'Weigh absence in a scale': Beckett’s 'Imbedded' Poetry in 'Watt' and 'Words and Music'

In their critical edition of the 'Collected Poems of Samuel Beckett' (2012), John Pilling and Seán Lawlor include several poems from his prose or drama. While isolating these poems from their original context and presenting them as standalone works is already a controversial choice, the editors also do not discuss the genetic variants of these poems, a privilege they extend to all the other poetry, which thus enhances the rogue status of these snip-pets. Nevertheless, Beckett’s ‘imbedded’ poems have a fascinating genetic history of their own, in the drafts of the texts to which they belong. In this article we look at two case studies – the novel 'Watt' and the radio play 'Words and Music' – to analyse how the poems imbedded in them impacted not only the genesis but also the translation process of these works. Often referred to as ‘untranslatable’, they severely delayed the progress of 'Watt' in French and 'Paroles et musique'. This observation will, in turn, be related to Beckett’s poetry as the least self-translated aspect of his bilingual oeuvre, as well as his return to the genre in the late 1960s.