Collected Poems in English and French Read online

  A family transports a red eiderdown as you your heart

  An eiderdown as unreal as our dreams

  Some go no further doss in the stews

  Of the Rue des Rosiers or the Rue des Ecouffes

  Often in the streets I have seen them in the gloaming

  Taking the air and like chessmen seldom moving

  They are mostly Jews the wives wear wigs and in

  The depths of shadowy dens bloodless sit on and on

  Tu es debout devant le zinc d'un bar crapuleux

  Tu prends un café à deux sous parmi les malheureux

  Tu es la nuit dans un grand restaurant

  Ces femmes ne sont pas méchantes elles ont des soucis

  cependant

  Toutes même la plus laide a fait souffrir son amant

  Elle est la fille d'un sergent de ville de Jersey

  Ses mains que je n'avais pas vues sont dures et gercées

  J'ai une pitié immense pour les coutures de son ventre

  J'humilie maintenant à une pauvre fille au rire horrible

  ma bouche

  Tu es seul le matin va venir

  Les laitiers font tinter leurs bidons dans les rues

  La nuit s'éloigne ainsi qu'une belle Métive

  C'est Ferdine la fausse ou Léa l'attentive

  Et tu bois cet alcool brûlant comme ta vie

  Ta vie que tu bois comme une eau-de-vie

  You stand at the bar of a crapulous café

  Drinking coffee at two sous a time in the midst of the

  unhappy

  It is night you are in a restaurant it is superior

  These women are decent enough they have their troubles

  however

  All even the ugliest one have made their lovers suffer

  She is a Jersey police-constable's daughter

  Her hands I had not seen are chapped and hard

  The seams of her belly go to my heart

  To a poor harlot horribly laughing I humble my mouth

  You are alone morning is at hand

  In the streets the milkmen rattle their cans

  Like a dark beauty night withdraws

  Watchful Leah or Ferdine the false

  And you drink this alcohol burning like your life

  Your life that you drink like spirit of wine

  Tu marches vers Auteuil tu veux aller chez toi à pied

  Dormir parmi tes fétiches d'Océanie et de Guinée

  Ils sont des Christ d'une autre forme et d'une autre croyance

  Ce sont les Christ inférieurs des obscures espérances

  Adieu Adieu

  Soleil cou coupé

  1913

  You walk towards Auteuil you want to walk home and

  sleep

  Among your fetishes from Guinea and the South Seas

  Christs of another creed another guise

  The lowly Christs of dim expectancies

  Adieu Adieu

  Sun corseless head

  1950

  SÉBASTIEN CHAMFORT

  Huit maximes

  Le sot qui a un momen d'esprit étonne et scandalise comme des chevaux de fiacre qui galopent.

  Long after Chamfort

  Wit in fools has something shocking

  Like cabhorses galloping.

  Le théâtre tragique a le grand inconvénient moral de mettre trop d'importance à la vie et à la mort.

  The trouble with tragedy is the fuss it makes

  About life and death and other tuppenny aches.

  Quand on soutient que les gens les moins sensibles sont à tout prendre, les plus heureux, je me rappelle le proverbe indien: ‘Il vaux mieux être assis que debout, couché que assis, mort que tout cela.’

  Better on your arse than on your feet,

  Flat on your back than either, dead than the lot.

  Quand on a été bien tourmenté, bien fatigué par sa propre sensibilité, on s'aperçoit qu'il faut vivre au jour le jour, oublier beaucoup, enfin éponger la vie à mesure qu'elle s'écoule.

  Live and clean forget from day to day,

  Mop life up as fast as it dribbles away.

  La pensée console de tout et remédie à tout. Si quelquefois elle vous fait du mal, demandez-lui le remède du mal qu'elle vous a fait, elle vous le donnera.

  Ask of all-healing, all-consoling thought

  Salve and solace for the woe it wrought.

