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

Abstract

When the English Molloy was published in 1955, jointly by Olympia (Paris) and Grove (New York), a long and difficult translation process had ended, on which Beckett worked both alone and together with Merlin and Patrick Bowles. This article is the first attempt to approach this somewhat neglected topic by way of manuscripts, notebooks, letters and other related materials, in order to establish a basic chronology of the English Molloy. In so doing, our purpose is to shed more light on a relatively obscure period in Beckett's literary career and examine critically the role of each party involved. 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: DATE TYPE NAME SOURCE / LOCATION A Oct. 1950 Prepublication "Two Fragments"

Beckett’s Collaborative Translations in the 1950s

“…This left Beckett with the feeling that he was rewriting rather than revising Bowles' translation, so that he decided to do the rest of the "trilogy" on his own. For a more detailed discussion of the collaboration, see Verhulst and Dillen 2014;O'Reilly, Van Hulle and Verhulst 2017.…”