Cunard's lack of political orthodoxy makes her an easy target for mockery in Beckett's correspondence with MacGreevy. Letters from the early 1930s deride her work in Harlem and in Jamaica with the Marcus Garvey Association.⁵⁰ Yet by January 1938, writing from a hospital bed in Paris, Beckett alludes more warmly to her work in support of Spanish refugees and anti-fascist groups (‘Nancy Cunard bounced in the other evening from Spain. I was very glad to see her’).⁵¹ Subsequently, the pair met regularly, but Beckett often reverted to his former tone, complaining that she had ‘submerged [him] in left wing literature’, and that he had ‘never seen so many bad poems’ as in the short poetry collections about the Spanish Civil War that Cunard printed in 1937.⁵² Yet, he conceded, the poems by Lorca and Alberti had merits.⁵³ Later correspondence expresses his continued solidarity with Cunard's endeavours and his fond memories of Negro, of which he owned a copy.⁵⁴ The friendship remained immensely important to Cunard as well, to the extent that Beckett, along with Sadoul and Aragon, were said to be the only friends whom she longed to see on her deathbed.⁵⁵

The success of Cunard's literary and political ventures relied heavily upon her friendships, and Negro was no exception. Michelet was her companion, while Sadoul had been her faithful assistant at the Hours Press .⁵⁶ Members of the Surrealist group such as Crevel were old friends and contributed on this basis. Some were enrolled through friends’ recommendations: Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, for example, recalled that he was invited to contribute at the suggestion of Claude McKay and Henri Barbusse.⁵⁷ Others were members of organisations supported by Cunard: Francis Jourdain, one of the many authors translated by Beckett, was a member of the French branch of the League Against Imperialism and is introduced as such in the anthology. That this link is clearly stated is not insignificant: the league, founded in Brussels in 1927 as the Ligue contre l'Impérialisme et l'Oppression Coloniale, was one of the first organisations to emerge from the anti-colonial work of the Communist International.⁵⁸ The main objectives of the league, split into national branches working under the command of the Comintern, were to campaign for the civic and national liberties of oppressed peoples and to cultivate communist and socialist alliances. Its leaders and members were originally dispersed across a broad political spectrum, and included Jawaharlal Nehru, Messali Hadj, Willi Münzenberg, Jim Larkin and Ernst Toller. Its first Congress, opened by Barbusse (at the time, one of the organisation's honorary presidents along with Albert Einstein), focused on three main issues: struggles for emancipation in China, American imperialism in Latin America, and the black liberation struggles in South Africa, the Caribbean, African colonies and North America. Subsequent gatherings focused on the nature and mode of operation of the league's anti-imperialist struggle. This broad church of political interests offers a compelling corrective to the accepted notion that Negro was conceived to raise funds for the French Communist Party.⁵⁹ This seems unlikely: the Surrealists’ relations with the French Communist Party were strained, and relations between Cunard and the British Communist Party equally so, not least because the party had a habit of laying claim to the funds that she had raised for the International Labor Defense.⁶⁰

Many facets of Negro accord with the concerns of the League Against Imperialism: Cunard's foreword, for example, declares her ambition to bring together the energies of communism and anti-imperialist thought to curb the hold of racialist ideologies in the United States and elsewhere. Most of the essays, however, do not make a case for the emancipatory role of communism but describe the realities of slavery, colonial exploitation and racism, while accounts of segregation and struggles for civil rights remain primarily focused on the United States, allowing only marginal representation to the colonial histories of North Africa and South America. A short section is dedicated to South Africa, offering brief information about the pass laws and the exploitation of black labour. As Tory Young notes, the anthology is not an encyclopaedia, but a ‘call to arms’, and should be read as such.⁶¹

The idiosyncratic nature of Cunard's call to arms is evidenced in the prominent position given to Crevel , Jourdain, Péret and Sadoul , whose ties to the Surrealist circle and the French Communist Party were shifting. Their contributions to Negro were all translated by Beckett. Cunard's decision to grant such political significance to their work has a distinctive context, and intersects with the action taken by different branches of the League Against Imperialism against the 1931 International Colonial Exhibition, held from May to November in Paris.⁶² In March 1931, the German Liga gegen Imperialismus und für Nationale Unabhängigkeit began to plan a counter-exhibition in Berlin; in May, a Paris counterpart organised by the Ligue Contre l'Impérialisme et l'Oppression Coloniale was announced.⁶³ This counter-exhibition – in which Cunard played an unacknowledged role – was put together by the Surrealists, led by Aragon, Sadoul and Thirion, and ran between September 1931 and February 1932, coinciding with one of Beckett's numerous stays in Paris.⁶⁴ Its title, ‘La vérité sur les colonies’ (The Truth about the Colonies), conveys its focus on the politics of forced labour, poverty, armed repression and colonial subjugation.⁶⁵ Some parts of the exhibition celebrated the Soviet regime; others dealt with the atrocities of the tsarist system and with global patterns of colonial conquest. The event had little to do with the 1936 London exhibition with which Beckett's translations of Eluard became directly associated. The latter event featured colonial exhibits selected solely on aesthetic grounds and was emphatically not designed as an exhibition exposing the workings of imperialism.⁶⁶

The inclusion in Negro of ‘Murderous Humanitarianism’, a manifesto written in May or June 1932,⁶⁷ carries particular significance, since the statement (signed by Breton, Crevel, Eluard, Péret, Tanguy, Roger Caillois, René Char, Jules Monnerot, André Thirion, Pierre Unik and Pierre Yoyotte) contributes to a series of polemical responses to the 1931 Colonial Exhibition. These included an article by Blin (then associated with Surrealist circles) that was discussed in the French National Assembly⁶⁸ as well as articles and photographs in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. The Surrealists issued two collective manifestos: the first, from May 1931, expressly asked French audiences not to visit the Colonial Exhibition, attacked the myths and hypocrisy that bolstered the empire, and encouraged the public to demand the immediate withdrawal from the colonies; the second, from July 1931, denounced the cultural politics of the exhibition and reported on its many human and organisational fiascos.⁶⁹

‘Murderous Humanitarianism’, presented in Beckett's translation as the work of ‘the Surrealist group in Paris’, is directly aligned with the preoccupations voiced in these manifestos and Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution. The original French text has not survived; it does not seem to have been written expressly for Negro, and it seems more likely that it was conceived for the ephemeral journal of the Ligue Contre l'Impérialisme et l'Oppression Coloniale . This journal, Contre l'impérialisme , produced only one special issue in May 1932, which was dedicated to the threat of a second world war and included articles by Jourdain on French presence in Indochina and a call by Aragon to campaign against French imperialism.⁷⁰ The year 1932 witnessed numerous ideological disagreements within the Surrealist group as their affiliations with the Communist Party came under considerable strain: in January, notably, the Surrealists discovered that only card-carrying party members (Alexandre, Aragon, Sadoul and Unik) would be accepted into the Association des Ecrivains et Artistes Révolutionnaires , an organisation sponsored by the Communist Party that they supported but that did not support them.⁷¹ Their relation with this new organisation was tainted by hierarchical tensions and a wave of exclusions from the Communist Party and the Association itself. Aragon, Sadoul and Unik, for whom Communism had replaced Surrealism as the chosen cause, left the Surrealist group in March, in the wake of the ‘Aragon affair’ that had also erupted in January. In many ways, the idea that the French colonial enterprise was a political disaster was one of few issues around which the Surrealists could still rally in 1932, without any disagreement or tension. As such, ‘Murderous Humanitarianism’, like many collective statements issued by the Surrealists, symbolised a fleeting political alliance created largely for the purposes of the appeal itself: the text binds to the core Surrealist group the Martiniquan writers Yoyotte and Monnerot, who were not considered members of the Paris elect, and were involved in Légitime Défense, a short-lived Surrealist review tied to the Négritude movement and dedicated to Caribbean writing.⁷² These allegiances, tensions and ruptures give a different dimension to the work of translation that Beckett conducted in the shadows.

The Negro Anthology in the Making

Beckett's voice remained concealed in the 1934 edition of Negro: his name appears in neither table of contents nor acknowledgements, and only in the body of the texts for which he is credited as translator.⁷³ His contribution did not expose him; Cunard, however, received a substantial amount of hate mail during the making of the anthology and following reports of her relationship with Crowder in the American press.⁷⁴ Where Beckett stood in relation to the controversies sparked by Cunard's work is not always clear, and he seems to have been alternately aware of and oblivious to the obstacles that Cunard and Crowder encountered as a couple. He sometimes referred to their partnership in ways that recall the racism that they faced from other close friends: he wrote, for example, about their ‘comparing colours’.⁷⁵ His letters to MacGreevy give little sense of Crowder's talent and stature as a jazz musician; they caricature Crowder's Southern drawl and mock his perceived lack of erudition.⁷⁶ Yet some of Beckett's poems from that period enter in dialogue with the political work of Cunard and the artistic work of Crowder in a different way. The only poem by Beckett to feature an in-text dedication is a tribute to Crowder the musician: ‘From the Only Poet to a Shining Whore. For Henry Crowder to Sing’. The dedication also marks the continuation of a dialogue between Beckett and Crowder begun with Whoroscope, which had been printed by Crowder and typesetter Maurice Rigaud at the Hours Press .⁷⁷ ‘From the Only Poet’ was written to be set to music by Crowder; it appeared in Henry-Music (1930), a collection also published by the Hours Press featuring striking cover designs by Man Ray and other poems by Richard Aldington, Harold Acton, Walter Lowenfels and Cunard, as well as Crowder's scores for their texts. Beckett's poem is a peculiar combination of ventriloquised references to Dante; it revolves around Dante's representation of Rahab in Paradiso, and her capacity to abide by her principles, alone and in all circumstances, even when doing so leads to the destruction of her world, the city of Jericho. While maintaining an insistent focus on shades of whiteness and brightness, the poem also introduces a meditation on domination and marginalisation – issues of pressing importance to Crowder and Cunard, who had taken high personal risks to pursue their political and artistic ideals. It seems that both of them recognised Beckett's poem as an expression of friendship and solidarity: in her memoir, Cunard described Beckett as the friend who appreciated Crowder's charm and musical talent the most, presenting his poem as an illustration of their friendship; her words become particularly meaningful in light of her own dedication of Negro to ‘Henry Crowder/my first Negro friend’.⁷⁸ Crowder's memoir concurs: he was clearly fond of Beckett and retained warm memories of him.⁷⁹

It is likely that, by the time he started work on the anthology, Beckett had come to understand something of the workings of racism, and of the difficulties encountered by Crowder in particular in the United States and in Europe. In the years that followed, Beckett had further occasions to become acquainted with prejudice; he always retained bitter memories of the anti-Irish racism he encountered in London in particular.⁸⁰ Calder recalls meeting a very annoyed Beckett at Heathrow airport in later years, after an immigration officer had asked him, ‘How long are you staying Paddy?’⁸¹ In France, Beckett also encountered manifestations of intolerance, in a somewhat different register; in 1962, for example, the academician Marcel Achard described Beckett's work as worthless and void, emphasising that it was inappropriate to mix apples and oranges – or, here, his own theatre and the ‘new theatre’. His conclusion was without appeal: ‘besides’, Beckett is ‘not French’.⁸²

When Cunard invited Beckett to translate texts for Negro, Beckett had no experience of translation beyond his aborted Joycean exercise with Péron and versions of short Italian texts by Eugenio Montale, Raffaelo Franchi and Giovanni Comisso, which involved much radical rewriting, yet little translation, and were published as a ‘miniature anthology’ in This Quarter . Interestingly, Beckett was entrusted with several of the more difficult and controversial texts to appear in Negro. Beckett, Cunard and her cousin Edward translated Michelet 's essays, whose assessment of the workings of colonialism emerges as the most virulent and lucid in the collection, and Beckett was also tasked with an essay by Léon-Pierre Quint , biographer of Proust and Gide, which examined the conditions according to which an international, anti-colonial and interracial movement might emerge. Beckett's first contribution was a translation of another polemical text, Crevel's ‘The Negress in the Brothel’, a vitriolic portrayal of racism and colonial subjugation.⁸³ Crevel wrote the text specifically for Negro in August 1931 during a holiday at Dalí's home in Port-Lligat and at the same time as an essay entitled ‘Le patriotisme de l'inconscient’, which appeared in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution.⁸⁴ Cunard knew that Crevel's text would constitute a delicate addition, and the essay does not feature in the table of contents to the 1934 edition. Weary of surveillance and potential interference, she arranged for the setting and printing of the English text to be done separately by the Utopia Press in London, and inserted Beckett's translation into copies of the anthology herself when the volumes were bound.⁸⁵

Cunard seems to have treated Beckett – who, if his letters from that period are to be trusted, could be immensely unpleasant, petulant and immature – with great indulgence and generosity. This treatment extends to the anthology: Beckett's correspondence indicates that he asked for money early on and received payment for some translations on at least one occasion; his plaintive tone suggests that he was indeed expecting some remuneration. Yet the anthology was reliant on good will rather than payment, and this led to incidents with some contributors: Claude McKay broke contact when he discovered that no fee was forthcoming, and the poet Sterling Brown, who protested that he could not write for nothing, was eventually paid.⁸⁶ Beckett, for his part, appears to have previously benefited from Cunard's generosity, but without particular reason: Crowder recalls in his memoir that, shortly after he first made Beckett's acquaintance, Cunard gave Beckett ‘quite a large sum of money’, ‘because he seemed to be in need’ and ‘she felt like doing it’.⁸⁷

It may well be that Cunard was so supportive and trusting because she perceived special affinities with Beckett (she was very proud of her own Irish ancestry) and sympathised with his feelings of estrangement towards his maternal family. The history of the Roe family, whose fortune was built through connections with the rest of the British Empire, makes Beckett's relation to the anti-imperialist remit of Negro at least as complicated as Cunard's. Beckett was intimately familiar with the colonial and racist rhetoric exposed in Cunard's anthology; his boyhood readings included the children's magazine Union Jack, which published stories of adventure, travel and conquest around the British Empire and at the American Frontier – precisely the kind of publication that capitalised on the enshrined assumptions and racial stereotypes denounced in the essay by Sadoul that he translated for Negro.

