Murphy Read Free

the translation itself, which, like the Bordas-Minuit version, makes cuts and changes such as the difference between English and the other language demands. Allusions have to be modified if they are to retain their point; humour is a quality that reaches deep into conventional responses and shifts subtly in the process of cultural exchange. The point is that Beckett was once again deeply involved in thinking through his English text, and the particular situation almost certainly prompted both him and Tophoven to refer to solutions arrived at in the previously translated French version. Both the French and the German translations provided opportunities to correct material errors in the English text, some of which were taken and others ignored. In this respect, they contribute as much to an improved text as the several editions in English that followed the Routledge text of 1938.
    The first reprinting of the English Murphy was a photographic reissue, by Grove Press, New York. It was published on 16 May 1957, price $3.50 cloth and $1.95 paper. A trial version of the cover by Francine Felsenhal was quickly superseded by one by Roy Kuhlman; and there was also a differently bound limited signed edition. It followed on Grove Press editions of Beckett’s own translations of his French writing published by Minuit, in a similar format, and it has been reprinted many times. The impact on readers in the English-speaking world was immediate. Murphy was central to a special issue of Perspective devoted to Beckett in 1959, and to monographs by Hugh Kenner (1961), Ruby Cohn (1962), and later John Fletcher (1964). It provided a formative entrée into an understanding of Beckett’s work, reinforcing the English conviction that Beckett was primarily a comic writer at a time when Fin de partie and the novels in French threatened that he was something else as well, and supplied American students with the figure of a Cartesian centaur, which provided a key that turned out to close as many doors as it opened. Coffey’s starting point – which takes for granted that the structure of the novel displays a distrustful critique, not a hilarious celebration, of Cartesian dualism – is the more profitable one. Beckett acknowledged as much to the very first reader to whom he showed his completed typescript, who put his finger on the same issue (Beckett to MacGreevy, letter dated 7 July 1936). He admitted that he had not been able to avoid the ‘Aloisha mistake’, by which he means – via a reference to Alexei, the youngest of the Karamazov brothers in Dostoevsky’s novel – that he had not been able to bring discordant emotions into line. The full title he wrote on the notebook draft, ‘Sasha Murphy’, is an admission of the same, Sasha being a diminutive of Alexandra, which corresponds to Aloisha/Alexia and therefore alludes to Celia. To communicate so much so clearly is the book’s achievement, its advance on Beckett’s previous writing. In the end, the most comfortable non-solution to the dilemma proved to be literally to upstage it.
    The Grove Press edition is a page-for-page facsimile of the Routledge text and was the only text available on this side of the Atlantic (outside second-hand bookshops) between 1957 and 1963, during which time copies were imported by John Calder. Calder meanwhile acquired the British rights and published Murphy under his own imprint in October 1963 as Jupiter Book 1, which was reissued under the imprint of Calder and Boyars in 1969. This 1963–69 edition – the second English edition proper – derives from the Routledge text, which was entirely reset and corrected in two places; it also corrects two errors of fact that had been corrected in the French and German translations, and introduces a fresh error (into the chess game); a few spellings are normalised. The third English edition proper – entirely reset but deriving from the second edition – appeared in 1973 from Pan Books in conjunction with