Chapter 11 - Samuel Beckett’s Translations of Mexican Poetry

Summary

‘Beckett lo pone en inglés de la mejor manera posible’ (‘Beckett puts it into English in the best possible way’).² This rare comment on Samuel Beckett’s translation of An Anthology of Mexican Poetry, compiled by Octavio Paz and published by Indiana University Press in 1958, is notable because it comes from a Mexican poet, José Emilio Pacheco, recipient of the Cervantes Prize in 2009 and himself a translator of Beckett into Spanish.³ The volume of poems translated by Beckett has elicited very little response from Mexican critics in the more than sixty years since it was published. Yet it is indeed pertinent to recall Pacheco’s judgement here in that it offers the opinion of an accomplished poet with a vast knowledge of the original tradition to which the poems belong, a view from the other side of the language spectrum, so to speak.⁴