Collected Poems in English and French
Samuel Beckett
Works by Samuel Beckett published by Grove Press
COLLECTED POEMS IN ENGLISH AND FRENCH
COLLECTED SHORTER PLAYS
(All That Fall, Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II, Krapp's Last Tape, Rough for Theatre I, Rough For Theatre II, Embers, Rough for Radio I, Rough for Radio II, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio, … but the clouds …, A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht and Träume, What Where)
COMPLETE SHORT PROSE: 1929–1989
(Assumption, Sedendo et Quiescendo, Text, A Case in a Thousand, First Love, The Expelled, The Calmative. The End, Texts for Nothing 1–13, From an Abandoned Work, The Image, All Strange Away, Imagination Dead Imagine, Enough, Ping, Lessness, The Lost Ones, Fizzles 1–8, Heard in the Dark 1, Heard in the Dark 2, One Evening, As the story was told, The Cliff, neither, Stirrings Still, Variations on a “Still” Point, Faux Départs, The Capital of the Ruins)
DISJECTA:
Miscellaneous Writings and a Dramatic Fragment
ENDGAME AND ACT WITHOUT WORDS
HAPPY DAYS
HOW IT IS
I CAN'T GO ON, I'll GO ON:
A Samuel Beckett Reader
KRAPP'S LAST TAPE (All That Fall, Embers, Act Without Words I, Act Without Words II)
MERCIER AND CAMIER
MOLLOY
MORE PRICKS THAN KICKS
(Dante and the Lobster, Fingal, Ding-Dong, A Wet Night, Love and Lethe, Walking Out, What a Misfortune, The Smeraldina's Billet Doux, Yellow, Draff)
MURPHY
NOHOW ON (Company, III Seen III Said, Worstward Ho)
PROUST
STORIES AND TEXTS FOR NOTHING
(The Expelled, The Calmative, The End, Texts for Nothing 1–13)
THREE NOVELS (Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable)
WAITING FOR GODOT
WATT
HAPPY DAYS:
Production Notebooks
WAITING FOR GODOT:
Theatrical Notebooks
Copyright © 1977 by Samuel Beckett
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
Printed in the United States of America
Published simultaneously in Canada
Collected Poems in English and French first published by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd, London 1977
Whoroscope first published by Nancy Cuard, The Hours Press, 1930
Echo's Bones first published by George Reavey, Europa Press, 1935
Gnome first published 1934
Ooftish first published 1938
Home Olga first published 1934
All other English poems except the last three English poems in this volume first published by John Calder (Publishers) Ltd 1961, the last three first published in this volume 1977. Poems in French first published by Limes Verlag Wiesbaden under the title Gedichte 1959 and by Editions de Minuit, Paris under the title Poèmes 1968
Translations from Paul Eluard first published by This Quarter, Paris 1932
Translation from Arthur Rimbaud first published by Whitenights Press, Reading 1976
Translation from Guillaume Apollinaire first published by Dolman Press, Dublin and Calder & Boyars, London 1972
Translations from Sébastien Chamfort first published by The Blue Guitar, Messina 1975
Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 77–77855
ISBN: 9780802198440
Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
00 01 10 9 8 7 6
CONTENTS
Publishers' Foreword
Part I: Poems in English
1. Whoroscope
2. Gnome
3. Home Olga
4. Echo's Bones
The Vulture
Enueg I
Enueg II
Alba
Dortmunder
Sanies I
Sanies II
Serena I
Serena II
Serena III
Malacoda
Da Tagte Es
Echo's Bones
5. Six Poems
Cascando
Ooftish
Saint Lô
dread nay
Roundelay
thither
Part II: Poems in French with some translations
1. Poèmes 1937–1939
elles viennent
they come
à elle l'acte calme
être là sans mâchoires sans dents
Ascension
La Mouche
musique de l'indifférence
bois seul
ainsi a-t-on beau
Rue de Vaugirard
Dieppe
Dieppe
Arènes de Lutèce
jusque dans la caverne ciel et sol
2. Six Poèmes 1947–1949
bon bon il est un pays
Mort de A.D.
