On Fragments: A Piece of Art and the “I” – or Not
Samuel Beckett takes up the issue directly in 1975–1976 with his translations, rather transformations or adaptations called, Long after Chamfort, that is, both of a time long gone and very far from Chamfort’s versions, which are themselves often rerenderings. In his scathing review of Samuel Beckett: Poems 1930–1989, Christo-pher Ricks puts the matter in The Guardian on 31 May 2002,
A sequence of translations from Chamfort – not “After Chamfort” but “Long After Chamfort”, and that is not just a historical insistence – includes the Indi-an proverb upon which Chamfort muses: “Il vaut mieux être assis que debout, couché qu’assis, mort que tout cela.” In Beckett’s calloused, workaday hands, this becomes:
Better on your arse than on your feet,
Flat on your back than either, dead than the lot.(Ricks 2002: n.p).
Such radical concision and metonymy are manifest in other work of this period, the poem Something there (1974), for instance, whose metonym is the eye (as it was earlier in his Film):
something there
where
out there
out where
outside what
the head what else
something there somewhere outside
the headat the faint sound so brief
it is gone and the whole globe
not yet bare
the eye
opens wide
wide
till in the end
nothing more
shutters it again