Murphy (2 page)

One other translation in which Beckett was involved must be mentioned because, besides all else, it has some bearing on the present edition: this is the German translation published by Rowohlt in June 1959. The translator is named on the title page as Elmar Tophoven, who had been
lektor
in German and a doctoral student at the Sorbonne since 1949 (he was
afterwards
successor to Paul Celan at the École Normale). He
translated
Godot
into German on his own initiative while he was a student and quickly became Beckett’s preferred translator from French:
Warten auf Godot
was published in 1953,
Malone stirbt
in 1958, and
Endspiel
and
Der Namenlose
both in 1959. However, while he translated from French into German in
Gedichte
(1959), the translation of English poems in that volume was undertaken by Eva Hesse; and his translations of English play titles undertaken at the time (
Alle, die da fallen
in 1957 and
Das letze Band
in 1959) were undertaken in collaboration with Ericka Schöningh (whom he was to marry). The fact that the German translation of
Murphy
was published when it was, in 1959, under his name only, strongly suggests that he had considerable assistance from Beckett, and this is confirmed from other sources who knew him well. The point is not the translation itself, which, like the Bordas-Minuit version, makes cuts and changes such as the difference between English and the other language demands. Allusions have to be modified if they are to retain their point; humour is a quality that reaches deep into conventional responses and shifts subtly in the process of cultural exchange. The point is that Beckett was once again deeply involved in thinking through his English text, and the particular situation almost certainly prompted both him and Tophoven to refer to solutions arrived at in the previously translated French version. Both the French and the German translations provided opportunities to correct material errors in the English text, some of which were taken and others ignored. In this respect, they contribute as much to an improved text 
as the several editions in English that followed the Routledge text of 1938.

The first reprinting of the English
Murphy
was a
photographic
reissue, by Grove Press, New York. It was published on 16 May 1957, price $3.50 cloth and $1.95 paper. A trial version of the cover by Francine Felsenhal was quickly superseded by one by Roy Kuhlman; and there was also a differently bound limited signed edition. It followed on Grove Press editions of Beckett’s own translations of his French writing published by Minuit, in a similar format, and it has been reprinted many times. The impact on readers in the English-speaking world was immediate.
Murphy
was central to a special issue of
Perspective
devoted to Beckett in 1959, and to monographs by Hugh Kenner (1961), Ruby Cohn (1962), and later John Fletcher (1964). It provided a formative entrée into an understanding of Beckett’s work, reinforcing the English conviction that Beckett was primarily a comic writer at a time when
Fin de partie
and the novels in French threatened that he was something else as well, and supplied American students with the figure of a Cartesian centaur, which provided a key that turned out to close as many doors as it opened. Coffey’s starting point – which takes for granted that the structure of the novel displays a distrustful critique, not a hilarious celebration, of Cartesian dualism – is the more profitable one. Beckett acknowledged as much to the very first reader to whom he showed his completed typescript, who put his finger on the same issue (Beckett to MacGreevy, letter dated 7 July 1936). He admitted that he had not been able to avoid the ‘Aloisha mistake’, by which he means – via a reference to Alexei, the youngest of the Karamazov brothers in Dostoevsky’s novel – that he had not been able to bring discordant emotions into line. The full title he wrote on the notebook draft, ‘Sasha Murphy’, is an admission of the same, Sasha being a diminutive of Alexandra, which
corresponds
to Aloisha/Alexia and therefore alludes to Celia. To communicate so much so clearly is the book’s achievement, its advance on Beckett’s previous writing. In the end, the most 
comfortable non-solution to the dilemma proved to be literally to upstage it.

The Grove Press edition is a page-for-page facsimile of the Routledge text and was the only text available on this side of the Atlantic (outside second-hand bookshops) between 1957 and 1963, during which time copies were imported by John Calder. Calder meanwhile acquired the British rights and published
Murphy
under his own imprint in October 1963 as Jupiter Book 1, which was reissued under the imprint of Calder and Boyars in 1969. This 1963–69 edition – the second English edition proper – derives from the Routledge text, which was entirely reset and corrected in two places; it also corrects two errors of fact that had been corrected in the French and German translations, and introduces a fresh error (into the chess game); a few spellings are normalised. The third English edition proper – entirely reset but deriving from the second edition – appeared in 1973 from Pan Books in conjunction with Calder and Boyars, and the same was reissued in 1977 under the imprint of John Calder in a uniform series of Beckett titles: it has been reprinted several times up to the present. All told, the English editions and reprintings of
Murphy
that have appeared since 1963 contain fewer textual errors than Calder versions of other titles. Why this is so is unclear; but their significance lies in the number of copies published, and how and where they circulated, rather than in the (mildly) degrading text.
Murphy
has always been the most immediately available of Beckett’s novels to an English-speaking readership: elsewhere in Europe, the French
Molloy
and the German
Der Namenlose
proved more influential, following
Godot
in establishing his reputation. The reason may have to do with the inherently verbal dimension of the humour, or perhaps the humour itself engages different areas of moral response. Whatever the case, any English, French or German reader can learn, as Beckett did, from what the versions in the other languages perforce omit. 