  L'espérance n'est qu'un charlatan qui nous trompe sans cesse; et, pour moi, le bonheur n'a commencé que lorsque je l'ai eu perdu. Je mettrais volontiers sur la porte du paradis le vers que le (sic) Dante a mis sur celle de l'enfer: Lasciate ogni speranza etc.

  Hope is a knave befools us evermore,

  Which till I lost no happiness was mine.

  I strike from hell's to grave on heaven's door:

  All hope abandon ye who enter in.

  Vivre est une maladie dont le sommeil nous soulage toutes les seize heures. C'est un palliatif; la mort est le remède.

  sleep till death

  healeth

  come ease

  this life disease

  Que le coeur de l'homme est creux et plein d'ordure.

  how hollow heart and full

  of filth thou art

  NOTES

  PART ONE

  Whoroscope

  Written as an entry for the Nancy Cunard £10 Competition for the best poem on the subject of Time in the Summer of 1930, which it won. The judges were Nancy Cunard and Richard Aldington. The original edition consisted of 100 signed and 200 unsigned copies published by Nancy Cunard's Hours Press. One condition of the Competition was that the poem should be no more than 100 lines. The Notes were added later at the suggestion of Richard Aldington. The poem is based on Adrien Baillet's late 17th century life of Descartes.

  Gnome

  First published in the Dublin Magazine IX (July–September 1934) Inspired by Goethe's Xenien.

  Home Olga

  First published in Contempo (Chapel Hill N.C.) III, No 13 (February 15, 1934). The poem is an obscure acrostic on the name of Joyce, composed for a special Joycean occasion, which may have been Bloomsday 1932. The title is a euphemism for ‘foutons le camp d'ici’, which was freely used by Tom MacGreevy and his friends.

  The Vulture

  Based on a fragment from Goethe's Harzreise in Winter.

  Enueg I and II

  Written in the form of a Provençal dirge or lament. The poet at the time was a lecturer at Trinity College.

  Alba

  Written about the same time as the above, and also based on a provençal model. Alba is the dawn which lovers dread, as they must separate when it breaks. First appeared Dublin Magazine VI (Oct–Dec 1931).

  Dortmunder

  Written in Kassel. The title is taken from the German beer.

  Sanies I and II

  The first poem is set in Dublin, the second in Paris. Both are also based on Provençal models. The title is latin for “morbid discharge”.

  Serena I, II and III

  Again the models are Provençal, based on Troubador evening poems. Thales (line 2) took a pantheistic view of the soul (“all things full of Gods”).

  Malacoda

  Written after the death of the poet's father from a heart attack in 1933. In Dante, Malacoda is a deceitful demon.

  Da Tagte Es

  Also written after the death of the poet's father. Compare Walther von der Vogelweide's Nemt, frowe, disen kranz of which the last line of the second to last stanza reads do taget ez und muoso ich wachen.

  Echo's Bones

  Title taken from Ovid's Metamorphoses iii. 341–401.

  The whole cycle of poems was published in 1935 by Europa Press (George Reavey) and was No 3 in the series Europa Poets. The original title was Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates.

  Cascando

  First published in the Dublin Magazine XI (Oct.–Dec. 1936). Line 4 originally read is it better abort than be barren and was the first line. The first three lines and the a
ddition of not is a later version.

  Ooftish

  First published in Transition: Tenth Anniversary (April–May 1938). The title is a yiddish expression meaning ‘put your money down on the table.’

  Saint-Lô

  Written in 1946 and first published in the Irish Times June 24 that year. Originally in five lines with lines 3 and 4 as follows: and the old mind/ghost-abandoned

  Something there

  First published in New Departures, Special Issue No 7/8 and 10/11 1975.

  The Notes to Part I were compiled by the publishers with reference to Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics by Raymond Federman and John Fletcher. (Univ. of California Press 1970). James Knowlson and the author also contributed information.

