Xmas Cheer (?)

One of the welcome gifts to cross my threshold this holiday was this, the 4-volume Grove Press Centenary edition of Samuel Beckett. I've been thinking some about Beckett lately, & over the past couple of years reading some of the works I hadn't yet ventured on. It's been hard to avoid SB this year, of course, given that it's the centenary of his birth year & so forth – a new story in the Times every few weeks, the TLS running an ongoing "translate Beckett's untranslatable French poems" contest. Not to mention Marjorie Perloff, whom every time I've seen her (in print or in person) the last few years has been grousing about some group of young people or other: "They haven't even read Beckett!"

Well, dammit, I've read Beckett – or a decent chunk of him: 4 of the 7 novels, maybe 2/3 of the plays, all the poems, & a substantial portion of the short fiction. It's awfully satisfying to have pretty much all of it together in the 4 solid volumes of the Centenary edition, tho at the same time it's kind of shocking to realize how compact the corpus actually is, given SB's larger-than-life reputation. I suspect that's the effect of having read so much of it over the years in 12 or 15 slim separate collections.

Textual Note: This really is the place to start with Beckett, & for most of us the place to end as well. Watt, most importantly, is presented in a significantly cleaned-up text. There's very little missing: the suppressed early novel Dream of Fair to Middling Women & B's first French play Eleutheria (both in print from other publishers than Grove, or I imagine they'd be here as well), a few short prose pieces, & the French poems. The box retails for $100, but you can save about a third of that at amazon.com; it'll probably be hitting half.com for less than its current $75 soon.

I'm most struck re-reading the poems, which made a huge impact on me when I was a grimly self-pitying undergraduate aesthete. I haven't picked them up in 15 years or so, but looking over them today I found them strikingly familiar, even companionate.

Roundelay

on all that strand
at end of day
steps sole sound
long sole sound
until unbidden stay
then no sound
on all that strand
long no sound
until unbidden go
steps sole sound
long sole sound
on all that strand
at end of day