The task of preparing a correct text of
Murphy
goes to the heart of the way the book works on its readers. On the one hand, it is clear that the writing is highly organised and that the intricately devised interconnections – between places and events within the novel, and between the novel and the world outside it – communicate a vision of a meaningful world. On the other hand, it is equally evident that the organisation of particulars is upset by a number of deliberate contradictions and loose ends. The disjunction mirrors what the book is about: a perfection that can exist in the mind but is doomed to be discommoded by contingency. Like Joyce in the composition of
Ulysses
, Beckett took elaborate care over the working-out of his story, and at the same time took care to ensure that some details did not fit. The first requirement was paramount as he put the story together; the second emerged more strongly after he began to revise it. However, what Joyce habitually did at a relatively late stage, Beckett instinctively did earlier, and the adventitious, the undecidable and the contradictory are integral to the processes of his composition.

In
Murphy
, there are conscious divagations from fact in descriptions of real locations (Bethlem Royal Hospital) and of characters who incorporate features from people he knew (Henry Macran, Hester Dowden, Austin Clarke). The character Murphy has a great deal of Beckett in him and yet he is not Beckett. A similar ambivalence extends to details of spelling, where a reader is left unsure whether a word has been
accidentally
misspelled or spelled to allow an unusual, disruptive meaning into the text. Examples in the opening pages are raised by Murphy’s seven scarves (p. 3), by the impossible distance between moon and earth (p. 19) and by the astrological
contradictions
of Suk’s horoscope. Sometimes the French translation corrects what appears to be such a mistake and the German does not (e.g. p. 154, where ten minutes are corrected to twenty), sometimes vice versa (e.g. p. 155, where the French 
repeats the mistake of the English, and the German has ‘die Pupillen waren ausserordentlich verkleinert’: the pupils were unusually reduced). Beckett is named as the translator of the French version but not of the German, which masks the fact that he was a collaborator in both instances, if in slightly
different
ways. Should the English text be adjusted in accordance with his later wishes, supposing them to be the product of
experience
and wisdom? Or must we assume that texts in translation are not different versions of the same text but different works?

The French and German versions confirm, if confirmation is needed, that the torque Beckett puts on words by discomfiting conventional expectations is deliberate: thus,
concave
where one might expect
conclave
(p. 15),
glaze
where one might expect
gaze
(p. 17),
wrack
where one might expect
rack
(p. 96) and so on. One might also note some deliberately Hiberno-English spellings, old-fashioned Anglo-Irish even in his own day. Take
Cathleen na Hennessey
(for
Ni
p. 31),
Clonmachnois
and
Connaught
(p. 167):
na
for
Ni
is a solecism also affected by W. B. Yeats. Beckett could spell
Clonmacnoise
correctly as his letters prove,
Connaught
imports the odour of rugby clubs and the London hotel. It is typical that
Dun Laoghaire
on p. 76 became
Kingstown
in the French (the German has misspelt
Loaghaire
), as if to lean on the point being made. Then there are run-together words (e.g.
knighterrant
p. 35,
corpseobedient
p. 119) and possible Irishisms (e.g.
took tube
p. 77) which, even if not definitely deliberate, give the original text its particular flavour. The same is true of spellings that are deliberately pedantic (e.g.
Petrouchka
p. 4,
katatonic
p. 121). These are normalised in the later English (Calder-Picador) editions, levelling the tone.

Details that might look accidental, then, are more often designed, and a number of mistakes are allowed if, in fact, they were not in the first place contrived. Taken together with the circumstances of restricted access to the manuscript draft and the broken line of transmission, it is inevitable that the 1938 Routledge text should possess particular authority. Whatever the difficulty of finding a publisher, Beckett composed his text 
with particular care and was afterwards moved by considerable regard for the integrity of what he had achieved. One might even reckon the enforced period he spent in hospital while he corrected and revised proofs turned out to the advantage of the text as published, as did the scrutiny it was subjected to when that text became the first of his writings to be translated into French. The assistance he gave his German translator likewise prompted a second, detailed re-reading: different adjustments were made, to be sure, but they serve to confirm the integrity of the Routledge text.

The text that follows therefore revises the first, 1938 edition in only two instances, and both are minor: the correct spelling of the brand name
Ballitoes
has been substituted for
Bollitoes
on p. 26, and the word
so
has been inserted on p. 36 (‘unless she had superlative reasons for doing so’), as it was inserted in the HRC typescript. It happens that the Calder editions
incorporate
these same two corrections but, as I have said, they also introduce errors and unnecessary minor variations. For all that strikes a reader as unfamiliar or puzzling, odd or simply wrong, I strongly recommend the annotations by C. J. Ackerley published under the title
Demented Particulars
(Journal of Beckett Studies Books, 2004). His book offers help at every turn and supplies further background to most of the references in this short introduction.

[Note: where unspecified, translations from French to English or vice versa are by Beckett]