The letters to MacGreevy in which Beckett comments on the anthology offer some uncomfortable and contradictory insights. In October 1931, he reports that he has been translating ‘surréalistes inédits for Nancy's nigger book’; he describes Crevel 's text as ‘Miserable rubbish’ and complains: ‘I'll have about 11 more to do. About 8 pages each. I asked her £25 for the whole job. Is that too much? Tzara next’.⁸⁸ The same letter features an unkind pun on Crevel's poor health, spelling his name as ‘Creve(l)’ or crevé (Crevel suffered from chronic ill-health and exhaustion, and a diagnosis of tuberculosis culminated in his suicide a few years later).⁸⁹ Twelve months later, his tone has changed, and he suggests that further translations for Negro would be a welcome prospect.⁹⁰ In early January 1933, he writes that he is ‘doing stuff for Nancy at present – some interesting (Congo Sculpture) some balls (Madagascar). There's one there waiting [‘Murderous Humanitarianism ’] about the usual assassin signed by the whole surrealiste guild. And a long one by Péret ’.⁹¹ A few weeks later, he reports: ‘I have finished all translations for N.C., poem & prose – Thank God. Such fizzle she sent a few quid anyhow’.⁹²

At this point in his career, Beckett remained reliant upon a system of patronage comparable to that which might be imposed by a literary ‘guild’. While his letter suggests that he viewed the Surrealist group as a small literary monopoly whose actions were not in keeping with their collectivist ideals, he nonetheless remained keen to present himself to MacGreevy as an insider acquainted with their political work. Whenever his letters to MacGreevy touch upon the political realm, his comments are inconclusive and troubling, bearing testament to a distinctive capacity to anticipate the reactions of his correspondent and adjust his tone accordingly. Most significantly, none of Beckett's reflections on Cunard and the anthology conveys the care, attention and thought that he put into translating, and sometimes rewriting, the texts assigned to him.

The Negro Anthology Translations

There are many indications that Beckett did not remain indifferent to the factual and political content of Negro, even in the early days. There are, for example, troubling coincidences between the anthology's subject matter and Beckett's rendering of Arthur Rimbaud's ‘The Drunken Boat’, written in the early months of 1932 with a view to publication in This Quarter. Beyond its visionary reveries, Rimbaud's poem also deals with the materiality of colonial trading, and Beckett's translation brings to the fore the poem's vision of colonialism as a spent force. His translation voices a stronger and clearer indictment of colonial rule than in the original; its opening stanzas carry a more ominous tone, assimilating colonial trade to a physical strain or burden that will eventually be removed.⁹³

His translations for Cunard's anthology betray a similar sensitivity to historical and political nuance. These are not transparent, non-committal renderings of the original texts, but partisan interventions that approach the question of historical reporting with seriousness and gravity. Clearly, he took a keen interest in polemical essays and densely researched historical surveys, but had less sympathy for superficial readings such as the potted history of Madagascar offered by Rabearivelo. His translations often accentuate the tone of the original texts, particularly when dealing with suffering, poverty, distress and the work of colonial administrations; at other points, Beckett tempered obscenity and sexual allusion, elided references to Judaism suggesting prejudice and transformed singular examples of violence and oppression into key features of a wider economic system. Some translations are fanciful: Louis Armstrong, reimagined by Beckett, speaks Irish English, a slippage that introduces into the anthology some challenging resonances between the growing American civil rights movement, Irish political nationalism and the Irish diaspora.

Beckett's rendering of Crevel 's bellicose essay ‘La Négresse des Bordels’ offers rather striking illustrations of his method of transposition and rewriting. The translation minimises sexual innuendo, accentuating instead other passages addressing the systemic ills of imperialism. Notably, Beckett italicises a statement associating class stratification with the effects of colonisation and, in doing so, offers a politically charged account of colonisation as a phenomenon ‘suffered’: ‘But since such an attitude is impracticable in capitalistic societies stinking of class consciousness (coloured men and women being assimilated to the proletariat because they happen to have suffered colonisation), it becomes necessary to annihilate the imbecile ideology that is precisely the cause and the sanction of that social degradation’.⁹⁴ Crevel's conclusion also undergoes a radical transformation. The original text presents rape and sexual exploitation as the staples of colonial subjugation: ‘Vraiment ce serait à vous ôter l'envie d'aller porter sa goutte militaire, sa goutte religieuse aux sauvages’ (176). Here Crevel plays upon the multiple and colloquial connotations of goutte, associating the enterprise of colonisation with the transmission of gonorrhoea and forcible conversion to Catholicism. Beckett substitutes this sentence with another of his own invention, which introduces a parody of middle-class liberal sentiment and strengthens Crevel's acerbic parody of social relations: ‘After that I propose to withdraw my subscription from the Society for the Diffusion of the White Man's Moral and Physical Complaints among Savage Peoples’ (72–3). These additions and modifications gain added significance in light of Crevel's international work: Crevel was among the first in French Surrealist circles to enter into contact with British and American writers, who either ignored his political views or perceived them as incompre-hensible.⁹⁵

‘Black and White in Brazil’, Beckett's translation of an essay by Péret , is exempt from such playfulness. The original text is imbued by other political concerns, arising from Péret's work with the Brazilian Communist League, a Trotskyist group that he founded in early 1931, and his parallel efforts to document the history of slavery in Brazil. Péret was, at the time, engaged in an archival study of the 1910 Revolt of the Lash, an endeavour that led to his incarceration and expulsion from Brazil, and his return to Paris at the end of 1931.⁹⁶ In his translation, Beckett grants added significance to Péret's depiction of colonial trade, and alters the text slightly to draw attention to the strategic use of starvation and forced labour. The systemic aspects of the slave trade between the African coast and Bahia are not expressly stated in the original, but Beckett's translation is unambiguous: it renders the journey of the slaves as a trial yielding ‘few survivors’, in which thirst and starvation are ‘calculated’ to keep people at the threshold of life (41). The translation also introduces an element of moral judgement: emphasising the relentless imprisonment of the slaves, held in chains even in slumber, Beckett's text renders forced labour as a factory routine in which even flogging methods display a ‘frenzy of industry’ (41). Péret evokes an empire of slavery reliant on slave owners in Brazil (‘s'appuyait sur les propriétaires esclavagistes’), while the empire described by Beckett is clearly corrupt, ‘in the pocket of the slave proprietors’ (190, 44). Beckett's version also augments the effect and scope of the abolitionist movement: Péret's text speaks of an empire ‘pressé’ or pressured by the anti-slavery movement, while Beckett evokes an empire ‘harassed by’ – and hence unable to resist – ‘the anti-slavery campaign’ (190, 45). The translation also brings to the fore a reflection on economics confined to the margins of the original. Péret, when describing the abolition of slavery in Brazil, evokes the ‘frightful misery’ (‘misère effroyable’) of the freed slave, forced out of the towns and back to the plantations after 1889 (190). Beckett speaks of different conditions: of a people thrown into a ‘distress […] so appalling that they were soon obliged to return to the plantations which they had just left’ (45). This nuanced tweak is significant, because it involves the transformation of an economic problem – a state of frightful misery – into the logical outcome of an immoral system of exploitation. Elsewhere, when turning to modern history and the future of Brazil, Beckett's translation expands on the radical register utilised by Péret; ‘le combat’ (the struggle) is rendered as ‘the revolutionary element’, and the phrase ‘solidaires contre l'ennemi commun’ (in solidarity against the common enemy) is translated as ‘united in opposing the common enemy’ (192, 48). Describing the general strikes that raged in the 1910s, Péret states that the government capitulated, lacking the means to resist the united workers’ movement (‘Le gouvernement capitula, faute de moyens de leur résister’) (192). The state is even less immune to protest in Beckett's translation: ‘The government had no choice but to capitulate’ (47). Furthermore, where Péret evokes farmers presently submitted to a regime that often recalls slavery (‘soumis à un régime qui rappelle souvent l'esclavage’), Beckett speaks of ‘agricultural workers’ who work ‘as often as not under conditions that do not greatly differ from those of slavery’ (191, 46). Ultimately, through such emendations and additions, the political history recounted by Péret becomes more momentous and sharply delineated in the translation.

Beckett's other translations place greater emphasis on the nature of colonial authority and its lack of political legitimacy. These questions bear particularly strongly upon the translation of Pierre-Quint's ‘Races et Nations’, which draws upon Gide's Voyage au Congo: Carnets de route (1927). Gide's widely read diary of a journey to the Congo offered such revealing accounts of the system of ‘porterage’ or forced labour, the regime of concessions and the conditions in which the railways were built that the book was debated at the French National Assembly upon publication.⁹⁷ Yet it remains difficult to read Gide as an advocate of racial equality along the lines suggested by Pierre-Quint: Gide denounces some economic realities, but as part of a straightforward humanist critique of the horrors of which humankind is capable. Pierre-Quint's essay transforms Gide into a vociferous anti-colonial thinker, and presents observations confined to footnotes and addenda in Gide's journal as a historical thesis on colonial trade and exploitation. Beckett's translation, meanwhile, features minor factual additions that strengthen Pierre-Quint's transformation of Gide's account. For example, where Pierre-Quint's text emphasises the explosive nature of the situation described by Gide upon his arrival in Libreville, Beckett's translation adds new details that both corroborate Gide's original text and confer greater emphasis and precision on Pierre-Quint's statements.⁹⁸ Commenting upon the delivery of spoilt goods, Pierre-Quint's text remains imprecise and does not indicate the quantity and mode of transport (‘Bordeaux a expédié des conserves, mais elles sont avariées’) (193). Beckett's translation, however, evokes a ‘cargo of tinned food sent from Bordeaux’ that ‘arrives unfit for use’, following the details provided in Gide's diary (60).

At other points, historical facts are given added significance: Beckett transforms a sentence evoking the public ‘emotion’ that greeted the discovery in the 1820s of the shackles, chains and whips utilised by the slave traders into an invocation of a French public ‘stirred to a great movement of sympathy’ upon its discovery of ‘the slave-trader's stock-in-trade’ (194, 62). Where Pierre-Quint speaks of Europeans schoolboys being educated to believe that they should go to the colonies to deliver the benefits of civilisation (‘pour y apporter les bienfaits de la civilisation’), Beckett evokes a whole culture driven by the belief that ‘the European in the colonies is actuated exclusively by the desire to propagate the bounties of civilization’ (194, 62). Pierre-Quint's nondescript evocation of Congolese regions is transformed into a political topography; a vast stretch of land consisting of regions that are ‘quite independent’ (and keen to remain so). Elsewhere, Beckett renders as an unwarranted aggression the power relationship that Pierre-Quint traces in the European fascination with African arts; the translation turns a simple statement about conquest (‘cette influence du vaincu sur le vainqueur n'a jamais empêché ce dernier d'exercer jusqu'au bout son pouvoir de domination, d'absorption ou de mort’) into a commentary on violence and aggression: ‘the aggressor can submit to the influence of his victim without ceasing to exercise his prerogative of domination, absorption and death’ (197, 66). Even mistranslations serve a rhetorical purpose: the words exaction and exactions, designating abuse, violence or severe brutality in French, are rendered according to their literal English meaning – as extortions, and hence a feature of an economic system that dispossesses and oppresses. For example, Pierre-Quint's description of a general ‘régime de force et d'exaction’ in colonial Africa is rendered as ‘a regime of coercions and exactions’ (196, 65).

Beckett's translation recasts Pierre-Quint as a more articulate and credible campaigner against racial discrimination on several levels. The original text features arguments about Judaism and racial pride that Beckett partially transforms and omits,⁹⁹ and his translation adds rhetorical and factual depth to Pierre-Quint's commentary on race as a socially determined concept. Pierre-Quint's discussion of Enlightenment legacies stresses a concept of race which ‘n'a plus rien d'absolu. Il ne sépare pas plus les hommes que ne les séparent, au sein d'une même famille, leur taille, la couleur de leurs yeux ou de leurs cheveux’ (195). Beckett adds considerable rhetorical flourish and emphasis: ‘From this point of view the historical concept of race loses its importance. It has no longer any absolute value. It can no more separate man from his neighbour than accidents of physique, variously coloured eyes and hair, can separate members of the same family’ (64). For Pierre-Quint, the French Revolution marked a turning point, as a moment at which ‘les hommes osent manifester cette pensée, à savoir que les injustices ne sont pas une nécessité ici-bas et que la fonction sociale ou la couleur de la peau ne crée pas nécessairement des privilèges’ (196). In Beckett's hand, this sentence becomes: ‘It was not until ’89 that men dared formulate the idea that human injustice is not a necessity and that privileges are not automatically conferred by accidents of social status and cuticular pigmentation’ (65). There are fewer ambiguities about future political horizons in Beckett's text. Where Pierre-Quint evokes the Hindus and the people of Indochina rejecting the invader (‘rejetteront l'envahisseur’), Beckett speaks of two peoples who ‘will cast off the yoke’ (196, 65). Questions of collective responsibility are foregrounded in Beckett's conclusion: where Pierre-Quint portrays resistance against racial prejudice as a specific duty for the intellectual, Beckett imagines a generic ‘opponent of racial prejudice’ (198, 66); where Pierre-Quint evokes the continuation of specific anti-colonial struggles in the present, Beckett's text speaks of an ‘effort towards emancipation’ and a generic ‘oppressed race […] capable of opposing and vanquishing the invader’ (67). And if the original concludes with a non-specific vision of social equality (‘C'est, au contraire, de l'atténuation des frontières raciales, (de même que des frontières internationales) que peut sortir un monde social nouveau’), the translation bequeaths a greater specificity and some visionary Swedenborgian undertones to Pierre-Quint's internationalism: ‘Racial and international frontiers must be abolished before the new social Jerusalem can arise’ (198, 67).

