The Unnamable Read Free

speaker in the French version remarks ‘Ceci a tout l’air d’une anecdote de Mahood.
     Et pourtant non, toutes les histoires de Mahood étaient sur moi’ (Beckett 1971, p. 43). The Calder
     and Boyars version of the English text gives ‘This sounds like one of Malone’s anecdotes’,
     and omits the second sentence (‘And yet all Mahood’s stories were of me’), while the
     Grove text translates the French faithfully : ‘This sounds like one of Mahood’s anecdotes’ (Beckett 2006, p. 306). A little later,
     during the description of Mahood’s one-legged progress towards the rotunda, an aside
     in the French text, ‘je cite Mahood’ (Beckett 1971, p. 55), is rendered as ‘I quote
     Malone’ (Beckett 1959, p. 322); once again, the Grove edition translates the French
     exactly – ‘I quote Mahood’ (Beckett 2006, p. 313). A third example occurs when a remark
     regarding exhortations that the speaker hears which ‘ empruntent le même véhicule que celui employé par Mahood et consorts’ (Beckett 1971, p. 83)
     becomes ‘are conveyed to me by the same channel as that used by Malone and Co.’, with
     the Grove version once more translating literally, with ‘Mahood and Co.’ (Grove 2006,
     p. 330). These variations are puzzling. Are they Beckett’s own slips of concentration,
     or are they evidence of the deliberate attempt to compound the confusion of the speaker
     with regard to the voices that he hears? Three such mistakes certainly seem too many
     to be accidental. But, if the Grove press edition represents Beckett’s own correction,
     it seems odd that he should have allowed the Calder and Boyars to retain the Malone
     references. Given the uncertainty, this edition retains the Calder and Boyars readings.
    Similar transitions can be observed in the other excerpts. In the
Chicago Review
excerpt, from the section dealing with the narrator’s life in a jar, ‘my course is not a spiral’ (Beckett 1958b, p. 82), translating
     ‘Ce n’est pas une spirale, mon chemin’ (Beckett 1971, p. 66), becomes in the 1959
     version ‘my course is not helicoidal’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 329), and ‘my eyes, free
     to roll at will’, translating ‘les yeux, qui ont une faculté de roulement autonome’ (Beckett 1958b, p. 83), turns into the codlyrical ‘my eyes, free to roll as they list’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 329). In the
Texas Quarterly
extract, a dense passage from the close of the novel, the ‘le petit matin’ of the
     French text (Beckett 1971, p. 190) is rendered as ‘the crack of dawn’, but then sardonically
     screwed up to ‘the dayspring’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 404) in the final version.
    Other changes of emphasis are necessitated by the impossibility of exact equivalence.
     The sing-song sequence ‘d’histoires de berceau, cerceau, puceau, pourceau, sang et
     eau, peau et os, tombeau’ – literally, ‘stories of the cradle, hoop-skirt, virgin,
     hog, blood and water, skin and bone, gravestone’ (Beckett 1971, p.152) – is expansively
     reinvented in ‘tales like this of wombs and cribs, diapers bepissed and the first
     long trousers, love’s young dream and life’s old lech, blood and tears and skin and
     bones and the tossing in the grave’ (Beckett 1959b, p. 382). One of the more substantial
     excisions is of a passage reflecting on the fly-catching skills of the figure in the
     jar outside the restaurant:
    Des mouches. Elles ne sont peut-être pas très nourrissantes , ni d’un goût très plaisant, mais la question n’est pas là, mais ailleurs, loin de
     l’utile, loin de l’agréable. J’attrape aussi les papillons de nuit, attirés par les
     lampions, quoique plus difficilement. Mais je n’en suis encore qu’à mes débuts, dans
     ce nouvel exercice, je suis loin d’avoir atteint mon plafond. (Beckett 1971, p. 76)
     
    The flies. They are perhaps neither very nourishing, nor very pleasant to the taste,
     but it is not a question of that, but of something else, far from