vive morte ma seule saison
je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse
my way is in the sand flowing
que ferais-je sans ce monde
what would I do without this world
je voudrais que mon amour meure
I would like my love to die
3. Poème 1974
hors crâne seul dedans
something there
Part III: Translations from French with the originals
1. From Paul Eluard
L'amoureuse
Lady Love
A perte de vue dans le sens de mon corps
Out of Sight in the Direction of my Body
A peine défigurée
Scarcely Disfigured
Seconde nature
Second Nature
La vue
Scene
L'univers–solitude
Universe-Solitude
Confections
Confections
2. From Arthur Rimbaud
Le bateau ivre
Drunken Boat
3. From Guillaume Apollinaire
Zone
Zone
4. From Sébastien Chamfort
Huit maximes
Long after Chamfort
Le sot
Wit in fools
Le théâtre tragique
The trouble with tragedy
Quand on soutient que les gens
Better on your arse
Quand on a été bien tourmenté
Live and clean forget
La pensée console
Ask of all-healing
L'espérance
Hope
Vivre est une maladie
Sleep till death
Que le coeur de l'homme
How hollow heart
Notes
FOREWORD
This is the most complete collection of poems that Mr. Beckett authorized. It contains all the work published in English before 1977 with the addition of prewar poems and some later ones. The complete French poems are included in the original by arrangement with Les Editions de Minuit, and six of them have been translated by the author. The first one originated in English. The last section contains those translations from French poets that Samuel Bec
kett agreed to see republished, most of them commissioned by little magazines before World War II, although the Chamfort maxims came later. The translation of Le Bateau Ivre was long lost before miraculously turning up in private hands as is explained in the Notes.
The translation made by Samuel Beckett of an anthology of Mexican poetry compiled by Octavio Paz, first published in 1959, is not included here, but is separately available from Grove Press in an edition entitled Mexican Poetry. Other translations, many unsigned, made during the thirties with which Mr. Beckett was unsatisfied, exist in old magazines, but he did not want to see them reissued in book form.
The Publishers
PART I
POEMS IN ENGLISH
1. WHOROSCOPE
Whoroscope
What's that?
An egg?
By the brothers Boot it stinks fresh.
Give it to Gillot.
Galileo how are you
and his consecutive thirds!
The vile old Copernican lead-swinging son of a sutler!
We're moving he said we're off—Porca Madonna!
the way a boatswain would be, or a sack-of-potatoey
charging Pretender.
That's not moving, that's moving. 10
What's that?
A little green fry or a mushroomy one?
Two lashed ovaries with prostisciutto?
How long did she womb it, the feathery one?
Three days and four nights?
Give it to Gillot.
Faulhaber, Beeckman and Peter the Red,
come now in the cloudy avalanche or Gassendi's sun-red
crystally cloud
and I'll pebble you all your hen-and-a-half ones
or I'll pebble a lens under the quilt in the midst of day. 20
To think he was my own brother, Peter the Bruiser,
and not a syllogism out of him
no more than if Pa were still in it.
Hey! pass over those coppers,
sweet millèd sweat of my burning liver!
Them were the days I sat in the hot-cupboard throwing
Jesuits out of the skylight.
Who's that? Hals?
Let him wait.
My squinty doaty!
I hid and you sook. 30
And Francine my precious fruit of a house-and-parlour
foetus!
What an exfoliation!
Her little grey flayed epidermis and scarlet tonsils!
My one child
scourged by a fever to stagnant murky blood—
blood!
Oh Harvey belovèd
how shall the red and white, the many in the few, (dear bloodswirling Harvey)
eddy through that cracked beater? 40
And the fourth Henry came to the crypt of the arrow.
What's that?
How long?
Sit on it.
A wind of evil flung my despair of ease
against the sharp spires of the one
lady:
not once or twice but. …
(Kip of Christ hatch it!)
in one sun's drowning 50
(Jesuitasters please copy).
So on with the silk hose over the knitted, and the morbid
leather—
what am I saying! the gentle canvas—
and away to Ancona on the bright Adriatic,
and farewell for a space to the yellow key of the
Rosicrucians.
They don't know what the master of them that do did,
that the nose is touched by the kiss of all foul and sweet air,
and the drums, and the throne of the faecal inlet,
and the eyes by its zig-zags.
So we drink Him and eat Him 60
and the watery Beaune and the stale cubes of Hovis
because He can jig
as near or as far from His Jigging Self
and as sad or lively as the chalice or the tray asks.
How's that, Antonio?
In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.
Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?
Anna Maria!
She reads Moses and says her love is crucified.