Beckett's letters to MacGreevy suggest that, among the translations with which he was entrusted, he was most interested in the essays about sculpture – precisely the contributions that fail to interrogate racial politics altogether. Yet it is in these essays that Beckett tries most consistently to improve on the style of the originals and to politicise their terminologies. Henri Lavachery's essay on statuary in the Congo clearly benefits from Beckett's stylistic efforts: for example, the phrase ‘les oeuvres d'art les plus parfaites qu'ait produit le Congo belge’ (literally, the most perfect artworks that the Belgian Congo has produced) is rendered as ‘the indisputable masterpieces of Belgian Congo’ (183, 94). Lavachery does not speak of white profit and exploitation, yet Beckett renders Lavachery's denunciation of the neglect that threatens to annihilate the arts in Africa as a strictly political matter, translating ‘les blancs’ (the whites) as ‘the white man’ and ‘those intruders’ (186, 98). Beckett also gives to Lavachery's generic associations between western civilisation and progress a new anti-colonial flavour. Lavachery suggests that, ‘Si l'on veut réellement que les Noirs d'Afrique accèdent à ce stade de civilisation où celle-ci n'est ni un jouet dans ses produits, ni un esclavage dans son travail, il faut que l'on facilite et entretiennent [sic] la renaissance de leurs arts’ (186) (literally: if one really wants the Black peoples of Africa to access the stage of civilisation at which the work of civilisation is neither a mere toy in the process of production nor slavery, one must facilitate and nurture the revival of their arts). To this Beckett adds further allusions to forced labour and the time-honoured trade of trinkets against valuable colonial goods, redistributing Lavachery's terms into a clear economic equation: ‘If it be desirable honestly for the black peoples of Africa to attain that degree of civilization where civilization will not signify only a supply of useless trifles and labour spell slavery, the revival of their arts must be encouraged and maintained’ (98). B. P. Feuilloley's essay on ‘Magic and Initiation among the Peoples of Ubanghi-Shari’ is subject to similar treatment; in Beckett's hand, it becomes an account of ethnography as a practice of colonisation, which puts in its service all the people and goods it encounters. Such additions and emendations were crucial to the kind of political intervention that Cunard wished to make. She must have been pleasantly surprised: in Beckett's hands, the exuberant and provocative lyricism deployed in many of these difficult texts was given new rigour, and a precision appropriate to the demands of her anthology.

Taking Sides: The Spanish Civil War and the New Idioms of Republicanism

The dialogue between Beckett and Cunard on political history continued beyond Negro to Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, a pamphlet published in 1937 by the Left Review . Although presented as a group enterprise, the pamphlet was primarily Cunard 's work, and marked the continuation of another project: the same year, her printing press served the very anti-fascist activities she had once hoped for,and was used for a series of six plaquettes of poetry entitled Les poètes du monde défendent le peuple espagnol, conceived with the help of Pablo Neruda, which were sold to raise funds for Spanish Republican Relief in Paris.¹⁰² The poets featured included Neruda, as well as Rafael Alberti, Vicente Aleixandre, W. H. Auden, Nicolás Guillén, Brian Howard, Langston Hughes, Federico García Lorca, Tristan Tzara and Randall Swingler – the eminent poet of the British Communist Party and editor of the Left Review . For Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War, Cunard collected 173 statements and published 148 of them.¹⁰³ The contributors responded to a call specifically addressed to ‘the Writers and Poets of England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales’ that aspired to ‘[reflect] faithfully the frame of mind of British authors to-day’. Writers were asked two questions: ‘Are you for, or against, the legal Government and the People of Republican Spain?’ and ‘Are you for, or against, Franco and Fascism ?’¹⁰⁴ This model had precedents; in 1925, Barbusse, Aragon and the Paris Surrealist group had published an appeal condemning the Moroccan Rif War, asking ‘intellectual workers’ to answer with ‘yes’ or ‘no’.¹⁰⁵

The canvassing technique that Cunard employed was strikingly effective and has left a trace in the history of contestation: thirty years later, a pamphlet entitled Authors Take Sides on Vietnam was conceived according to the same model, and was signed by many of the writers who had featured in the Left Review in 1937.¹⁰⁶ Beckett's name does not feature in this sequel, but there are other connections between his work and the protests taking place against the Vietnam War that reflects the distinctive ways in which his work has often been mobilised in support of pacifist campaigns and movements: in 1970, sixteen signed volumes of original editions of Beckett's texts were donated to a large New York auction organised by the American group Publishers for Peace ; this was held at the Gotham Book Mart, with which Beckett had associations. The proceeds were intended to support the election to Congress of candidates opposed to the continuation of the Vietnam War.¹⁰⁷

Cunard was immensely proud of Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War , and later recalled that the 3,000 copies ‘sold out immediately’.¹⁰⁸ The pamphlet opens with a preface entitled ‘The Question’, signed by Aragon, Auden, Cunard, Neruda, Spender, Tzara and others, and dated Paris, June 1937. In this commentary, the contributors emphasised the necessity to ‘take sides’, reminding readers that ‘[t]he equivocal attitude, the Ivory Tower, the paradoxical, the ironic detachment, will no longer do’. The pamphlet made a dedicated effort to situate the Spanish Civil War in a wider context marked by ‘murder and destruction by Fascism’ in Italy and Germany (the land ‘of social injustice and cultural death’), the Italo-Abyssinian War and the continuation of colonial exploitation. The preface also emphasised that ‘To-day, the struggle is in Spain. To-morrow it may be in other countries – our own’. The choice of contributors coincided with the contours of a colonial empire either vanished or under threat; some of the authors polled were from the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, Jamaica and India, and the contributors included Mulk Raj Anand, Boyle, O'Flaherty, O'Casey, Sean O'Faolain and Louis MacNeice. T. S. Eliot and Pound both issued statements classified as ‘neutral?’, while the majority of the contributors stated their opposition to Franco , with many reflecting on the war's historical significance. Marcus Garvey , who had met Cunard in Jamaica during the preparation of Negro, described fascism as ‘the cult of organised murder, invented by the arch-enemies of society’, which ‘tends to destroy civilisation and revert man to his most barbarous state’, concluding: ‘Mussolini and Hitler might well be called the devils of an age, for they are playing hell with civilisation’.

Beckett – who had only a modest record as a writer at that point – contributed a one-word statement that mirrored the anti-fascist slogan ‘¡No pasarán!’: ‘¡UPTHEREPUBLIC!’ The pamphlet certainly accommodated this format and features other comparably brief statements, for example, Rose Macauley's ‘AGAINST FRANCO’. The war's historical coordinates were familiar to Beckett, through his Irish and French acquaintances and as a consequence of his personal interests. He had briefly considered a trip to Spain in 1935,¹⁰⁹ a year before the outbreak of hostilities, when visiting Spain had little to do with taking up arms. There are scattered traces of his interest beyond the letters: for example, the list of censored books and authors that he draws up in ‘Censorship in the Saorstat’ includes Barbusse and the contributors to The Spanish Omnibus, an anthology published in 1932 and edited by Julián Gómez García or Julián Gorkin, the later leader of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM). Barbusse's introduction to the anthology charts developments in Spanish-language literatures since the late nineteenth century against the backdrop of recent political history and concludes that the primary duty of the writer is to safeguard the legacy of the April revolution.¹¹⁰

‘¡UPTHEREPUBLIC!’ and its obscure referentiality have received much attention, and have even earned Beckett a place in the recorded history of the Spanish Civil War.¹¹¹ James McNaughton has pointed to the political polysemy of Beckett's statement, noting that the slogan ‘Up the republic’ was associated with IRA action during the Irish Civil War and with the pro–de Valera side in the 1932 General Election.¹¹² Beckett's statement, through its telegrammatic form, also connects to a longer and more hazardous history of revolutionary action. The same form was used by the Surrealist group to convey political urgency in the first issue of Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution in July 1930, which opened with a question and answer defining the nature of the revolution Surrealism intended to serve. The reproduced exchange consisted of a telegram from Moscow asking what the Surrealist position would be if world war were to be declared against the Soviet Union , and a reply from Breton and Aragon asserting that the Surrealists fully supported the French Communist Party and stood ready to offer all the support that intellectuals could provide.¹¹³ In the context of Cunard's pamphlet, however, Beckett's statement also intersects with the history of republicanism in a specific Irish sense. One of the first objectives of the 1916 Easter Rising was to gain control over communications, particularly over the Irish School of Wireless Telegraphy on O'Connell Street, and it is from there, using a ship's transmitter and Morse code, that a text written by James Connolly announcing the proclamation of the Irish Republic was broadcast to the world.¹¹⁴ The telegrammatic form of Beckett's statement and its attempt to mimic the workings of the Spanish language have a wider significance in the context of the pamphlet: his contribution brings the work of the Spanish republican front in line with these precedents and creates a correlation with the overthrow of British colonial rule in Ireland, suggesting that the overthrow of fascism is a task for all republics. This sentiment resonates with Liam O'Flaherty's own contribution, which emphasises that Spanish republicanism is a struggle, like its Irish precedent, ‘against landlordism and foreign Imperialism’.

Only if the doctrine of non-intervention had not prevailed in Europe at this point would ‘¡UPTHEREPUBLIC!’ read as a mocking declaration of international solidarity. In some ways, the dominant idea that one could take side recast the Spanish Civil War as a conflict around communism, which served Franco well. The stakes were terrifyingly high: this was, as Hugh Thomas emphasises, a ‘world war in miniature’, which Hitler seized as a strategic opportunity to re-arm Germany and bolster the political strength of his regime across Europe.¹¹⁵ In France, the Left saw Spain at war, in the words of André Chamson, as the ‘symbol of liberty in peril’ and the ‘prefiguration of our own future’.¹¹⁶ Much confusion raged in Britain, where responses to the war became more indicative of the state of British political culture.¹¹⁷ For Thomas, the war gave British intellectuals ‘a sense of freedom, the thought of rubbing shoulders with the dispossessed in a half-developed country, above all the illusion that their “action” could be effective’.¹¹⁸ The coordinates of the debate in the Irish Free State were different: Spanish republicanism became associated with Irish socialist republicanism, and Franco with the defence of Catholicism against communism. Donal Ó Drisceoil identifies the outbreak of the war as the point at which old ideological and cultural battles resurfaced.¹¹⁹ The Irish Independent, the Catholic Church and Fine Gael joined forces to support Franco – a manoeuvre denounced in November 1936 at a meeting led by George Gilmore, Owen Sheehy Skeffington , Ernie O'Malley and Peadar O'Donnell .¹²⁰ Some former Blueshirts, following O'Duffy's lead, formed an Irish Brigade and joined Franco's army, while Frank Ryan and his volunteers joined the Spanish republican forces. Tensions rose in the Dáil. In November 1936 also, Cosgrave asked the Dáil to take steps to recognise Franco's government, on the basis that the war raging in Spain was ‘for the victory or defeat of communism and all it stands for, with its denial of Christian principles, individual liberty and democracy’.¹²¹ De Valera delivered a meandering response advocating caution and non-intervention, in keeping with the pact signed by France and Britain. He emphasised that communism in Ireland had virtually vanished, and related the debate around the Spanish war to the red scares that had surrounded Fianna Fáil's election.¹²²

In light of these debates, Beckett's contribution to Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War takes on a new dimension, as a reminder of the history of Irish republicanism and a response to Irish perceptions of the Spanish Civil War. Whether his response also reflects a resentment at being categorised as British by virtue of being Irish, as intimated in the call to writers that initiated the pamphlet, is a matter open to speculation. As usual, his correspondence suggests that no serious thinking took place: a letter to Hone mentions the ‘Spanish business’ and relates that Cunard ‘wrote again, to demand amplifications’.¹²³ For Cunard, Beckett's cryptic statement acquired new meanings in retrospect: her memoir recalls this moment by association, emphasising that Beckett ‘took side with some purpose’ during the war, and that his Resistance activities ‘counted effectively in the Allied effort’.¹²⁴ It is certain that Beckett remained committed to the idea of opposing Franco, whom he perceived, like many French intellectuals of his generation, as a symbol of brutal repression. Various anecdotes testify to his continued concern about levels of censorship in Spain. In 1963, he sent ‘a wire of sympathy’ (somewhat reluctantly, it seems) in response to an appeal from his Italian publisher, Giulio Einaudi , the son of a former Italian president, who was canvassing for support when his anthology of anti-Franco songs contributed to a lasting diplomatic crisis between the Italian and Spanish governments.¹²⁵ Sanctions included being forbidden from entering Spanish territory, and in Italy Einaudi was sued for blasphemy and obscenity and for offending a Head of State.¹²⁶ In 1966, Beckett donated a manuscript of ‘Enough’ – certainly an interesting choice – to a Paris auction organised at the Palais Galliera, to contribute to the payment of fines levied by the Spanish government against a group of Spanish professors, novelists, poets, painters and architects from Barcelona, and against another group of intellectuals and artists from Madrid. All were fined for attending meetings pressing for students’ unions free from official control, and for protesting against the violent repression of a demonstration in Barcelona, during which Catholic priests who had questioned the mistreatment of an imprisoned student leader were subject to police beatings. The auction was organised by a committee presided by the art historian Jean Cassou, and Sartre , de Beauvoir , Picasso, Alexander Calder, Max Ernst and Joan Miró donated artworks and manuscripts.¹²⁷ The following year, Beckett sent a plea for Arrabal to a Madrid tribunal, as part of a series of statements issued by other writers and artists including Ionesco, Achard, François Mauriac, Jean Anouilh and Jean-Louis Barrault. The context of Beckett's decision to intercede in Arrabal's favour is well known: Arrabal, then a French resident, was arrested during a trip to Spain and convicted of treason and blasphemy for writing in one of his books a dedication deemed unpatriotic and obscene (‘Me cago en Dios, en la patria y en todos lo demás’ [I shit on God, my country and everything else]).¹²⁸ The letter that Beckett wrote to the Spanish tribunal deploys a rhetoric conceived to impress: he evokes Arrabal's youth, describes him as mentally and physically fragile, and praises Arrabal as ‘a profoundly Spanish talent’ who has integrated a quintessential national quality into his work. The letter concludes that the court should ‘[l]et Fernando Arrabal return to his own sentence’, on the grounds that he ‘will have to suffer considerably to give us what he still has to give’.¹²⁹ This gesture and many of Beckett's public statements are inscribed in a long reflection on justice and freedom which began with Negro and owes much to Cunard's belief in Beckett's political voice.

