that he had style on his mind. He wanted, in his words, ‘the possibility of stylelessness’, a ‘purer’ form of communication and to write ‘without style’. To write in French was also more exciting for Beckett: the old associations had been stripped away and he could write without the ingrained ‘Anglo-Irish exuberance and automatisms’ allowing him to maintain a language that resonated with new cadences and sounds (Knowlson, 1996: 257, 357). As Al Alvarez has put it, his creativity begins with a refusal, a denial of all he had been, up to the moment when he begins to write in a foreign language (Alvarez, 1973: 47). To get a flavour of Beckett’s prose as self-translation, I borrow from Christopher Ricks’ example which is taken from Beckett’s short story ‘First Love’. In the American edition, which deviated from Beckett’s own translation, the phrase Personellement je n’ai rien contre les cimetière is rendered as ‘Personally I have nothing against graveyards’. Beckett’s version is: ‘Personally I have no bone to pick with graveyards.’ The American version, as Ricks notes, is insufficiently mordant, not alive to the bare bones of the matter. Its meaning is directed, using an English idiom, towards a particular type of action. To pick a bone is an attack of sorts; it’s designed to get to the heart of things. Did Beckett need to think about the English rendition from a place of foreignness to approach this narrative (see Beckett, 1970: 61 and Ricks, 2009: xi)?
Freud, in his 1937 paper, ‘Constructions in Analysis’, suggests that the task of the analyst is to reconstruct repressed materials from the traces that have been left behind in the language of the patient; from fragments of memories, associations and parapraxes. Adam Phillips has suggested that the slip is a moment of self-translation, the moment when an original text is inadvertently revealed (see Phillips, 2002: 137, 140). But this form of self-translation is always also a de-translation, which aims, if we take Laplanche’s model into account, to situate and re-elaborate the constructions of the Oedipal scene, what Laplanche thinks of as a move towards a re-elaboration of ‘the hollow of [the analysand’s] own originary enigma’ (1999: 112), in other words, a re-translation of an obscure narrative that has already been translated from enigmatic messages – so one that is always also a failure of