In 52 B.C. the Romans quashed a Gaulish rebellion; one of the decisive victories was led by Julias Caesar’s general, Titus Labienus, in a northern town on the lands of the Parisii; following the defeat, the town was renamed Lutetia and grew into a modest city. In 310 A.D. Lutetia became Paris. In January a friend’s band played here and he stayed at mine to avoid sleeping on some random’s floor. He’s big into Roman history, and to this day I still carry a counterfeit Roman coin he gave me a couple of years ago. On his last night in Paris I tried to take him to the old Gallo-Roman amphitheatre, Arènes de Lutèce, but when we arrived the gates were locked. We’d missed it by half an hour.
In the weeks that followed I was too busy to visit. Then, sometime in February, when winter first started to let up, I remembered I’d had the idea to translate Samuel Beckett’s untranslated poem of the same name, but never got round to it.1 So now I could kill two birds.
This time, I’d approach the arena with a different friend: Oscar. Since I’ve become acquainted with the translations of André Markowicz and Françoise Morvan, I’ve wanted to try translating as a pair, and Oscar is the perfect candidate for this. He is, like Morvan, a very talented poet; and, just as Morvan doesn’t speak or read Russian, he doesn’t speak or read French. So, like Markowicz, I’ll be responsible for bringing the text from one language to another, and Oscar will be tasked with Morvan’s role, which Markowicz describes as bringing out the music.
As I walk into the arena I pause the music I’m listening to. For weeks now I’ve been listening to the same four songs on repeat. I’m running on next to no sleep. It’s the warmest day in a long while and the vibes are impeccable. In the arena children scream. There’s loads of them, all playing football or running races against each other. People are scattered about the Roman steps. Flies are feasting on the stiff body of a rat. The air is thick with the stench of blossom. I sit. I close my eyes. The murmur of the crowd and the noise of the children a quasi-peaceful analogue to the murmurs and screams that filled the arena two-thousand years ago. The dust. The worn stones. I open my eyes. I stand up and turn around. Seeing the steps, I finally understand what Beckett meant in the first line of the poem. Before I came here I was confused by its logic. How could you be sat above the steps? What could be above them? I see now that there is an upper ring, home to three metal benches. What was there, I wonder, other than one of the Becketts in the poem, when he wrote it 80 years ago?
I wander about the place and figure out the geography of the poem. All of the markers remain. The street names. The statue. The stones. I decide to walk home. Up Rue Rollin, past Descartes’ house, past Hemingway’s. I leave the Latin Quarter, I walk through the Jardin des Plantes, down the river, across Pont Charles de Gaulle—rush hour’s cacophony, a Poodle—I swerve Gare de Lyon and make my way down into Bercy, under the railway, and get home in the last of the light. That night, my God, the moon.
***
At the start of the process Oscar and I had a significant and fundamental disagreement. Oscar levelled that, despite having a translation of mine in front of him, the poem was at its core untranslatable. Not for grammatical reasons, but something bigger, more philosophical. I wasn’t having it. Untranslatability is something that fascinates me and exists in certain respects, but it’s also far more complex than something simply being untranslatable. It’s a logical and semantic trap. It lends itself to sophistry and deification. ‘The old myth of the untranslatable,’ writes Anthony Cordingly in an essay on Beckett’s only self-professed untranslatable work, Worstward Ho, ‘awakens in some romantic predilections, according to which the idiolect of the solitary genius surpasses the signifying potential of any language, transcending even the confusion of tongues after Babel.’
I won’t give Oscar’s reasons as I neither want to misrepresent them, or speak for him. I will say that our closeness meant that I was more rude to him than he deserved. However, in spite of our disagreement, we produced multiple texts, and in doing so found ourselves in an inherently Beckettian situation. One voice announcing epistemological impotence and the futility of language, another accepting it as all we have and going on, no matter the outcome, no matter the futility.
N.B. Oscar’s initial claim, despite my disagreement, is held by many in regards to the translation of poetry. While I, for the most part, disagree with these claims, he’s not dangerously mired in semiotics or epistemology or esotericism, and he certainly isn’t ignorant.
***
It is now May. We began our translation in February, and worked sporadically through March and April. It has sat untouched since then. All of this—except this—has sat untouched since then. I waited to publish it because I knew Oscar was coming to visit me. I waited as well to give the translation(s) time to breathe, so that we could come back to them and make any edits with some necessary distance; but also so that we could make these final edits in the Arena itself. So far Oscar had only seen photos, relied on my descriptions. Now we are here. Now it is complete.
For formatting purposes I’ve put the original in this footnote.2 The versions that follow are in an order of progression, work-wise. The first is a relatively straight translation, which despite a few changes here and there remains as transparent a way as possible of translating and showing what Beckett’s original is like. Following this version, however, we took a page out of Beckett’s book and used his own approach of poetic translation against him, being incredibly liberal and adjusting the form. Initially we chose the sonnet and the haiku as our modes of conversion. The sonnet because of its three quatrains and resolving final couplet that match the structure and narrative flow (as we read it) of Beckett’s poem; and the haiku because it is the ultimate poetic form of place and experiencing a fleeting moment with oneself. However, as we were mapping out the sonnet, Oscar was struck by genius and said that instead we should use a Dantean form. Other than Joyce, there was no writer more important to Beckett. So we scrapped the sonnet and switched to Terza Rima: the form Dante invented when he wrote The Divine Comedy. Like the sonnet, it’s structurally strict, but not restricted to three quatrains and a doublet; instead, you just continually stack tercets (three line stanzas) with an interweaving rhyme-scheme (ABA BCB DED, etc.) on top of themselves until the poem is done, ending with either a single line or a couplet that rhymes with the penultimate line of the preceding stanza. This, far more than reducing the 220 syllables of the original poem down to the 17 of a haiku, was hair-tearingly difficult.