Beckett, Surrealist Circles and Cultures of Translation

Cunard's anthology furthered Beckett's career in other ways: it marked his proximity to Surrealist political activities and affirmed his reputation as translator of Surrealist texts. Alongside and beyond his work for Negro, Beckett translated a substantial number of other prose texts and poems by Breton, Soupault, Eluard and Crevel. It is likely that he translated more Surrealist texts, which were published unsigned. His translations were pioneering: in the early 1930s, the French Surrealists rarely published outside of their own reviews, and the channels through which Surrealist work was disseminated abroad were few. Jolas's transition was the first magazine to introduce Surrealism to an Anglo-American readership.¹³⁰ In 1932, the Surrealist issue of Edward Titus 's This Quarter , featuring many texts translated by Beckett, followed in its footsteps in bringing Surrealism to the attention of a wider public. Surrealist work was also disseminated via New Verse and the Europa Press directed by Reavey , who was close to the British Surrealists.¹³¹ Other than Beckett, Devlin and Coffey , early translators of French Surrealist texts into English included Man Ray, e.e. cummings, Eugene Jolas , Kay Boyle, David Gascoyne and Humphrey Jennings.

Among the artists associated with British Surrealism, Beckett befriended the painter John Banting , whom he had met through Cunard.¹³² Banting, a militant communist and anti-fascist, was one of Cunard's close allies: he designed banners for demonstrations in support of the Scottsboro Boys , helped her collect materials for Negro – to which he also contributed – in New York, and later joined her on a trip to besieged republican territories in Spain.¹³³ Beyond Banting, however, British Surrealism remained a world largely unknown to Beckett: he met Gascoyne much later, in the early 1950s, through Duthuit.¹³⁴ His letters convey his lack of sympathy for the variety of Surrealism manufactured by Herbert Read; fortunately for Beckett, the influential Read thought more highly of his work. Read's Surrealism was firmly aligned with English writing traditions, and with an aesthetic that obscured social and political dimensions.¹³⁵ His parallel attempts to theorise of the role of the artist often led him to blur the distinctions between political creeds, and to present the poet as ‘the agent of destruction in society’, who ‘must oppose all organized conceptions of the State, not only those which we inherit from the past, but equally those which are imposed on people in the name of the future’.¹³⁶

Information about Beckett's contacts with the Paris Surrealist group is largely anecdotal, but even in the early days, he remained a step ahead of MacGreevy, Devlin and Coffey; a letter from Devlin to MacGreevy from September 1933 states that Beckett has met both Breton and Eluard , and relays Beckett's observations: ‘Breton impressed him and Eluard inspires affection; which is proper’.¹³⁷ Beckett's correspondence indicates that he perceived Eluard's poetry as an important precedent and continued to work in imaginative proximity to Eluard. In 1938, he toyed with the idea of giving to Eluard a recently assembled corpus of poems in French and, possibly, of asking Marcel Duchamp to act as intermediary.¹³⁸ Many of his friends and collaborators shared such informal ties to the Surrealist circle: the world of Peggy Guggenheim, for example, revolved around Breton, Eluard, Duchamp, Calder, Mesens and Tanguy at the time of her tumultuous affair with Beckett.¹³⁹ From the late 1920s through to the 1950s, Beckett frequented Surrealist disciples and associates of every imaginable stripe, from Philippe Soupault – who wrote the first exploration of automatic writing with Breton , Les champs magnétiques – to Duchamp, Giacometti, Paz and Patrick Waldberg. The literary circles in which Beckett worked regularly intersected with Surrealist cultures of protest: Cunard , Duthuit , Jean Lurçat, Giacometti, Ernst, Paz and Soupault, for example, endorsed some of the many manifestos, protests and appeals issued by the Surrealists over time. Many of those who were sympathetic to Surrealism entertained an ambivalent relation to the core Paris group, whose internal dynamics were deeply fractious and involved numerous attempted slights, perceived betrayals, withdrawals and verdicts of exclusion. Some of Beckett's close friends were involved with the radical Surrealist fringe: Blin joined several Surrealist offshoots during the 1930s, including the revolutionary group Contre-Attaque, and endorsed a number of Surrealist manifestos between 1934 and 1939.¹⁴⁰ Prior to meeting Beckett, the Montreal-born painter Jean-Paul Riopelle signed several Surrealist tracts and appeals; he exhibited paintings at the 1947 Surrealist exhibition in Paris , and joined the pro-Breton group that dissociated itself from the French Communist Party that year.¹⁴¹ Many of Beckett's letters and essays demonstrate his continued interest in Surrealism and its legacies, and attest to his careful scrutiny of texts and paintings by André Masson, Ernst, Paalen and Freundlich throughout the 1930s and after 1945.

There are other connections between Beckett's own writing and Surrealist political cultures. Péron's translation of ‘Alba’, for example, appeared in the last issue of an anti-fascist review tied to Surrealism and entitled Soutes: Revue de culture révolutionnaire internationale.¹⁴² This was the first of Beckett's poems to appear in a French publication, and the choice of Soutes is significant: the review, which was conceived and delivered at the same time as the French Popular Front , was characterised by its political militancy and internationalist ambitions. Prior to 1938, Soutes published volumes of anti-militarist poetry, Spanish republican poetry and a long poem about the Spanish Civil War by Jacques Prévert denouncing the collusion between Franco and the Catholic Church; these books were sold at popular gatherings, at political meetings and on picket lines.¹⁴³ The review's founder and main editor, Luc Decaunes, was Eluard's son-in-law, and the editorial board included Péron, Decaunes and Jean Marcenac – who, like Decaunes, was a member of the French Communist Party . In 1938, Soutes was infused with melancholic evocations of the heady summer of 1936 and the Popular Front spirit; the Spring issue featuring ‘Alba’ included texts by Decaunes, Péron, Tzara, Marcenac and others who had ties to Communism and Trotskyism, and later rallied the anti-Nazi Resistance .

These affiliations were to prove crucial for Beckett's career in the war's immediate aftermath, when Eluard and Aragon enjoyed immense influence as the poets of the liberation, and when those who still believed in Surrealism rallied around Breton and Péret to redefine the political remit of artistic endeavour and create a new literary scene. Fortunately for Beckett, his pre-war translations had made a lasting impression: Blin , for example, recalls that Beckett was more widely recognised in Parisian circles as translator of Surrealism than as poet or novelist.¹⁴⁴ Tzara, widely known for his support to Stalinism and long-standing associations with different strands of the French Left, was rumoured to be acting as Beckett's literary ‘advisor’ at that point, and Maurice Nadeau later recalled that Tzara worked hard to attract attention to Beckett.¹⁴⁵ As for Blin, he stated that he knew of Beckett's work long before their first encounter, through Tzara, who had spoken to him about En attendant Godot.¹⁴⁶ There are indications that, for long-standing Surrealist renegades also, Beckett could offer a model of literary activity: in 1969, the year the Surrealist group eventually disbanded, Aragon published a long article entitled ‘I had voted for Samuel Beckett’ that contrasts sharply with the flow of press commentaries on Beckett's Nobel Prize emphasising or deploring the complexity of Beckett's national attachments. Aragon stated his admiration for Beckett's writing, presented himself as an assiduous reader of his work, and explained that Beckett had been on his mind constantly during the composition of his most recent essay, Je n'ai jamais appris à écrire ou Les Incipit (1969). His tribute is certainly moving. ‘Go on? I will only have known my beginning. I have never learnt how to write’.¹⁴⁷

Translating Surrealism

The translations that Beckett contributed to Negro hold particular significance in the political history of Surrealism. By positioning Surrealist texts alongside studies of the Harlem Renaissance and documents related to the work of the League Against Imperialism , Cunard's anthology inscribed Surrealist political affirmations in a longer series of historical struggles against racial and social injustice. Yet the literary reviews that commissioned and published Beckett's translations during the 1930s could not be further removed from such model: Jolas's transition, Reavey's Europa Press and Titus 's This Quarter manufactured a nihilistic and depoliticised version of Surrealism that had little to do with the activities of the movement. Their versions of Surrealism were entirely dissociated from the polemical work published in reviews such as Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution – which made a concerted attempt to document the history of colonial oppression over the course of its short life between July 1930 and May 1933 – and contrast sharply with the account of Surrealist political aspirations offered by Gascoyne a few years later.¹⁴⁸

transition, in particular, published manifestos that echoed the mystical aspirations of Surrealism but did not emulate their political focus and anti-colonial persuasion. When Jolas and writers from the transition circle proclaimed the ‘revolution of the word’ in 1929, they also called for a revolution divorced from politics and from ‘sociological ideas’.¹⁴⁹ In a later attempt to elaborate on the concept, Jolas explained that the revolution of language would operate in the realm of metaphysics, according to a kind of mysticism that ‘owe[d] nothing to Surrealism’.¹⁵⁰ Similarly, ‘Poetry is Vertical’ – published in March 1932 and bearing Beckett's signature – borrowed from a revolutionary register to call for a non-political revolution occurring through word, syntax and the invention of new hermetic languages. The text proclaimed ‘the autonomy of the poetic vision’, ‘the hegemony of the inner life’ and the necessity to safeguard ‘orphic forces […] from deterioration, no matter what social system ultimately is triumphant’.¹⁵¹ The manifesto was aligned with Jolas's Vertigralist philosophy, which encompassed strictly linguistic and psychic phenomena, and upheld a mysticism recalling the 1924 Surrealist Manifesto, but deprived of political implications. The signatories of ‘Poetry is Vertical’ also included MacGreevy and Hans Arp, who had just broken away from Surrealist circles. Beckett later denied involvement in the composition of Jolas's manifesto, and his own perspective on it remains unclear.¹⁵² It seems likely that he agreed to see his signature added to it because the same issue of transition featured another text by him, ‘Sedendo et Quiescendo’, an excerpt from Dream of Fair to Middling Women categorised by Jolas as an example of ‘anamyth’ or ‘psychograph’.¹⁵³ The June 1936 issue of transition featuring Beckett's ‘Malacoda’, ‘Enueg II’ and ‘Dortmunder’ confirms this alignment and presents Beckett as a disciple of Jolas's Vertigralism. The issue, published shortly before the 1936 Surrealist exhibition, ends with a manifesto explaining that transition will bring about a ‘metaphysical revolution’ capable of overturning the ‘world-crisis and its resultant suicidal nihilism’, concluding with the call, ‘DREAMERS OF THE WORLD UNITE!’¹⁵⁴

The Surrealist issue of This Quarter, published in September 1932 and featuring translations by Beckett, was enmeshed in similar uncertainties concerning the ways in which Surrealist political activity might be represented to an English-speaking readership. Its editor, Edward Titus, was hostile to Surrealist revolutionary aspirations, and, under his editorship, This Quarter became in many ways a vanity project, financed by his wife Helena Rubinstein and her cosmetics company.¹⁵⁵ In his foreword, Titus explained that his aim was to disseminate unfamiliar Surrealist texts and that Breton, his guest editor, had been expressly asked to ‘[eschew] politics and such other topics as might not be in honeyed accord with Anglo-American censorship usages, although entirely permissible in France’.¹⁵⁶ In his own introductory essay tracing the history of Surrealism, Breton graciously noted that Titus had provided a precious opportunity to present Surrealist work to British and American readers ‘at more effectual length than has been possible hitherto’, explaining that ‘the more or less rigorous controls to which publications in English are subjected in English-speaking countries obliges us to pass over in silence whatever in [Surrealist] activity bears on social conflicts and morals’.¹⁵⁷ Yet, by 1932, the association between the French Surrealist group and the French Communist Party was old news. Breton , Aragon, Eluard and Péret had stated their adherence to Marxism and joined the French Communist Party in early 1927, and their intricate trajectories around the French Communist Party and the Comintern during the 1930s and beyond are well known. Their political concerns inflected their poetry: even Eluard, then the least demonstrative in the political arena, published in 1931 in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution a poem that proclaimed his hatred of the ruling bourgeoisie, police and Church.¹⁵⁸

The selection of texts in This Quarter alludes to the controversies ignited by the Surrealists at several points, but these allusions are so scattered and muted that their political dimension comes across as unconvincing and somewhat delusional. An example is the unsigned translation of Crevel's ‘The Period of Sleeping-Fits’, which claims that ‘[t]o draw frontiers between the different psychic states is no more justifiable than to draw them between geographical states. It is for surrealism to attack both, to condemn every kind of patriotism, even the patriotism of the unconscious’.¹⁵⁹ This call to redefine the relation between the imagined and the real is echoed elsewhere, for example, in his essay against patriotism in Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution from the same period, but it loses its political resonance in the context of This Quarter. Elsewhere, in his potted history of Surrealism, Breton mentions briefly the polemic generated by Aragon's ‘Le Front Rouge’ (1930), a poem calling for violent revolutionary action against institutional socialism, designating Léon Blum and partisans of social democracy as targets.¹⁶⁰ Aragon was prosecuted for ‘incitation to military insubordination and provocation to murder’, a charge questioned by hundreds of writers and intellectuals who expressed their support for him.¹⁶¹ The signatories of the Surrealist tract issued in Aragon's defence included Cunard and some of Beckett's later friends (Duthuit, Lurçat, Giacometti), but none of his Dublin and London acquaintances. In the wake of the controversy, Aragon, Unik and Sadoul left the group to seek new political outlets. Throughout 1932, the Surrealists were ensnared in this controversy and continued to issue pamphlets and statements. The portrait of Surrealism offered in This Quarter could not have been further removed from their activities and concerns at that point.