Leider! Leider! she bloomed and withered, 70
a pale abusive parakeet in a mainstreet window.
No I believe every word of it I assure you.
Fallor, ergo sum!
The coy old frôleur!
He tolle'd and legge'd
and he buttoned on his redemptorist waistcoat.
No matter, let it pass.
I'm a bold boy I know
so I'm not my son
(even if I were a concierge) 80
nor Joachim my father's
but the chip of a perfect block that's neither old nor new,
the lonely petal of a great high bright rose.
Are you ripe at last,
my slim pale double-breasted turd?
How rich she smells,
this abortion of a fledgling!
I will eat it with a fish fork.
White and yolk and feathers.
Then I will rise and move moving 90
toward Rahab of the snows,
the murdering matinal pope-confessed amazon,
Christina the ripper.
Oh Weulles spare the blood of a Frank
who has climbed the bitter steps,
(René du Perron… .!)
and grant me my second
starless inscrutable hour.
1930
NOTES
René Descartes, Seigneur du Perron, liked his omelette made of eggs hatched from eight to ten days; shorter or longer under the hen and the result, he says, is disgusting.
He kept his own birthday to himself so that no astrologer could cast his nativity.
The shuttle of a ripening egg combs the warp of his days.
P. 1, l. 3 In 1640 the brothers Boot refuted Aristotle in Dublin.
4 Descartes passed on the easier problems in analytical geometry to his valet Gillot.
5–10 Refer to his contempt for Galileo Jr., (whom he confused with the more musical Galileo Sr.), and to his expedient sophistry concerning the movement of the earth.
17 He solved problems submitted by these mathematicians.
P. 2, l. 21–26 The attempt at swindling on the part of his elder brother Pierre de la Bretaillière—The money he received as a soldier.
27 Franz Hals.
29–30 As a child he played with a little cross-eyed girl.
31–35 His daughter died of scarlet fever at the age of six.
37–40 Honoured Harvey for his discovery of the circulation of the blood, but would not admit that he had explained the motion of the heart.
41 The heart of Henri iv was received at the Jesuit college of La Flèche while Descartes was still a student there.
P. 3, l. 45–53 His visions and pilgrimage to Loretto.
56–65 His Eucharistic sophistry, in reply to the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld, who challenged him to reconcile his doctrine of matter with the doctrine of transubstantiation.
68 Schurmann, the Dutch blue-stocking, a pious pupil of Voët, the adversary of Descartes.
P. 4, l. 73–76 Saint Augustine has a revelation in the shrubbery and reads Saint Paul.
77–83 He proves God by exhaustion.
91–93 Christina, queen of Sweden. At Stockholm, in November, she required Descartes, who had remained in bed till midday all his life, to be with her at five o'clock in the morning.
94 Weulles, a Peripatetic Dutch physician at the Swedish court, and an enemy of Descartes.
2. GNOME
Gnome
Spend the years of learning squandering
Courage for the years of wandering
Through a world politely turning
From the loutishness of learning.
1934
3. HOME OLGA
Home Olga
J might be made sit up for a jade of hope (an
d exile,
don't you know)
And Jesus and Jesuits juggernauted in the haemorrhoidal
isle,
Modo et forma anal maiden, giggling to death in stomacho.
E for the erythrite of love and silence and the sweet noo
style,
Swoops and loops of love and silence in the eye of the sun
and view of the mew,
Juvante Jah and a Jain or two and the tip of a friendly
yiddophile.
O for an opal of faith and cunning winking adieu, adieu,
adieu.
Yesterday shall be tomorrow, riddle me that my rapparee.
Che sarà sarà che fu, there's more than Homer knows how
to spew,
Exempli gratia: ecce himself and the pickthank agnus
—e.o.o.e.
1932
4. ECHO'S BONES
The Vulture
dragging his hunger through the sky
of my skull shell of sky and earth
stooping to the prone who must
soon take up their life and walk
mocked by a tissue that may not serve
till hunger earth and sky be offal
Enueg I
Exeo in a spasm
tired of my darling's red sputum
from the Portobello Private Nursing Home
its secret things
and toil to the crest of the surge of the steep perilous bridge
and lapse down blankly under the scream of the hoarding
round the bright stiff banner of the hoarding
into a black west
throttled with clouds.
Above the mansions the algum-trees
the mountains
my skull sullenly
clot of anger
skewered aloft strangled in the cang of the wind