  PART TWO

  elles viennent

  Originally written in English in 1937 and translated into French by the author before 1946. The English text is given by Peggy Guggenheim in her memoirs (Out of This Century, New York 1946 page 25on) and differs slightly from the French version (the last line containing life where one would expect love) in the Guggenheim book. In this volume Mr. Beckett has changed life back to love. The French version appeared for the first time in Les Temps Modernes Volume Two No. 14 (November 1946).

  à elle l'acte calme

  Written between 1937 and 1939, this poem appeared for the first time in Les Temps Modernes (as above).

  être là sans machoires sans dents

  Written between 1937 and 1939 and appeared for the first time in Les Temps Modernes (as above).

  Ascension

  Same as above.

  La Mouche

  Same as above. Compare with the last verse of Serena I in Part One.

  musique de l'indifférence

  This poem also appeared during the same period and was first published in Les Temps Modernes (as above).

  bois seul

  Same as above.

  ainsi a-t-on beau

  Same as above. In line 11 bon was originally gentil.

  Rue de Vaugirard

  Same as above. Line 2 originally started je me débraye.

  Dieppe

  Written in 1937 and suggested by a passage from Der Spaziergang by Hölderlin. First appeared in Les Temps Modernes (as above). Last line now changed from towards the lighted town.

  Arènes de Luteèce

  Same as above. Line 21 was originally qui vous éclaire.

  jusque dans la caverne ciel et sol

  Written in the same period and first published in Les Temps Modernes (as above).

  bon bon il est un pays

  Written between 1947 and 1949 and appeared for the first time in les Cahiers des Saisons No. 2 (October 1955) under the title Accul. Line 18 originally started with a capital letter.

  Mort de A.D.

  Poem written about 1947 in memory of a colleague at the Irish Red Cross Hospital in Saint-Lô (Manche), which appeared for the first time in les Cahiers des Saisons (as above). The second last line originally read vieux bois grêlé témoin des départs.

  vive morte ma seule saison

  Date and publication as above.

  je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse

  Written in 1948 and published for the first time in Transition Forty-Eight No. 2 (June 1948 page 96).

  que ferais-je sans ce monde sans visage sans questions

  Time of writing and publication as above. In the first line visage was originally plural. In line 10 the wording was originally comme hier comme avant-hier.

  je voudrais que mon amour meure

  Date of writing and publication as above. Variation in the French version in line 3 from et dans les rues and in line 4 from pleurant la seule qui m'ait aimé. In the English section the last line originally read mourning the first and last to love me (Poems in English, John Calder, London 1961), but was varied in later editions with an alternative last line mourning her who sought to love me. The last line has now been finally changed to mourning her who thought she loved me.

  hors crâne seul dedans

  First published in MINUIT 21: Revue Périodique, (1976), page 20, and was added after John Fletcher had compiled his notes for the Minuet edition of Poèmes.

  The Notes to Part Two are translated from those prepared by John Fletcher for Editions de Minuit (1968) and revised by the publishers.

  PART THREE

  Translations from Eluard

  These appeared together with many other translations by Samuel Beckett in the special Surrealist Number of This Quarter (Guest Editor: André Breton) in September 1932. The poems come from four collections Mourir de ne pas Mourir, La Vie Immediate, Love Poetry, and A Toute Epreuve.

  Drunken Boat

  The circumstances in which Samuel Beckett's early unpublished translation of Arthur Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre came to be written are in themselves of some interest. But the reasons why his original typescript has been preserved and the coincidence that has led to its eventual publication here, more than forty years after it was written, are even more curious and worth relating.

  At the end of December 1931, Beckett left Trinity College, Dublin, where he had been Lecturer in French for only four terms. He then travelled to Germany and resigned his academic appointment by post from Kassel. After a short stay in Germany, he moved to Paris where he joined his friend and fellow Irishman, Thomas MacGreevy, with whom Beckett had been lecteur d'anglais at the École Normale Superiéure in the rue d'Ulm in 1928, Beckett staying on alone for a further year. It was in 1932, while staying in the same hotel as MacGreevy, that Beckett was working on his first unpublished novel, Dream of fair to middling women.

  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 origina
l 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.