The contribution that Beckett made to Titus and Breton's Surrealist issue was substantial and includes signed translations of poems by Breton and Eluard, prose texts from Les champs magnétiques by Breton and Soupault, and other prose excerpts by Crevel, Breton and Eluard. The overall selection is distinctive and presents the Surrealists as hedonistic anarcho-libertarians, trapped in hermetic disagreement with the figureheads of French psychiatry in the wake of their controversial experiments with automatic writing – in other words, an inoffensive aesthetic movement, unlikely to imagine alternative forms of social and political organisation, or to influence the course of international events. Such version of Surrealism was reinstated with the publication of Thorns of Thunder, a collection edited by Reavey featuring Beckett's translations of Eluard 's poems. The volume was published to coincide with the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London – an event widely publicised in the British press that, for Roland Penrose, marked the genuine beginnings of Surrealism in Britain.¹⁶² Reavey was keen to involve his team of translators and made plans for a public reading by Eluard, with readings of translations by other contributors including Beckett. Beckett declined the invitation, and his correspondence suggests that he protested against Reavey's original plan because he had not been consulted.¹⁶³ In the end, the event took another shape: Eluard read excerpts from his own poetry as well as poems by Lautréamont, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Cros, Jarry, Breton, Mesens, Péret and Picasso, while Gascoyne , Jennings and Reavey read translations of Eluard's poems and English Surrealist verse.¹⁶⁴ Arguably, Beckett's response was also an attempt to dissociate himself from an emerging strand of British Surrealism that he found confused and opportunistic. The London exhibition attracted other expressions of dissent, notably from three Birmingham artists who pointed out that the criteria determining the choice of exhibits were too loose and broad to be designated as Surrealist.¹⁶⁵

Thorns of Thunder resonates with the domesticated version of Surrealism presented at the 1936 exhibition: it portrays Eluard 's poetry as solely driven by mysticism, ekphrasis and classical traditions of love poetry.¹⁶⁶ Reviewing the volume in The Dublin Magazine, Leventhal presented Beckett as uniquely able to ‘catch’ Eluard's ‘elusiveness’ and seized the opportunity to explicate Surrealist political sentiment: his article points to the tensions between the Surrealists and the Communist Party, arguing that it is necessary ‘for the man in the literary tavern’ to know how ‘to discuss surrealism, albeit superficially’, and to learn to ‘distinguish between Leninism and Marxism ’ more generally.¹⁶⁷ Leventhal's praise of Beckett's skill also foregrounded other coded literary insights: Beckett's ‘Cascando’, a poem featuring a muted allusion to the Irish laws on abortion and contraception, appeared next to poems by Ernie O'Malley in the same issue.

Cunard's Negro anthology was, then, the first English-language publication to give substance to the idea of a Surrealist political front, tied to major internationalist movements for equality and social justice. Situated in this context, Paz's Anthology of Mexican Poetry, a large-scale translation project commissioned by UNESCO , also becomes far more than the product of a simple accident of fate, as Beckett liked to portray it. Like Negro, Paz's anthology required considerable investment, and yet is rarely evoked in studies tracing Beckett's career, so much so that the 1985 Grove Press reedition was opportunistically presented as a lost Beckett text, its dustjacket gloss claiming the work as a collaboration that the young Beckett, fresh out of Trinity College Dublin, had once undertaken with Paz.¹⁶⁸ The task of producing the anthology was monumental: the published edition features 103 poems, but Beckett initially translated many more. The minutiae of translation absorbed much of his time between January and April 1950, and may have required further spurts of work thereafter: a letter to MacGreevy from September 1952 complains that too much time has been taken up with yet another UNESCO task.¹⁶⁹ The volume saw light after considerable delays, a decade after Beckett first applied to UNESCO for translatorial work. It was published by Indiana University Press in December 1958 – six years after the French version.

UNESCO and the Cultural Politics of Translation

The Anthology of Mexican Poetry had diplomatic, rather than literary origins: it arose from a special agreement with the Mexican government in the wake of the 1948 UNESCO conference in Mexico City, and it was commissioned for UNESCO's Collection of Representative Works, which aspired to make masterpieces of world literature available predominantly in French and English.¹⁷⁰ This large and ambitious translation project, initiated in 1948, was then in its infancy, and Paz's anthology was the second instalment in a subseries dedicated to Latin America. Both French and English editions present the anthology and, more broadly, the Collection of Representative Works as contributions to a wider endeavour to promote reconciliation between nations liberated from totalitarianism: the anthology is earmarked as an attempt to ‘emphasize the essential solidarity of creative artists in different nations, languages, centuries, and latitudes’.¹⁷¹ These aspirations were aligned with UNESCO's foundational remit and its constitutional aim to contribute to peace and security by promoting the principles of the United Nations Charter. Naturally, aspirations to peace, security and collaboration also made for fraught political negotiations: as Gail Archibald has shown, UNESCO was the political medium through which the American government sought to implement its own moral and economic models in the wake of a war it had reluctantly joined.¹⁷²

If the Anthology of Mexican Poetry was a long time in the making, this was due to circumstances shaped by UNESCO's internal politics and the shifting position that Mexico occupied in a larger game of political chess played out beyond UNESCO. The volume also owed much to networks established around Spanish republicanism that would have been familiar to Paz since the days of the Spanish Civil War – Paz had travelled to Spain in 1937 to attend the Second International Congress of Antifascist Writers and later attempted to join the republican army.¹⁷³ The idea of publishing an anthology of Mexican poetry was initiated by the critic and translator Ricardo Baeza, a Spanish republican in exile who worked for UNESCO and provided Paz with a link to the institution.¹⁷⁴ Gerald Brenan was later enrolled to proof Beckett's translations prior to publication; he had authored a landmark study of Spanish political history, The Spanish Labyrinth, and had also been associated with republican circles. Guy Lévis Mano , who translated the French version, entitled Anthologie de la poésie mexicaine , had published Surrealist poems expressing opposition to Franco at the time of the Spanish Civil War. It is certainly intriguing that, in this context, Beckett should be positioned as a counterpart to Lévis Mano, an artisan with a unique portfolio of work as typographer, printer and editor, a prominent figure in the Parisian world of Surrealist poetry and political writing – and the person to whom Cunard , incidentally, had sold one of her printing presses after Negro, for his Editions GLM.¹⁷⁵

For Beckett, the Anthology of Mexican Poetry would remain a sorry episode and an unwelcome reminder of lean times. Reviews were mostly lukewarm and seemed only to confirm the sentiment: one reviewer thought that the originals were ‘superbly’ rendered, observing that the whole volume was, nevertheless, ‘very far removed from the grisly slob-lands of the Beckett country’, while others described ‘uninspired’ translations that occasionally succeeded in rendering the feel of the originals.¹⁷⁶ Beckett's letters to Mary Hutchinson and Kay Boyle issue damning verdicts on the volume, lamenting the inclusion of poor poems and his uneven grasp of Spanish .¹⁷⁷ As was the case with Cunard's Negro, Beckett's affirmations about the Anthology of Mexican Poetry do not convey the intensity of attention and insight that he dedicated to the task. The selected poems were immensely challenging and the work involved far more than simple translation, for the anthology was also a political enterprise that came with its own tensions, disputes and solidarities.

There was much rewriting and discontent behind the scenes, not least because Paz, as his foreword reveals, felt uneasy about both the Spanish-language remit of the anthology and its exclusion of pre-conquest and contemporary poetry. Before the French volume was completed, he related his dissatisfaction to Reyes, complaining that the intense process of revising had not succeeded in improving Lévis Mano's ‘unfaithful’ translations; furthermore, the selection was fundamentally unsatisfactory, and the confused introduction by the ‘sectarian’ Paul Claudel , previously known for his pro-Franco stance, was, he felt, inappropriate to a discussion of Mexican poetry, due to Claudel's theological and Eurocentric fixations.¹⁷⁸ No such problems arose in response to Beckett's translations, and it seems that Paz wished to see them appear as written. However, when plans to publish the English anthology resurfaced some years later, Indiana University Press wrote to Beckett, informing him of the necessity to correct his sometimes ‘awkward’, ‘infelicitous’ or ‘florid’ translations.¹⁷⁹ It seems that, initially, either Brenan or Indiana University Press wanted to include the line ‘revised by Mr Gerald Brenan’ on the book cover, although there were no clear reasons for this: thirty years later, Brenan asserted that he and his wife had found only one minor error in Beckett's manuscript.¹⁸⁰

Paz's recollections of the anthology were as ambivalent as Beckett's. He remained for a long time unwilling to discuss this episode, and sent an irate response to Deirdre Bair when she contacted him in 1974 about the anthology.¹⁸¹ In the 1990s, however, he gave a fuller account to Eliot Weinberger, explaining that he had taken over the enterprise because he was, at the time, employed by the Mexican embassy in Paris and was in need of money. Much of the content had been imposed, but he was at least given the freedom to choose his translators. He would have preferred to edit an anthology of Latin American poetry more closely aligned with his internationalist beliefs, he claimed, and resented the conditions imposed by the Mexican poet Jaime Torres Bodet, UNESCO's Director-General, who directed the publications list.¹⁸² To Paz's dismay, Torres Bodet commissioned introductions by Claudel for the French edition and by the Oxford scholar C. M. Bowra for its English counterpart; he also decided that the anthology would conclude with the work of Alfonso Reyes, thus excluding the contemporary Mexican poets admired by Paz. Ultimately, the only living poets included in the anthology were two former diplomats: Reyes and Enrique González Martínez. The anthology's fate remained tied to Torres Bodet's career; he resigned from his UNESCO post in 1952 over a budget controversy shaped by Cold War dynamics and tensions with American representatives over the cultural role of UNESCO.¹⁸³ It is likely that the 1952 publication of the French volume, in an extended edition that reproduced the original Spanish poems, and the long-delayed publication of its English version owed much to tensions over the institution's grants and future.

As translator, Beckett was not at all at home with UNESCO. The liberal humanism sponsored by the organisation and its internal politics were deeply alien to him, and he had nothing positive to say about its internationalist ambitions. His letters deplore ‘an atmosphere of futility & incredulity’ and conclude that UNESCO may not last, or perhaps only ‘in a very modified form’.¹⁸⁴ Fortunately for his term as translator, this was not the case, and UNESCO supplied him with a steady trickle of commissions. He worked on a tribute volume to Goethe published in 1949 in Zurich, revising some English translations including ‘Message from Earth’, a translation of ‘Recado Terrestre’ by the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral.¹⁸⁵ This poem reads as a homage to Goethe's wisdom; it is also phrased as a mock-prayer for a new state of grace, on behalf of a warring world in agony. Such translation tasks required a deft hand: Goethe's work had been mined by the Nazis to bolster their nationalist iconography, and the post-war reinterpretation of his work was a large-scale endeavour fraught with many cultural and scholarly anxieties.¹⁸⁶ UNESCO's reappraisal anticipated the growth of a new consensus around Goethe and returned to Nietzsche's view of Goethe as a ‘good European’ who resisted the pressures of nationalist sentiment.¹⁸⁷ The volume implemented a reconciliation of another order, bringing very different political trajectories together. The contributors included writers with staunch political ambitions and politicians and diplomats harbouring literary ambitions – Senghor, Spender and Reyes, as well as Benedetto Croce; Thomas Mann; Carl J. Burckhardt, Swiss ambassador to France and director of the International Committee of the Red Cross between 1945 and 1948; Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, later vice-president and president of India; the Egyptian writer, academic and politician Taha Hussein Bey; and Jules Romains, newly appointed to the French Academy to replace Abel Bonnard. The preface to the volume, meanwhile, reproduces a statement by Torres Bodet asserting UNESCO's ambition to overcome enshrined political tensions through the medium of culture. Paraphrasing Nietzsche's verdict, Torres Bodet presents Goethe as ‘a great European’ and ‘a great universalist’, and asserts that UNESCO, in keeping with its aims of ‘harmonizing and reconciling’, is ‘proud to salute Goethe's memory and to recognize in it an imperishable testimony to what the human mind can accomplish when its desire for knowledge, that is for analysis and awareness, is combined with the power of understanding’.¹⁸⁸

