How exquisite, to be able to seize by the throat at last the opportunity to say, like Krapp, ‘Thirty-nine today...’, given the anniversary more or less around now of my dropping, thirty-nine years ago, to seize this opportunity by the throat, as I was saying, and shake soundly until dead. Except that the introspective bug has never enjoyed very rich pickings on my vitamin B-deficient blood and I don’t really have anything, anything at all, to say on the subject. In my imagination the subject of my dropping occupies a position not dissimilar to what people like to say about the sixties: what would I know about it/them anyway? I was only there.
I can however oblige with two renderings of Beckett in French on the subject of birth, due to appear in my cobbling together of his Selected Poems 1930-1989, which you can expect to see darkening your local bookshop some time next month.
chaque jour envie
d’être un jour en vie
non certes sans regret
un jour d’être né
each day the desire
one day to be alive
not of course without scorn
for one day having been born
pas davantage
de souvenirs qu’à l’âge
d’avril un jour
d’un jour
no more
memories all told than aged
one day in April
one day old
3 comments:
'He wanted to get out of his head,' she said,
'so I told him to write about his mother's nipples.'
Who is publishing the book? I'll look forward to it.
It's part of the new rake of Faber editions, the first five of which came out a month or two back. Contains as frontispiece a poem written on a Johnny Walker whisky bottle cardboard box, I'm pleased to say.
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