Review by Nadia Louar
Translation as Poiesis: On Samuel Beckett and Translation
In recent years, Beckett studies have decisively shifted toward a deeper engagement with the author’s translational practice—not only as a logistical or ancillary aspect of his oeuvre, but as an integral mode of his creative expression. The volume Samuel Beckett and Translation, edited by José Francisco Fernández and Mar Garre García, makes a timely and ambitious contribution to this line of inquiry. Comprising thirteen scholarly essays and four commentaries, the book offers a multifaceted account of Beckett’s lifelong negotiations between languages, genres, and media. While some chapters revisit familiar ground, others offer fresh perspectives that fruitfully extend ongoing debates about Beckett’s poetics, linguistic displacements, and collaborative ethos.
Rather than framing bilingualism as a biographical curiosity or linguistic footnote, the volume situates translation at the very heart of Beckett’s method—an operation not of duplication but of sustained rewriting and revoicing. Several essays illuminate this point through a genetic approach, tracing how revision, transposition, and hesitation become legible in the archive as aesthetic principles. Shane O’Neill’s close study of Not I (Pas moi) exemplifies this trend. Drawing from manuscript drafts, he reconstructs Beckett’s recursive attempts to replicate the breathless rhythm and sonic violence of the original, revealing how translation here becomes inseparable from performance. Olga Beloborodova, in a similarly archival register, shows how Beckett’s self-translations of Play and Film resist the expected austerity associated with his later work, instead introducing new semantic resonances and intertextual echoes shaped by theatrical and cinematic contexts.
The volume’s strongest moments occur when translation is treated less as a matter of linguistic fidelity than as a philosophical and poetic impulse. Patrick Bixby’s chapter on Beckett’s rendering of Gabriela Mistral’s homage to Goethe is exemplary in this regard. His analysis uncovers how Beckett subtly distorts the humanist optimism of the original, refracting it through a late-modern skepticism that resists ideological consolation. What emerges is a Beckett who does not merely translate but intervenes—displacing tone, undercutting pathos, and revoicing the poem in his own ethical key. Similarly, Amanda Dennis’s elegant reading of Le Bateau ivre tracks how Beckett draws on Protestant linguistic textures to recreate Rimbaud’s cultural allusions in English, prefiguring the sonic layering that will come to define his self-translations in Molloy and beyond.
Not all the essays position themselves as interpretive interventions; some aim to catalogue or clarify. Waqas Mirza examines the effect of personal pronoun shifts across the Trilogy, arguing that Beckett’s English narrators project a more fractured subjectivity than their French counterparts. Sławomir Studniarz’s contribution on Beckett’s bilingual poetry focuses on phonic texture and prosodic divergence, concluding that the poems should be read as complementary rather than equivalent. Pim Verhulst’s chapter on Embers/Cendres provides a valuable case study in collaborative self-translation, tracing the evolution of the text alongside the interventions of Robert Pinget. These essays offer granular insight, though they occasionally remain tethered to well-established questions about fidelity, textual doubling, and semantic drift.
Elsewhere, the volume expands the conversation by considering Beckett’s work as a translator of others. María José Carrera’s essay on Beckett’s translations of José Juan Tablada’s haiku foregrounds the cultural and formal complexities of this task—how the apparent simplicity of the source text gives way to dense political and sonic negotiations. Matthijs Engelberts’s reflection on Long after Chamfort is particularly compelling in its institutional critique. Though Beckett intended the text as a bilingual diptych, it has been persistently published as two monolingual editions—English without the French originals and vice versa—thereby obscuring the work’s deliberate interlingual design. Engelberts’s reading raises a broader question about how editorial and publishing practices have inadvertently ‘monolingualized’ Beckett’s reception.
The third section of the volume explores translation as a poetics, rather than merely a process. John Pilling reflects on Beckett’s resistance to ‘the neatness of identifications,’ tracing how the oscillation between languages complicates stable binaries of subject and object, self and text. Dirk Van Hulle’s essay, centering on the motif of the doppelgänger, reframes self-translation as a literal enactment of divided authorship. Particularly illuminating is his reading of Arène de Lutèce, where echoes of Heine’s Der Doppelgänger—via Schubert—intersect with Beckett’s meditation on identity and alterity. Fábio de Souza Andrade offers a compelling metaphor in the mistuned piano episode from Watt, proposing ’empêchement’ (impediment) as a defining trait of Beckettian language: translation as dissonance, not correspondence.
Martin Schauss closes this section with a politically resonant essay on language, property, and displacement in Beckett’s postwar prose. Focusing on the Nouvelles, he shows how self-translation displaces nationalist linguistic markers, creating an authorial voice doubly estranged from historical legibility. Beckett’s vagabond figures, situated between languages and belonging nowhere, reflect a broader refusal of stable cultural positioning—a refusal mirrored in the opacity and mobility of his translated texts.
The final section of the book includes reflective pieces by long-time practitioners. Erika Tophoven’s short intervention offers invaluable insight into the lived practice of translating Beckett into German. Her evocation of the Tophoven family archive and its ongoing role in Beckett Studies is especially affecting, bridging scholarly labour and personal legacy. Gabriele Frasca’s stimulating formulation of a ‘third language’ of translation resonates as both theoretical proposition and lived literary reality, while Alan W. Friedman’s closing remarks reflect on staging as a form of embodied translation, giving theatrical life to the ambiguity of Beckett’s texts.
This collection succeeds in several important ways. It foregrounds Beckett’s translational practice as a central aesthetic concern rather than a peripheral feature of his work. The genetic approach employed by several contributors offers empirical grounding for broader theoretical insights, while the inclusion of practitioner voices—translators, performers, editors—usefully bridges the divide between scholarly and creative domains. Notably, the volume gestures toward a more inclusive, multilingual approach to Beckett’s oeuvre.
At the same time, it also reveals—if indirectly—the persistent gravitational pull of anglophone scholarship in the field. While some contributors engage with debates beyond the dominant critical canon, the volume remains largely anchored in anglophone criticism, with relatively little engagement with recent work in French and other languages. A more sustained integration of the vibrant body of recent research in French and other languages would have further enriched the collection’s international scope and conceptual range. As the field of Beckett studies continues to evolve, attending more closely to its own linguistic and epistemological asymmetries will be crucial to capturing the full complexity of a writer whose work was, from the outset, shaped by multiplicity.
Nadia Louar is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh. She holds a PhD in French from UC Berkeley (2004). Her research focuses on literary bilingualism, Beckett studies, performance and Translation Studies, modern and contemporary French and francophone studies. Her recent publications include ‘Reconfiguration du “champ”: le règne du Beckett irlandais‘ in Samuel Beckett Today/Aujourd’hui (2013) and “Beckett’s Art of Passing: From Corps to Bodies” (forthcoming). She is currently completing a manuscript on The Figure of Bilingualism in Beckett’s Work.
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