Later in 1949, Jean-Jacques Mayoux and Emile Delavenay , who worked for UNESCO alongside other normaliens, again invited Beckett to act as ghost writer, for a collection entitled Interrelations of Cultures: Their Contribution to International Understanding, which grew out of an international UNESCO colloquium promoting cultural diversity, cooperation and a reflection on ‘the present stage of the indigenous cultures of the various peoples of the world’.¹⁸⁹ The topic was also a response to global anxieties regarding the possibility of a new world war, and the volume emphasised UNESCO's commitment to human rights and progressive economic ideals. The conference proceedings gathered academic essays on a range of questions pertaining to philosophy, anthropology, sociology, musicology, economics, archaeology, history of art and literature. At the request of Mayoux and Delavenay, Beckett revised an essay by Shih-Hsiang Chen entitled ‘The Cultural Essence of Chinese Literature’; more precisely, he retranslated into English the extant French translation of the essay by Louis Cazamian, for the sum of $200 – a significant fee at a time of successive currency devaluations in France.¹⁹⁰

Clearly, old networks of contacts played a role in Beckett's appointment as translator for the Anthology of Mexican Poetry. ENS alumni occupied prominent posts at UNESCO, as they did in many other spheres of state administration and government in France: René Maheu , for example, became Torres Bodet's Director of Cabinet in 1948, Deputy Director General in 1954 and eventually Director General. Delavenay , who had been Beckett's student at the ENS, later explained that it was Mayoux who had initially recommended Beckett to Paz.¹⁹¹ For his part, Paz mentioned his interest in Beckett's French-language fiction as the trigger for his appointment: he had read ‘L'Expulsé’ in Fontaine, which also published his own poetry, and admired Beckett's novella.¹⁹² Ironically, this is one of the texts in which Beckett deploys most successfully and strikingly a whole array of translation effects outside of the process of translation.¹⁹³ It seems more likely that Paz chose Beckett on the basis of his translations for Negro and This Quarter: the Surrealists – Péret and Breton above all – maintained a long-standing fascination with Mexico, and Paz, a well-connected poet in both Mexico and Paris, was close to Breton and knew Péret well.¹⁹⁴ Perhaps Breton refreshed Paz's memories: Breton and Beckett met in April 1948,¹⁹⁵ a few months after Péret's return from seven years in Mexico, just as Breton and Péret were seeking to rekindle old partnerships and rebuild the Surrealist group.

Translating the Anthology of Mexican Poetry

There is little documentation of the translation process as such, but ample evidence of the difficulties that Beckett encountered, and the pains he took to render the specificities of flora and fauna while respecting prosody.¹⁹⁶ His grasp of Spanish – a language he attempted to learn in 1933 and thereafter, but never mastered – was poor, and the poems featured many challenging Mexicanisms. Having found that he had unwittingly omitted some lines, stanzas and even whole poems, he had to revise all his translations at the end of the process. To Paz, Beckett made clear that he didn't speak Spanish and said that he would rely on his Latin and the assistance of a friend, likely the unknown helper dismissed in correspondence as an arrogant ‘petit normalien’ (Beckett had other Hispanist friends – Coffey, for example).¹⁹⁷ Interestingly, Paz was never daunted by Beckett's lack of fluency and retained a boundless faith in his capacities. In the 1990s, he explained that he and Beckett were on friendly terms and met occasionally to resolve translation problems; he also recalled that they shared a dislike of the Mexican Romantic poets, and an admiration for modern poets such as José Juan Tablada and Ramón López Velarde, as well as seventeenth-century poets such as Luis de Sandoval y Zapata and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (the latter, however, does not feature in the published volume). Beckett's correspondence conveys his enduring admiration for others, such as Miguel de Guevara and the only female poet he translated, Sor Juana de Asbaje.¹⁹⁸ Paz also emphasised Beckett's dedication to the task and the beauty of his translations. He had little sympathy for Beckett's personality, however, and stated that Beckett ‘was not interested in anything exterior, only his own philosophical and existential problems’, that ‘[h]e had no anthropological interest or curiosity’. ‘He was a man of his time, a certain moment in Western civilization. He never showed any interest in the Americas or even in the United States, as Kafka did. He was too much a prisoner of himself, of his own obsessions. His country was his room’.

These declarations are important, not simply because they repeat common myths about Beckett prevalent since the 1950s. Beckett's contribution to the anthology contradicts this verdict, offering a subtle rewriting of the original poems into a broader history of imperialist conquest across the globe. His translations speak of a colonial violence inflicted and felt, charting a haunted territory animated by mysterious forces capable of taking over. These aspects of Beckett's translations are certainly at odds with other sections requested by UNESCO. Bowra's foreword and Paz's short history of Mexican poetry evade questions of conquest, ascendency and indigeneity; while Bowra barely mentions Mexico at all, Paz celebrates the exoticist baroque that brought Spanish and indigenous traditions together, describing the poetry of the colonial period as a derivative art without commenting on the cultural imaginary that such poets replicate but do not own. His treatment of the Mexican revolution is confined to the raising of minor points about the formal innovations of López Velarde, portrayed as the father of modern Mexican poetry. Overall, Paz's introduction offers abstract evaluations of poetic forms and posits a purely formal teleology between poetry from the early days of conquest and modernist poetry, concluding that ‘the only true revolutionary poetry is apocalyptic poetry’, but without entering into specifics about how poetry ‘transmutes’ history (41). For Paz, poetry simply provides the ultimate refuge from ‘the domination of history’, which in his view has never been greater (44). Paz's notes to the poems, however, render the pressure of historical circumstance more clearly, discussing the poets’ social origins and political relations between Spain and the colonies. These notes Beckett translated particularly faithfully.

At times, the divorce between poetry and history described by Paz reverberates in the selections chosen for inclusion. For example, the anthology features a fragment from Ignacio Rodríguez Galván's ‘Profecia de Guatimoc’, a poem that presents a speaker estranged from his beloved, friends and family, who engages in a dialogue with the spirit of Cuauhtemoc, the last Aztec emperor, imprisoned and tortured by Cortés. In the full-length poem, his dialogue with the ghost of the martyred emperor addresses the ways in which indigenous American peoples have lost their status, wealth and power, and yields political prophecies foretelling the downfall of a corrupt elite ruling Mexico and the collapse of Paris and London, ultimately expressing the hope that justice will be done and that the time of revenge will come for Mexico's indigenous peoples.¹⁹⁹ Paz's anthology transforms the poem into a declaration of existential anguish: the only sections included in the volume are those bracketing the dialogue between ghost and speaker, which focus exclusively on the isolated speaker's thoughts and visions of death and resuscitation.

There are many tensions between the framing of the anthology and Beckett's translation choices. These are perhaps most readily discernible in the opening poem by Francisco de Terrazas, which is permeated by spectral references to the Spanish conquest of Mexico that are largely introduced by the translation. The original text is a love poem, which relates the speaker's dream of being thrown off from a rock (‘una peña’) by the woman he loves. Beckett's translation, however, presents a poetic voice under the sway of something other than love: it offers an apocalyptic vision in which terror and powerlessness have overwhelmed the spectrum of possible feelings. Beckett's speaker dreams of being ‘thrown from a crag/by one who held my will in servitude,/and all but fallen to the griping jaws/of a wild beast in wait for me below’ (49). Other translations introduce new historical undertones and accentuate the political predicament that informs the originals. For example, Beckett's translation of Manuel José Othón's ‘Idilio Salvaje’ slightly alters the register of the original, where, in the midst of horrific visions of devastation, a ‘wild’ Indian woman appears to the speaker, who tries in vain not to forget. The lines ‘Flota en todo el paisaje tal pavura/como si fuera un campo de matanza’ (107) are rendered in a manner that introduces a proximity to ritual sacrifice, animal or human (‘Such horror hovers over all the scene/as on a place steeped in the blood of slaughter’) (132). The French translation opts for ‘champ de meurtre’, field of murder, the distinctive nineteenth-century French usage of which invokes the military battlefield (107).

Some of Beckett's most delicate translation choices strengthen a historical dimension that is only half-stated in the original poems, and bring together coded signifiers of colonial conquest and imperialist custom. The translation of Reyes's ‘Yerbas del Tarahumara’ introduces a reference to cúscus, the Spanish word for couscous, in a description of the Tarahumaras’ pharmacopeia: Beckett renders the line ‘yerbaniz, limoncillo, simonillo’ (or mint marigold, lime, horseweed) as ‘mint and cuscus and birthroot’ (190).²⁰⁰ The French translation by Lévis Mano, however, remains neutral, opting for ‘menthe, piloselle, simonillo’ (152). For Weinberger, this is one of several slippages resulting from Beckett's unfamiliarity with indigenous Mexican cultures, and it reflects Beckett's neglect for his sources more generally.²⁰¹ This seems doubtful: on the contrary, a close reading of Beckett's translations illuminates his experiment with historical logics. The medicinal practices of the Tarahumaras, and their use of peyote in particular, were far from obscure in the wake of Antonin Artaud's accounts of his travels to Mexico and to the land of the Tarahumaras, published in different forms from 1937 onwards.²⁰² Many details in Beckett's translation convey the care with which he rendered the complexities of the original poem, which stands as the most direct evocation of colonial plunder, exploitation and forcible conversion in the anthology. In Beckett's hands, Reyes's poem becomes a tribute to the nobility and philosophical insights of the Tarahumaras – issues that, in another context, had also preoccupied Artaud. To this effect, Beckett's translation introduces many antiquated terms, exotic references and baroque grammatical reversals, and is considerably more solemn than its French counterpart. Gradually, Beckett's speaker becomes alienated from the documented history invoked in the original: in a subsequent stanza, Don Felipe Segundo is rendered as ‘Don Philip the Second’, a seemingly provincial ruler who shares little with Philip II and the golden age of the Spanish Empire. Beckett's stylised reworkings resonate with other reimaginings of Mexican geography: his rendering of the Aztec calendar stone as a ‘stone of sun’ (another demonstration of his ignorance, for Weinberger) anticipates the ‘pierre de soleil’ that Péret celebrated over a decade later in his translation of Paz's Piedra de sol. Such creative additions and subtle rewriting contrast with Lévis Mano's more literal approach. Paz , who believed in translation as a creative process, was unlikely to take issue with Beckett's choices.²⁰³

Throughout his translations, Beckett counters the anti-historical impulse that frames the collection, deploying various forms of historical remapping and shadowy references to Scotland, Ireland and North Africa. These minute shifts are significant: the Mexican poets included in the anthology are mostly of Spanish origin, and the original poems remain haunted by colonial history in ways that are largely coded or implicit. At times, Beckett's translations edge close to Irish and Scottish balladry; for example, the lines ‘no queda ya ni un resto de verdura,/ni una brizna de hierba, ni un abrojo’ from Manuel José Othón's ‘Elegía’ (101) become, ‘there survives not a trace of verdure,/not a blade of grass, not a thistle’ (128). ‘Thistle’ is not in itself an incorrect or improbable translation but certainly differs from the literal French, ‘ronce’ or bramble, and resonates with Beckett's persistent rendering of peña as ‘crag’. Elsewhere, Beckett introduces a historical shading absent from the original; his translation of José Juan Tablada's ‘El ídolo en el atrio’ renders ‘Y en pleno día las caudas de los quetzales/suben y giran como fuegos artificiales’ (133) as ‘And in broad day the quetzels’ tails soar and whirl like Catherine wheels’ (157), playing upon the dual meaning of the Catherine wheel, as both a type of fireworks and a torture instrument used to crush limbs in Roman times and during the Spanish Inquisition. Other translations acquire a Parisian flavour, evoking ‘this grisaille that never is/lit up by any colour’ (127), or a mock Sartrean flavour (‘what a nausea of self-disgust!’) (133).

Ultimately, Paz's anthology offers precious insights into the manner in which Beckett, in his humble capacity as translator, participated in a wider reflection on the formation of new international dialogues arising from a reshaped and frequently occluded imperial past. Beckett's own rendering of political history, here as in Negro, wrestles with unresolved questions often half-glimpsed in the recesses of the original texts. To wars long gone or raging far away he was never indifferent, and the vast body of translations that he crafted and honed reveals the attention and care with which he represented the political anxieties of others. As translator, he worked according to his own principles and aspirations, unburdened by inherited political affiliations, but armed with a body of historical knowledge acquired from decades of literary engagement. It is in these translations – precisely when he attempted to render histories and landscapes far removed from those he intimately knew – that his dedication to political thought appears in its bluntest and most unmediated form.

¹ John Pilling and Seán Lawlor, ‘Beckett in Transition’, in Publishing Samuel Beckett, ed. Mark Nixon (London: British Library, 2011), 83–96; LSB3, 639 n11.

² D'Aubarède, ‘En Attendant… Beckett’, 7; LSB2, 666; LSB3, 637.

³ LSB2, 90–1, 92. The term ‘les poilus’ (the hairy ones) designates the French soldiers who fought in the trenches during the First World War. George Craig translates Beckett's phrase as ‘rankest of rankers’.

⁴ LSB1, 146 n6; Seán Lawlor and John Pilling, eds., The Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett (London: Faber, 2012), 438. See also Pascale Sardin and Karine Germoni, ‘“Scarcely Disfigured”: Beckett's Surrealist Translations’, Modernism/modernity 18, no. 4 (2011): 739–54.

⁵ Megan M. Quigley, ‘Justice for the “Illstarred Punster”: Samuel Beckett's and Alfred Péron's Revisions of “Anna Lyvia Pluratself”’, James Joyce Quarterly 41, no. 3 (2004): 469–87.

