THE ARTIST AND THE ARTISAN:

Beckett as a Translator of Italian Poetry

Laura Visconti
The artist has acquired his text:
the artisan translates it.

Marcel Proust

When "the artist has acquired his text", states Beckett, paraphrasing
Proust, "the duty and the task of the artisan is to translate it.,,1
Translation is therefore defined as the moment in which the artist
entrusts the text that he has discovered within himself to the hand of the
artisan, for him to mould it through language and writing and make it
known to the outside world. The artist and the artisan represent two
different, but complementary aspects of that complex and 'magical'
operation which artistic creation is. For Beckett, translation was "a duty
and a task" which occupied him throughout his long literary career, a
commitment which went beyond the evocative but restricted sense of the
Proustian definition cited above. In Beckett's inconspicuous but intense
activity as a translator, there are two distinct strands: the translation of
the work of other writers, in which he turned into English a linguistic
material that was still not his own, and the practice of rewriting his own
works in English or French, depending on the language in which he had
first composed them.
Beckett began to publish translations in Paris in the years leading
up to the Second W orId War, during the decade in which he took an
active part in the intellectual life of the French capital, while he was
looking for the path of his own writing, his 'pact with Mephistopheles'.
This was the period of his literary apprenticeship, and through the
exercise in style of translation he began the 'wrestling match', the
'hand-to-hand fight' with language that was to last for the rest of his
life. There developed that entirely Beckettian form of love-hate for
words, which, as Emile Cioran reminds us, no one loved more than he
did. 2
These were the years which saw the development of the archetypal
character in Beckett's work, born with the name Belacqua in Dante's
Purgatory. It was the period of his friendship with Joyce, who was
writing Work in Progress. Beckett was part of the numerous,
cosmopolitan group of writers and artists who had elected Paris as their
home, or who gravitated around Paris, in search of literary recognition
and consecration or, in other cases, to find relief from the oppressive

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atmosphere that Fascism had created in their homeland. He published
translations and original works in English-language avant-garde reviews
such as Transition and This Quarter, in which problems of aesthetics,
art, and artistic languages were discussed and debated. The review
Transition: An International Quarterly for Creative Experiments offered
its founder and editor Eugene Jolas, an American intellectual of Franco-
German origins, the opportunity to advance his "Revolution of the
Word". According to the rather dismissive observation of Edward
Titus, the editor of This Quarter, the greatest merit of Transition was
that it offered young artists, with liberality and sincerity of intention,
the chance to publish.2
It was in Transition, in fact, that Beckett published his first
narrative, poetic, and critical texts: "Dante ... Bruno. Vico .. Joyce" in
1929; the poem "For Future Reference" in June 1930; and the short
stories "Sedendo et Quiescendo" and "Dante and the Lobster", the first
nuclei of More Pricks Than Kicks, in 1932.
The introduction in This Quarter, vol.lI, no.4 (April-May-June
1930) contained the following words: "The present issue is, in large
part, devoted to translation from contemporary Italian literature [ ... ] in
each instance the work of experts chosen with scrupulous care."3
Among these translations, the following are by S. Beckett: the short
stories "Landscape" by Raffaello Franchi and "The Home-Coming" by
Giovanni Comisso, and the poem "Delta" by Eugenio Montale. This
issue of This Quarter bears witness to the lively intellectual fervour of
the Parisian artistic milieu in the late 1920s, the intense and spontaneous
exchange between writers, the intelligent reception of new ideas, and
the interest shown right from the beginning in the work of so many of
the great artists of this century.
The editor's introduction mentioned above is entitled "A Miniature
Anthology of Contemporary Italian Literature". In fact the journal
contains translations of poems by Bontempelli, D' Annunzio, Pirandello,
Borgese, Palazzeschi, Saba, and Fogazzaro, as well as two poems by
Montale and the short story by Comisso. Some of these works had only
recently been published (Montale), or had not yet been published at all
(Saba's poem "Berto" and Comisso's "The Home-Coming"). Many of
the authors translated were linked by friendship and mutual esteem:
some were also friends of Savinio and De Pisis, two Italian painters
living in Paris, whose drawings adorn this special issue of the review.
La Nouvelle Revue Francaise (1 May 1930) presents Joyce's "Anna
Livia Plurabelle", jointly translated and revised by Peron, Goll, Jolas,
Leon, Monnier and Soupault, with the collaboration of Joyce himself,
while Beckett had prepared the first draft of the translation the year

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