So hair-tearingly difficult that we couldn’t produce a version I’d be satisfied with putting out. Oscar made a valiant effort reproducing a Dantean sonnet, but it didn’t adhere to the Terza Rima rhyme scheme. It followed the stresses of the Italian form, but to an English reader, without those rhymes, it reads more like we’ve just antiquated Beckett’s original, which is certainly a liberal adaptation, but not the one I was chasing. Here, just as with our initial disagreement, we hit upon another key Beckettian theme: failure. So be it. We tried. We failed. No matter.
One adaptation that I did want to have a crack at—to mollify the failure—was a simple rhyming couplet. Beckett himself had done this to a series of Chamfort’s maxims in 1973, successfully converting the courtly 18th century French into doggerel. So, where the Dantean adaptation Oscar and I had attempted adhered to the linguistic maximalism of Beckett’s early work, this last hurrah of a couplet—and the haiku—adhere to the ever more condensed and minimal language of his later work. From boulder to time-worn pebble; mountain to sucking stone.
***
Long After Beckett
(I) Arènes de Lutèce
From above where we are sat on the steps,
I see us enter from Rue des Arènes,
hesitate, look up, then lumber
towards us across the somber sand,
uglier and uglier, as ugly as the others,
but mute. A little green dog3
enters running from the mouth of Rue Monge,
she stops, follows it with her eyes,
it crosses the arena, disappears
behind the base of the learned Gabriel de Mortillet.
She turns around, I’ve left, I climb alone
the rustic steps, I touch with my left hand
the rustic ramp, concrete. She hesitates,
makes a step towards the Rue Monge exit, then follows me.
I shiver, it is I who joins me,
it is with other eyes that I now see
the sand, the puddles beneath drizzle,
a little girl dragging a hoop behind her,
a couple, lovers perhaps, hand in hand,
the empty steps, the high houses, the sky
that lights us too late.
I turn around, shocked
to find there a sad face.4
***
(II) Arènes de Lutèce
Uncoupled I watch Us coupled crossing wet sand The sun comes too late
***
(III) Arènes de Lutèce
Damp and ugly there we lumbered Surveying our carcass I am outnumbered
*Untranslated by Beckett, who self-translated almost the entirety of his oeuvre. Why these 23 lines went untranslated, I don’t know.
Arènes de Lutèce - Samuel Beckett
De là où nous sommes assis plus haut que les gradins
je nous vois entrer du côté de la Rue des Arènes,
hésiter, regarder en l'air, puis pesamment
venir vers nous à travers le sable sombre,
de plus en plus laids, aussi laids que les autres,
mais muets. Un petit chien vert
entre en courant du côté de la Rue Monge,
elle s’arrête, elle le suit des yeux,
il traverse l'arène, il disparait
derrière le socle du savant Gabriel de Mortillet.
Elle se retourne, je suis parti, je gravis seul
les marches rustiques, je touche de ma main gauche
la rampe rustique, elle est en béton. Elle hésite,
fait un pas vers la sortie de la Rue Monge, puis me suit.
J’ai un frisson, c’est moi qui me rejoins,
c’est avec d’autres yeux que maintenant je regarde
le sable, les flaques d’eau sous la bruine,
une petite fille traînant derrière elle un cerceau,
un couple, qui sait des amoureux, la main dans la main,
les gradins vides, les hautes maisons, le ciel
qui nous éclaire trop tard.
Je me retourne, je suis étonné
de trouver là son triste visage.
Upon translating petit chien vert, I wondered and still wonder if he meant green as in the dog’s colour or age. In the right light, especially shadows, a certain sort of brown dog can take on a greenish hue. But also, like me, he often didn’t wear his glasses (especially in situations he should have, much like me, or, more realistically, me like him), and I can attest to perceiving a lot of things very differently to how they actually are. This is often confusing, sometimes concerning, and always interesting. Getting to witness your brain try and make sense of the information it’s taking in and getting it completely wrong, these themes of unknowing and sensory degeneration both so present in Beckett’s work. This is not to say that this is the reason for him saying the dog is green, he may well have just wanted to indulge in surrealism, or just not wanted to say young, but knowing the state of his eyes it was something that I couldn’t help but think of.
Out of interest I googled chien vert, thinking it might be a reference to something I was unaware of, and discovered that it was a nickname used in the late 19th and early 20th century for a French military officer. Everything I’ve found out about this makes it seem like it was pretty specific army slang, and not necessarily something the general public would know. But Beckett was a word nerd, and also this was written in the inter-war period, so there was probably a lingering, far more present use of military language among civilians compared to today. I’m not sure. Perhaps he was making a joke. Perhaps it’s a coincidence. Either way, all the other translations reckon it’s a little green dog, which does make more sense for how it disappears behind the base of a statue, unless the officer was very small indeed.
What was a possessive pronoun (son = his/her) in French, I translated here into an indefinite article to continue the ambiguity that the original has. There is no clear antecedent to the pronoun, and in a poem that has its narrator watching himself and the unnamed woman, one can translate it that he either turns around and sees his own sad face, or hers. Hence, in my translation: a sad face.