⁶ Sheehy Skeffington, Skeff, 63; LSB2, 29.

⁷ LSB1, 508; SB, 251.

⁸ Cited in Rosette Lamont, ‘Samuel Beckett's Wandering Jew’, in Reflections of the Holocaust in Literature, ed. Randolph L. Braham (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1990), 43.

⁹ McDowell, Trinity College Dublin, 1592–1952, 451.

¹⁰ The class lists in the Dublin University Calendar do not indicate that Frank Beckett undertook special training for the Indian Civil Service at Trinity, but the programme was running when he obtained a BA in Engineering in 1924.

¹¹ LSB1, 338, 112.

¹² BR/RB, 15; Belmont, Souvenirs, 164.

¹³ LSB1, 138–9.

¹⁴ LSB1, 351–2, 354 n13.

¹⁵ See DF, 4, 14.

¹⁶ Trilogy, 352; Jenner Bastien, ‘Summary of the History of Hayti’, trans. Samuel Beckett, in Negro: Anthology Made by Nancy Cunard, 1931–1933 (London: Nancy Cunard at Wishart & Co.), 460–4.

¹⁷ ‘48 Playwrights in Apartheid Protest’, Times, 26 June 1963, 12.

¹⁸ ‘Playwright Strike at Segregation’, Washington Post, 27 June 1963, E9; Dorothy Connell Carroll, ‘Cultural Boycott: Yes or No?’, Index on Censorship 4, no. 1 (1975): 3444.

¹⁹ LSB4, 287–8, 398.

²⁰ Chris Agee and Bill McCormack, ‘In the Prison of His Days’, Linen Hall Review 5, no. 3 (1988): 11; W. J. McCormack, ed., In the Prison of His Days: For Nelson Mandela (Dublin: Lilliput, 1988); Jaques Derrida and Mustapha Tlili, eds., For Nelson Mandela (New York: Seaver Books, 1987).

²¹ LSB3, 297.

²² LSB3, 588.

²³ LSB3, 571; NABS, 140.

²⁴ Maria Jolas, ‘Lettre de Fleury-Mérogis’, Esprit 1 (1978): 104–9.

²⁵ ‘Correspondence 1978–1979’, Fonds Beckett, Institut Mémoires de l'Edition Contemporaine (hereafter IMEC).

²⁶ D, 19.

²⁷ McCormack, ‘Samuel Beckett and the Negro Anthology’, 73–92; Friedman, ‘Introduction’, Beckett in Black and Red, xi.

²⁸ John Banting, ‘Nancy Cunard’, in Nancy Cunard: Brave Poet, Indomitable Rebel, 1896–1965, ed. Hugh Ford (Philadelphia: Chilton Book Company, 1968), 181; Nancy Cunard, These Were the Hours: Memories of My Hours Press, Réanville and Paris, 1928–1931, ed. Hugh Ford (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1969), 199–205.

²⁹ ‘If Britain Had Been Conquered: 2300 Names on Nazi Black List’, Dundee Evening Telegraph and Post, 14 September 1945, 8; Lois Gordon, Nancy Cunard: Heiress, Muse, Political Idealist (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 303.

³⁰ Ibid., 199–200.

³¹ See, for instance, Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944).

³² Quoted in Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 191.

³³ Carole Sweeney, From Fetish to Subject: Race, Modernism, and Primitivism, 1919–1935 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 71–94.

³⁴ Susan D. Pennybacker, From Scottsboro to Munich: Race and Political Culture in 1930s Britain (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), 6, 67; Maroula Joannou, ‘Nancy Cunard's English Journey’, Feminist Review 78 (2004): 141–63.

³⁵ Renata Morresi, Nancy Cunard: America, modernismo, negritudine (Urbino: QuattroVenti, 2007), 78–84; Morresi, ‘Black Man and White Ladyship (1931): A Manifesto’, in Recharting the Black Atlantic: Modern Cultures, Local Communities, Global Connections, ed. Annalisa Oboe and Anna Scacchi (New York: Routledge, 2008), 98–100. Earlier studies date the appeal to 1933 without going into specifics.

³⁶ Cunard, Hours Press, 128–9; Morresi, ‘Black Man’, 100; Morresi, Nancy Cunard, 802, 167 n77. Beckett did not send an additional statement when he signed the appeal. Warm thanks to Renata Morresi for sharing this information and for directing me to Beckett's ‘From the Only Poet to a Shining Whore’.

³⁷ Morresi, Nancy Cunard, 79–80.

³⁸ Jane Marcus, Hearts of Darkness: White Women Write Race (Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 128, 139.

³⁹ Ibid., 140.

⁴⁰ James Smith, British Writers and MI5 Surveillance, 1930–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), xi, 161 n17; 163 n19, 155.

⁴¹ ‘La France d'outre-mer: Miss Nancy Cunard’, Bec et ongles, 14 May 1932, 11.

⁴² Maureen Moynagh, ed., ‘Introduction’, in Essays on Race and Empire, by Nancy Cunard (Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview, 2002), 9–63.

⁴³ Raymond Michelet, African Empires and Civilisation, International African Service Bureau No. 4, trans. Edward Cunard, foreword by Nancy Cunard (London: Panaf, 1945).

⁴⁴ ‘Negro Anthology Banned by Trinidad as Seditious’, NYT, 13 April 1934, 21; Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 222.

⁴⁵ Colonial Office, House of Commons Debates 314, 9 July 1936, 1495–7, Hansard Online, http://hansard.parliament.uk/.

⁴⁶ Georges Sadoul, ‘The Fighting Lady’, Cunard: Brave Poet, 146.

⁴⁷ Marcus, Hearts of Darkness, 140.

⁴⁸ Charles Duff, ‘Nancy Cunard: The Enigma of a Personality’, Cunard: Brave Poet, 188.

⁴⁹ Charles Burkhart, ‘Letters from Nancy’, ibid., 329.

⁵⁰ LSB1, 112.

⁵¹ LSB1, 584.

⁵² Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 145.

⁵³ SB to MacGreevy, 11 February 1938, TCD MS 10402/156.

⁵⁴ LSB2, 611.

⁵⁵ Raymond Michelet, ‘Nancy Cunard’, Cunard: Brave Poet, 132.

⁵⁶ Gordon, Nancy Cunard, 161; Cunard, Hours Press, 75.

⁵⁷ J. J. Rabearivelo, ‘Notre grande consultation sur les aspirations indigènes vues par les Malgaches’, Le Madécasse, 7 October 1936, 1.

⁵⁸ Michel Dreyfus, ‘La Ligue contre l'Impérialisme et l'Oppression coloniale’, Communisme: Revue d’études pluridisciplinaires 2 (1982): 49–71.

⁵⁹ W. J. McCormack, From Burke to Beckett: Ascendency, Tradition and Betrayal in Literary History (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994), 386.

⁶⁰ Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 209.

⁶¹ Tory Young, ‘The Reception of Nancy Cunard's Negro Anthology’, in Women Writers of the 1930s: Gender, Politics and History, ed. Mary Joannou (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 115.

⁶² See Morresi, Nancy Cunard, 87–93.

⁶³ Catherine Hodeir and Michel Pierre, L'Exposition coloniale de 1931, revised ed. (Brussels: André Versailles, 2011), 161.

⁶⁴ On Cunard's contribution, see Morresi, ‘Black Man’, 93–4.

⁶⁵ Amanda Stansell, ‘Surrealist Racial Politics at the Borders of “Reason”: Whiteness, Primitivism and Négritude’, in Surrealism, Politics and Culture, ed. Raymond Spiteri and Donald LaCoss (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 116–19; Morresi, Nancy Cunard, 90; Hodeir and Pierre, L'Exposition coloniale de 1931, 157–69.

⁶⁶ Surrealism: Catalogue, The International Surrealist Exhibition, Thursday, June 11th to Saturday, July 4th 1936 (London: New Burlington Galleries, 1936).

⁶⁷ Gérard Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, trans. Alison Anderson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 305.

⁶⁸ Odile Aslan, Roger Blin and Twentieth-Century Playwrights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 11–22, 58; Roger Blin, ‘Le scandale du village canaque’, La dépêche africaine 38, 1 July 1931.

⁶⁹ Tracts surréalistes, vol. 1, 194–5, 198–200; Hans T. Siepe, ‘“Ne visitez pas l'exposition coloniale’: Quelques points de repère pour aborder l'anticolonialisme des Surréalistes’, in Surréalisme et politique – Politique du Surréalisme, ed. Wolfgang Asholt and Hans T. Siepe (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007), 169–80.

⁷⁰ Dreyfus, ‘Ligue’, 69 n20.

⁷¹ Carole Reynaud Paligot, Parcours politique des Surréalistes (Paris: CNRS, 2010), 118; Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, 233–5.

⁷² Tracts surréalistes, vol. 1, 235–7.

⁷³ However, in Hugh Ford's abridged edition from 1970, Beckett's name features more prominently.

⁷⁴ Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 197–8. The hate mail is part of the HRHRC's Nancy Cunard collection.

⁷⁵ Robert L. Allen, ‘Epilogue’, in As Wonderful as All That?, by Henry Crowder and Hugo Speck (Navarro, CA: Wild Trees Press, 1987), 195, 189–201; DF, 133.

⁷⁶ LSB1, 25, 43.

⁷⁷ On Whoroscope, see Anthony Barnett, Listening for Henry Crowder: A Monograph on His Almost Lost Music with the Poems and Music of Henry-Music (Lewes, Sussex: Allardyce Books, 2007), 94, 24.

⁷⁸ Cunard, Hours Press, 155.

⁷⁹ Crowder, As Wonderful, 76.

⁸⁰ McMillan and Fehsenfeld, Beckett in the Theatre, 183.

⁸¹ Calder, Pursuit, 327.

⁸² Cited in Claude Sarraute, ‘Rien n'est plus beau que le métier de faire rire les gens’, Le Monde, 14 September 1962, 15.

⁸³ LSB1, 60.

⁸⁴ Jean-Michel Devésa, ‘René Crevel et le monde anglo-saxon’, Mélusine: Cahiers du Centre de Recherche sur le Surréalisme 22 (2002): 236; Crevel, Correspondance de René Crevel à Gertrude Stein, ed. Jean-Michel Devésa (Paris: L'Harmattan, 2000), 242; Crevel, ‘Le patriotisme de l'inconscient’, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 4 (1931): 3–6.

⁸⁵ Marcus, Hearts of Darkness, 139; Laura Winkiel, Modernism, Race and Manifestos (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 186.

⁸⁶ Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 205–6; Morresi, ‘Black Man’, 97.

⁸⁷ The sum was a hundred pounds. Crowder, Wonderful, 76; Chisholm, Nancy Cunard, 152.

⁸⁸ Friedman, ‘Introduction’, Beckett in Black and Red, xxxiv n41.

⁸⁹ Ibid.

⁹⁰ LSB1, 128.

⁹¹ LSB1, 149.

⁹² McNaughton, ‘The Politics of Aftermath’, Beckett and Ireland, 61.

⁹³ See, notably, the first six lines in SB, Collected Poems, 64.

⁹⁴ Beckett in Black and Red, 72 (hereafter cited parenthetically).

⁹⁵ See Devésa, ‘René Crevel et le monde anglo-saxon’.

⁹⁶ Daïnis Karepovs, ‘Benjamin Péret et la Ligue Communiste du Brésil’, Cahiers Léon Trotsky 47 (1992): 11–18; Fulvio Abramo and Daïnis Karepovs, ‘Benjamin Péret, poète révolutionnaire au Brésil’, Cahiers Léon Trotsky 25 (1986): 75–6.

⁹⁷ JORF, 95, 24 November 1927, 3178–9; JORF, 54, 15 June 1929, 2059–60.

⁹⁸ André Gide, Voyage au Congo: Carnets de Route (Paris: Gallimard, 1927), 16.

⁹⁹ This argument is woven through the essay, and Beckett omits its most direct articulations (notably, the following sentence: ‘Cependant, ironie du destin, ils [in the original, the Hebrews] sont devenus les hommes les plus vilipendés du monde’ (195–6)).

¹⁰⁰ See Mark Polizzotti, Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton (London: Bloomsbury, 1995), 356.

¹⁰¹ See Valérie Vignaux, ‘Georges Sadoul rédacteur en chef de Mon Camarade (1933–1939). Un magazine illustré pour une culture de jeunesse communiste?’, Strenæ 10 (2016), http://strenae.revues.org/.

¹⁰² Nancy Cunard, ‘Spain’, Cunard: Brave Poet, 164–70; Cunard, Hours Press, 196.

¹⁰³ Andy Croft, Comrade Heart: A Life of Randall Swingler (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 68.

¹⁰⁴ Authors Take Sides on the Spanish War (London: Left Review, 1937), n.pag.

¹⁰⁵ Tracts surréalistes, vol. 1, 51–3.

¹⁰⁶ Cecil Woolf and John Bagguley, Introduction, Authors Take Sides on Vietnam: Two Questions on the War in Vietnam Answered by the Authors of Several Nations (London: Peter Owen, 1967).

¹⁰⁷ Other auctioned items were works and manuscripts by Marianne Moore, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Nelson Algren, Norman Mailer, Bertrand Russell, Allen Ginsberg, W. S. Merwin, John Steinbeck and William Styron. Henry Raymont, ‘War Foes to Sell Two Russell Essays’, NYT, 23 August 1970, 2; ‘Anti-War Auction to Assist Candidates Put Off to Oct. 8’, NYT, 12 September 1970, 25; ‘Peace Group Gains $9,000 at Auction’, NYT, 10 October 1970, 1.

¹⁰⁸ Cunard, ‘Spain’, Cunard: Brave Poet, 165.

