Selected Poems 1930-1988 Read Free Page A

them as rejected by him; rather, they represent a partial further evolution of the sequence. Other marginal zones of the poetic œuvre also yield unexpected rewards. Translations represent some of Beckett’s finest poetic achievements. His version of Ernst Moerman’s ‘Louis Armstrong’ for the Negro Anthology follows to an uncanny degree the poetic grammar of Echo’s Bones . Beckett the non-self-translator is another matter again, and where his French poems are concerned the en face translations are by Beckett alone, with prose versions of poems untranslated by Beckett supplied in an appendix.
    Beckett is a writer whose fiction and drama effortlessly attain the condition of poetry, and some of whose great work happens to be in strictly, or not so strictly, poetic form. While his three coevals lauded in ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ (Thomas MacGreevy, Brian Coffey and Denis Devlin) are often cited as evidence of a shared aesthetic, Beckett’s insistence, contra nationalist canonisations of Jack Yeats, that ‘the artist who stakes his being is from nowhere, has no kith’ renders the concept of Irish poetic modernism as a shared front null and void. Beckett’s poetry might just as fruitfully be compared to the Objectivist poetics of George Oppen or Lorine Niedecker and the later W. S. Graham. It is also important to keep a sense of French poets such as Éluard, Char and Michaux as no less Beckett’s contemporaries, while his early translation of Montale hints at elective affinities further afield too. More recent writers as diverse as Susan Howe, Mahon and Trevor Joyce have also learned from Beckett’s poetry; and if this trio of names suggests the Irish context is not as easily disposed of as I may have hinted, there is always Watt ’s chastening reminder that ‘for all the good that frequent departures out of Ireland had done him, he might just as well have stayed there’. Finally, though, admirers of Beckett’spoetry find themselves in the peculiar position of wishing to rescue this work from the casual neglect of literary history while having to acknowledge that the deepest instinct of these poems is not to belong, in literary history or anywhere else. Ireland, the home place, any place, the self, language itself: on all Beckett passes the same impartial verdict of ‘away dream all /away’. Yet will themselves away as they might, Beckett’s poems cannot quite vanish as they go, but secrete themselves in their strange and compelling variety. Or as he writes in Malone Dies , ‘the forms are many in which the unchanging seeks relief from its formlessness.’

Table of Dates
    Where unspecified, translations from French to English or vice versa are by Beckett. 
    1906
 
13 April
Samuel Beckett [Samuel Barclay Beckett] born in ‘Cooldrinagh’, a house in Foxrock, a village south of Dublin, on Good Friday, the second child of William Beckett and May Beckett, née Roe; he is preceded by a brother, Frank Edward, born 26 July 1902.
1911
 
 
Enters kindergarten at Ida and Pauline Elsner’s private academy in Leopardstown.
1915
 
 
Attends larger Earlsfort House School in Dublin.
1920
 
 
Follows Frank to Portora Royal, a distinguished Protestant boarding school in Enniskillen, County Fermanagh (soon to become part of Northern Ireland).
1923
 
October
Enrols at Trinity College Dublin (TCD) to study for an Arts degree.
1926
 
August
First visit to France, a month-long cycling tour of the Loire Valley.
1927
 
April–August
Travels through Florence and Venice, visiting museums, galleries, and churches.
December
Receives B.A. in Modern Languages (French and Italian) and graduates first in the First Class.
1928
 
Jan.–June
Teaches French and English at Campbell College, Belfast.
September
First trip to Germany to visit seventeen- year-old Peggy Sinclair, a cousin on his father’s side, and her