In his 1988 study of Beckett’s self-translation, Babel and Beckett (University of Toronto Press), Brian T. Fitch sets aside the question of how intertextual effects survive translation, and he neglects to note that some of Beckett’s English texts have a rich intertextual resonance quite absent from their French counterparts. Starting from the echoes of Milton and Gray in Happy Days, of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth in Company, and of the close of Finnegans Wake in Beckett’s last text, What is the Word, I shall seek to identify other examples of this phenomenon. I shall ask whether Beckett cunningly plays with the differences between his two audiences, the Anglophone and the Francophone, linking himself to each of the two literary traditions in a distinctive way. I shall also ask whether French intertextual allusions are lost in translation, as occurs notably when the Lamartinian title Le dépeupleur becomes The Lost Ones, whether some of the French originals already contain allusions to English literature (the opening words of Act II of Oh les beaux jours may be a case in point), and whether in translating from English to French Beckett introduces allusions to French literature.

I shall reflect on the idea that a self-translation is also a self-interpretation and auto-commentary. New intertextual elements in the translations alter the tone and perspective of the originals. The orientation of Beckett’s late English writing, confirmed by its intertextual dimension, is centripetal, a return home; that of his French writing is centrifugal, a self-alienation. The English writing tends to the obscure or cryptic; the French to excess of clarity. The tense interplay between the two orientations keeps Beckettian identity problematic. Even a figure outside both the English and French traditions, such as Dante, may be present in the two versions in different ways – having a Miltonic aura in the English texts and perhaps a Racinian profile in the French ones.