¹⁰⁹ Chronology, 54.

¹¹⁰ Henri Barbusse, ‘Introduction’, in The Spanish Omnibus: Being a Collection of Stories Representing the Work of the Leading Spanish Writers of To-Day, trans. Warre B. Wells, ed. J. G. Gorkin (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1932), vii–xxvi.

¹¹¹ Hugh Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 3rd ed. (London: Penguin, 1986), 347 n3.

¹¹² McNaughton, ‘The Politics of Aftermath’, Beckett and Ireland, 57.

¹¹³ ‘Télégramme envoyé à Moscou’, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 1 (1930): 1.

¹¹⁴ See Maurice Gorham, Forty Years of Irish Broadcasting (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1967), 2–3; Christopher Morash, A History of the Media in Ireland (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 125–30.

¹¹⁵ Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 356.

¹¹⁶ Ibid., 348.

¹¹⁷ Tom Buchanan, The Impact of the Spanish Civil War on Britain: War, Loss and Memory (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2007).

¹¹⁸ Thomas, The Spanish Civil War, 347.

¹¹⁹ Ó Drisceoil, Peadar O'Donnell, 95.

¹²⁰ English, Radicals and the Republic, 246–7.

¹²¹ Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera, 285.

¹²² Ibid., 287.

¹²³ LSB1, 508.

¹²⁴ Cunard, Hours Press, 118.

¹²⁵ LSB3, 525, 526 n2; ‘Spain-Italy Relations Growing Icy’, Washington Post, 24 January 1963, 21.

¹²⁶ ‘Synopsis’, Guardian, 22 February 1963, 9.

¹²⁷ ‘MSS Sold to Aid Spanish Artists’, IT 27 June 1966, 5; Tad Szulc, ‘Art Auction Aids Fined Spaniards’, NYT, 27 June 1966, 13.

¹²⁸ Peter L. Podol, Fernando Arrabal (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978) 20; ‘Autograph Leads to Arrest’, Chicago Tribune, 25 July 1967, 4; ‘Spanish Playwright Held on “Blasphemy” Charges’, NYT, 25 July 1967, 28.

¹²⁹ ‘La situation en Espagne’, Le Monde, 28 September 1967, 5.

¹³⁰ Paul C. Ray, The Surrealist Movement in England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1971), 79.

¹³¹ New Verse 5 (1933); Dougald MacMillan, transition 1927–38: The History of a Literary Era (London: Calder and Boyars, 1975), 79–89; Céline Mansanti, ‘Between Modernisms: transition (1927–38)’, in The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 2, ed. Peter Brooker and Andrew Thacker (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 729–36; Mark Nixon, ‘George Reavey: Beckett's First Literary Agent’, Publishing Samuel Beckett, 45; Kohlmann, Modernism, Politics, and Left-Wing Literature in the 1930s, 41–50.

¹³² Michel Remy, Surrealism in Britain (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 66.

¹³³ John Banting, ‘Nancy Cunard’, Cunard: Brave Poet, 182–4.

¹³⁴ Robert Fraser, Night Thoughts: The Surreal Life of the Poet David Gascoyne (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 266.

¹³⁵ Ray, The Surrealist Movement in England, 149, 108–33.

¹³⁶ Read, Poetry and Anarchism, 15.

¹³⁷ LSB1, 169 n4.

¹³⁸ LSB1, 630, 645.

¹³⁹ Peggy Guggenheim, Out of this Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (London: André Deutsch, 1980), 162–96.

¹⁴⁰ Aslan, Roger Blin and Twentieth-Century Playwrights, 11–22, 58.

¹⁴¹ Tracts surréalistes et déclarations collectives, vol. 2, ed. José Pierre (Paris: Terrain Vague, 1982), 30–6.

¹⁴² SB, ‘Alba (traduit de l'anglais par A.R. Peron)’, Soutes: Revue de culture révolutionnaire internationale 9 (1938): 41.

¹⁴³ Jacques Prévert, La crosse en l'air. Feuilleton (Paris: Soutes, 1936); J.-E. Béry, Luc Decaunes, Louis Guillaume, Jacques Prévert and Michel Rochvarger, Cinq poèmes contre la guerre (Paris: Soutes, 1937); Arturo Serrano Plaja, Rafaël Alberti, Pascual Pla y Beltrán and José-Luis de Gallega, No pasarán!!! 5 Poèmes espagnols, trans. Luc Decaunes (Paris: Soutes, 1937); Pascal Ory, La belle illusion: Culture et politique sous le signe du Front Populaire, revised ed. (Paris: CNRS, 2016), 216–19.

¹⁴⁴ Blin, Souvenirs, 80.

¹⁴⁵ Maurice Nadeau, Grâces leur soient rendues (Paris: Albin Michel, 1990), 364.

¹⁴⁶ Blin, Souvenirs, 80.

¹⁴⁷ Louis Aragon, ‘J'avais voté Samuel Beckett’, Les Lettres françaises, 29 October 1969, 4.

¹⁴⁸ David Gascoyne, A Short Survey of Surrealism (London: Routledge, 1935).

¹⁴⁹ Eugene Jolas, Kay Boyle, Stuart Gilbert and others, ‘Proclamation’, transition: An International Quarterly for Creative Experiment 16–17 (1929): 13.

¹⁵⁰ Eugene Jolas, ‘What Is the Revolution of Language?’, transition: An International Workshop for Orphic Creation 22 (1933): 125. Beckett may have had this moment in mind when he later wrote about an article by Jolas that was more revolutionary than usual, or ‘plus révolutionnaire que nature’ (LSB2, 264).

¹⁵¹ Hans Arp, Samuel Beckett, Carl Einstein, Eugene Jolas, Thomas MacGreevy, Georges Pelorson, Theo Rutra [Eugene Jolas], James J. Sweeney and Ronald Symond, ‘Poetry is Vertical’, transition: An International Workshop for Orphic Creation 21 (1932): 148–9.

¹⁵² Ruby Cohn, A Beckett Canon (Ann Harbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001), 34; Thomas Hunkeler, ‘La poésie est-elle verticale? Remarques à propos d'une signature’, SBTA 11 (2001): 416–24.

¹⁵³ transition 21 (1932): 4.

¹⁵⁴ Eugene Jolas, ‘Vertigral Workshop’, transition: A Quarterly Review 24 (1936): 109, 112, 113.

¹⁵⁵ See Gregory Baptista, ‘Between Worlds: Gargoyle (1921–2); This Quarter (1925–32); and Tambour (1929–30)’, The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines, vol. 2, 690–1.

¹⁵⁶ Edward W. Titus, ‘Editorially: By Way of Introducing This Surrealist Number’, This Quarter 5, no. 1 (1932): 6.

¹⁵⁷ André Breton, ‘Surrealism: Yesterday, To-Day and To-Morrow’, trans. E. W. Titus, This Quarter, 7–8.

¹⁵⁸ Paul Eluard, ‘Critique de la poésie’, Le Surréalisme au service de la révolution 4 (1931): 14.

¹⁵⁹ René Crevel, ‘The Period of Sleeping-Fits’, This Quarter, 188.

¹⁶⁰ Aragon, ‘The Red Front’, trans. e.e. cummings, Literature of the World Revolution 3 (1931): 35–7.

¹⁶¹ Tracts surréalistes, vol. 1, 204–5, 208–22; Durozoi, History of the Surrealist Movement, 231–2, 725 n51; Maurice Nadeau, The History of Surrealism, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Collier Books, 1967), 175–82.

¹⁶² Roland Penrose, Quatre-vingt ans de surréalisme (Paris: Cercle d'Art, 1981), 60–2.

¹⁶³ LSB1, 340, 342 n5.

¹⁶⁴ Michel Remy, ‘Londres 1936, l'année de tous les dangers’, Mélusine 8 (1986): 128.

¹⁶⁵ Ibid., 129–30.

¹⁶⁶ Paul Eluard, Thorns of Thunder: Selected Poems, with a Drawing by Pablo Picasso, ed. George Reavey, trans. Samuel Beckett, Denis Devlin, David Gascoyne, Eugene Jolas, Man Ray, George Reavey and Ruthven Todd (London: Europa Press and Stanley Nott, 1936).

¹⁶⁷ A. J. Leventhal, ‘Surrealism or Literary Psycho-Therapy’, Dublin Magazine 11, no. 4 (1936): 72, 66.

¹⁶⁸ Octavio Paz, ed., Mexican Poetry: An Anthology, trans. Samuel Beckett (New York: Grove, 1985).

¹⁶⁹ SB to MacGreevy, 19 September 1952, TCD MS 10402/183.

¹⁷⁰ See Edouard J. Maunick, The UNESCO Courier 39, January 1986, 5–8.

¹⁷¹ UNESCO statement, in Anthology of Mexican Poetry, ed. Octavio Paz, trans. Samuel Beckett (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1958), 4. See also Anthologie de la poésie mexicaine, ed. Octavio Paz, trans. Guy Lévis Mano (Paris: Nagel, 1952), 8. Both are hereafter cited parenthetically.

¹⁷² Gail Archibald, Les Etats-Unis et l'UNESCO, 1944–1963 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1993).

¹⁷³ Nick Caistor, Octavio Paz (London: Reaktion, 2007), 35–43.

¹⁷⁴ Octavio Paz and Eliot Weinberger, 13 July 1994, ‘Afterword: A Conversation with Octavio Paz’, in The Bread of Days: Eleven Mexican Poets; El pan de los dias: Once poetas mexicanos (Covelo, CA: Yolla Bolly Press, 1994), 121–2; Froylán Enciso, Andar fronteras: El servicio diplomático de Octavio Paz en Francia (1946–1951) (Mexico: Siglo XXI Editores, 2008), 127.

¹⁷⁵ On Lévis Mano, see Edwy Plenel, ‘La fidélité Maspero’, in François Maspero et les paysages humains, ed. Bruno Guichard, Julien Hage and Alain Léger (Lyon: Fosse aux Ours, 2009), 13; Cunard, Hours Press, 196.

¹⁷⁶ Thomas Hogan, ‘Books’, Manchester Guardian, 13 February 1959, 6; George G. Wing, ‘Review of An Anthology of Mexican Poetry’, Books Abroad, 33, no. 4 (1959): 465; David Paul, ‘Colonial Muse’, Observer, 8 February 1959, 20.

¹⁷⁷ See SB to Boyle, 20 November 1960, Beckett Collection, HRHRC; SB to Hutchinson, 6 February 1959, Mary Hutchinson Collection, HRHRC.

¹⁷⁸ Enciso, Andar fronteras, 127–8.

¹⁷⁹ LSB2, 511 n2.

¹⁸⁰ LSB2, 666; SB, 410. Beckett thanked Brenan for his assistance in a translator's note.

¹⁸¹ SB, 695 n49.

¹⁸² Paz and Weinberger, ‘Afterword’, 122; Weinberger, ‘Introduction’, The Bread of Days, x.

¹⁸³ Vincenzo Pavone, From the Labyrinth of the World to the Paradise of the Heart: Science and Humanism in UNESCO's Approach to Globalization (Plymouth: Lexington Books, 2008), 78.

¹⁸⁴ LSB2, 75.

¹⁸⁵ Chronology, 106; Federman and Fletcher, Samuel Beckett: His Works and His Critics, 98.

¹⁸⁶ See Gerhart Hoffmeister, ‘Reception in Germany and Abroad’, in The Cambridge Companion to Goethe, ed. Lesley Sharpe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 248–53.

¹⁸⁷ See William H. F. Altman, Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: The Philosopher of the Second Reich (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2013), 18.

¹⁸⁸ Preface, Goethe: UNESCO's Homage on the Occasion of the Two Hundredth Anniversary of His Birth (Paris: UNESCO, 1949), ix–xi.

¹⁸⁹ Introduction, Interrelations of Cultures: Their Contribution to International Understanding (Paris: UNESCO, 1953), 7.

¹⁹⁰ Emile Delavenay, ‘Beckett, dernier recours’, in L'UNESCO racontée par ses anciens (Paris: Organisation des Nations Unies, 2006), 171–2; Chronology, 108.

¹⁹¹ LSB2, 184 n5.

¹⁹² Paz and Weinberger, ‘Afterword’, Bread of Days, 121.

¹⁹³ See my Samuel Beckett and the Problem of Irishness, 58.

¹⁹⁴ Caistor, Octavio Paz, 63–4.

¹⁹⁵ Chronology, 103.

¹⁹⁶ María José Carrera, ‘“And Then the Mexicans”: Beckett's Notes toward An Anthology of Mexican Poetry’, SBTA 27 (2015): 159–70.

¹⁹⁷ Paz and Weinberger, ‘Afterword’, 121–3; LSB2, 179.

¹⁹⁸ SB to Boyle, 20 November 1960, Beckett Collection, HRHRC.

¹⁹⁹ See Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Nature, Empire, and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 133; Benjamin Keen, The Aztec Image in Western Thought (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1971), 366.

²⁰⁰ See also Alfonso Reyes, Obras completas, vol. 10 (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 1959), 122.

²⁰¹ Weinberger, ‘Introduction’, xi.

²⁰² See ***, ‘D'un voyage au pays des Tarahumaras’, Nouvelle Revue Française 287 (1937): 232–47; Antonin Artaud, D'un voyage au pays des Tarahumaras (Paris: Editions Fontaine, 1945).

²⁰³ Octavio Paz, ‘Literature and Literalness’, in Convergences: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Helen Lane (London: Bloomsbury, 1987), 196–200.

Chapter 2 Another War Entirely

Internationalist Politics and the Labour of Translation

Beckett's Parallel Career