Selected Poems 1930-1988 (2 page)

The Unnamable, in the novel of that name, comes to believe that he is a tympanum, ‘the thing that divides the world in two', and increasingly the French poems master the turmoil of the earlier work by reaching for a state of quietist in-betweenness:

The end is in the beginning and yet we go on, though after the mainly French poems of the 1940s Beckett took an extended hiatus from poetry, even if his fiction and plays
continued
to feature poems (e.g. ‘Song', from
Words and Music
). It is a notable feature of Beckett's later work that his fiction and drama begin to take on each other's characteristics (the
stage-direction
-style arrangement of the bodies in
The Lost Ones
and
Imagination Dead Imagine
, the fiction-like
A Piece of Monologue
, the appropriately named ‘neither', written as an opera libretto), and by the time we reach his last poems we are dealing with texts that could be in any, or all of his genres.

Many Beckett plays isolate and detach the act of speech, most strikingly in the disembodied mouth of
Not I
, and an element of narrative extortion is an undeniable presence in later Beckett. Another aspect of his later work is the harnessing of speech to carefully choreographed movement, as in ‘Roundelay' but also in late plays and prose texts such as
Footfalls
and ‘The Way'. Chief among the late poems, however, are the
mirlitonnades
. These are described in an earlier John Calder edition (
Collected Poems 1930–1978
(1984)) as ‘written spasmodically on scraps of paper. Nothing dated.' While some of these poems were
originally
written on café bills and hotel notepaper, this is not the whole story: Beckett carefully copied and arranged the poems in the
mirlitonnades ‘sottisier'
notebook now held by the Beckett International Foundation, University of Reading. If these poems are ‘breathtaking glimpses of being and nothingness', as Justin Quinn has called them, they often take less than a breath to read aloud. At a minimum of as few as seven words, they are as carefully weighed as a Webern bagatelle, and come as close as anything Beckett wrote to honouring the ambition outlined in his 1937 letter to Axel Kaun to ‘bore one hole after another in [language], until what lurks behind it – be it something or nothing – begins to seep through'. The
mirlitonnades
rank high among Beckett's late achievements, and do much to usher in the style of his late prose narratives (
Company, Ill Seen Ill Said, Worstward Ho
).

Beckett's poetic last word was ‘what is the word', translated from the preceding French text ‘
comment dire
' in the Tiers Temps nursing home in 1989. (The
Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett
reports that the poem was printed from Barbara Bray's computer, Beckett's ‘word' processed at last.) And what is the word? the reader may wonder, mentally overstepping the mark and supplying the question mark the poem so noticeably lacks:

We can of course collapse the quest for the elusive Logos at any moment by deciding that the word in question is ‘what', a
suspicion
licensed by the omission of the poem's otherwise
ubiquitous
, jabbing dash, in the final line, as though coming to rest at last: ‘what is the word'. With fitting symmetry the French version, ‘
comment dire
', contradicts any closure this reading threatens to provide by moving in the opposite direction, bogging down further and further away from the word it seeks (‘
comment dire – /comment dire
'). Dragged in both directions at once by the English and French texts, we are delivered to a final resting place of precisely nowhere: ‘unspeakable home' once more.

Where Beckett's publishing history is concerned, his post-war poetry publications are effectively a series of updated
Collecteds
with the unusual distinction of becoming less and less reliable as they go along, the multiply defective
Poems 1930–1989
(2002) marking a low point in the history of Beckett editing. The rationale to the present
Selected
has been to take a fresh look at the poetry without pretending to the scholarly exhaustiveness promised by John Pilling and Seán Lawlor's forthcoming new
Collected Poems in English and French
. Nevertheless, some effort has been made to address the many anomalies that surround
Beckett's uncollected and unpublished work. The
mirlitonnades ‘sottisier'
contains a number of striking short poems, in both French and English, which post-date the publication of that sequence in 1978, and while Beckett made no effort to collect them in book form it would be wrong to see 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's
poetry 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.'

Where unspecified, translations from French to English or vice versa are by Beckett.