs the chronological overview reveals, the textual history of Molloy in English does not begin with the Beckett-Bowles collaboration. The idea to translate the novel was already on Beckett's mind in the late 1940s, six months after its completion in French, but well before it found a publisher. George Reavey wrote to him in Dublin that Cyril Connolly was looking for a text of around 30,000 words to include in Horizon, but the plan never materialized. On 8 July 1948 Beckett replied that he would not be able to translate the first part of Molloy by that time (Bair, 402). Two years later the first English sample from Molloy appeared in the October 1950 issue of Transition, together with a specimen from Malone Dies. Again, the French novels had yet to appear, but Jerome Lindon of Les Editions de Minuit had by now accepted them. The fragments are identified not by their titles but the numbers "I" and "II." The ensemble is called "Two Fragments" and Beckett is credited as the author and translator. Shane Weller's recent Faber edition of Molloy discusses the "substantive differences" between the Transition specimen and the Grove/Olympia editions (qtd. in Beckett 2009, vii).Equally interesting is Beckett's selection of text, beginning: "I left the shelter of the doorway and began to lever myself forward, slowly swinging through the sullen air" (1950, 103). In the Minuit first edition, this is when Molloy sets out on his crutches: "Ce qui par contre me parait indeniable, c'est que, vaincu par l'evidence, par une tres forte probabilite plutot, je sortis de sous l'auvent et me mis a me balancer lentement en avant, a travers les airs" (1951, 97). The English rendition in Transition deletes the first part of the French sentence, to pick up pace in full syntactic swing. Molloy embarks on a series of ruminations that comes to a peculiar close: "And the cycle continues, joltingly, of flight and bivouac, in an Egypt without bounds, without infant, without mother" (1950, 105).Beckett worked on the fragment between June and September 1950, when paying a sustained visit to his mother in Ireland (Cohn, 193). May Beckett was suffering from Parkinson's disease and eventually passed away on 25 August (Knowlson, 383). These biographical circumstances imbue the phrase "without mother" with special significance. …