Collected Poems in English and French

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Authors: Samuel Beckett
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avant-hier .

    je voudrais que mon amour meure
    Date of writing and publication as above. Variation in the French version in line 3 from et dans les rues and in line 4 from pleurant la seule qui m'ait aimé . In the English section the last line originally read mourning the first and last to love me (Poems in English, John Calder, London 1961), but was varied in later editions with an alternative last line mourning her who sought to love me . The last line has now been finally changed to mourning her who thought she loved me .

    hors crâne seul dedans
    First published in MINUIT 21: Revue Périodique , (1976), page 20, and was added after John Fletcher had compiled his notes for the Minuet edition of Poèmes .

    The Notes to Part Two are translated from those prepared by John Fletcher for Editions de Minuit (1968) and revised by the publishers.

    PART THREE

    Translations from Eluard
    These appeared together with many other translations by Samuel Beckett in the special Surrealist Number of This Quarter (Guest Editor: André Breton) in September 1932. The poems come from four collections Mourir de ne pas Mourir, La Vie Immediate, Love Poetry, and A Toute Epreuve.

    Drunken Boat
    The circumstances in which Samuel Beckett's early unpublished translation of Arthur Rimbaud's Le Bateau Ivre came to be written are in themselves of some interest. But the reasons why his original typescript has been preserved and the coincidence that has led to its eventual publication here, more than forty years after it was written, are even more curious and worth relating.
    At the end of December 1931, Beckett left Trinity College, Dublin, where he had been Lecturer in French for only four terms. He then travelled to Germany and resigned his academic appointment by post from Kassel. After a short stay in Germany, he moved to Paris where he joined his friend and fellow Irishman, Thomas MacGreevy, with whom Beckett had been lecteur d'anglais at the École Normale Superiéure in the rue d'Ulm in 1928, Beckett staying on alone for a further year. It was in 1932, while staying in the same hotel as MacGreevy, that Beckett was working on his first unpublished novel, Dream of fair to middling women .
    Following the assassination of the President of the Republic, Paul Doumer, on 7 May 1932 by the White Russian, Gorguloff, it was decided that a check should be made on the papers of all foreigners who were then living in Paris. Since Beckett did not possess a valid carte de séjour , he was forced to leave his hotel, and, as he could not legitimately register elsewhere, he spent several nights sleeping in the Studio Villa Seurat of the painter, Jean Lurçat, on the floor. In order to obtain money to leave the country, Beckett called on Edward Titus, the editor of the literary review, This Quarter , at his offices in the rue Delambre. Earlier, Titus had expressed interest in publishing an English translation of Rimbaud's poem, Le Bateau Ivre , and it was with this in mind that Beckett now completed a translation of the poem, begun by him some time before. He had already produced several translations from the Italian of Montale, Franchi, and Comisso, which Titus had published in This Quarter in 1930; a little later he had translated poems and prose by Breton, Éluard and Crevel for the special number on Surrealism which was to appear, edited by André Breton, in September 1932. Beckett had accepted this earlier work as a paid commission and, inview of his difficult financial situation, he asked Titus for a thousand francs for Drunken Boat . In the event, he was offered seven hundred francs for the poem, which allowed him to travel to London and live there for a short time, near the Gray's Inn Road. It was during this stay in London that Beckett tried to organise for himself a career in literary journalism, but a call on Desmond McCarthy failed to bring the commissioned reviewing that he had hoped for. Soon after this the money paid to him by Titus ran out and

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