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8 Translation’s Challenge to Lyric’s Immediacy: Beckett’s Rimbaud
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Published:October 2021
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Abstract
In part, translation forces acknowledgment of the extent to which a textual encounter is mediated by mnemonic, cultural, temporal, generic and linguistic networks. Beckett’s spirited translation of Rimbaud’s Le bateau ivre expresses his skepticism about the immediacy and spontaneity associated with the lyric, foregrounding instead the associative networks that contribute to the poem’s composition. In “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin asserts that “no translation would be possible if it strove for likeness to the original,” and Beckett practices this theory in the extreme. He does this by finding English equivalents for inter-textual allusions to Baudelaire’s “Le Voyage,” and “Le Cygne” and to Victor Hugo’s “Oceano’s nox.” By replacing these with echoes of Ezra Pound and Christian catechism, Beckett’s translation reveals the irony of the fact that the poem’s sense of being “free” derives in part from its allusions to a literary tradition of French lyricism. In this chapter, Amanda Dennis asks how Beckett’s early expression of translation as mediation inspires his later work of self-translation — especially his deviations from the “original” French that draw on Hiberno-English cultural associations, place names and puns, focusing on Molloy to make this point.
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