The Irishman who translated Mexican poetry.

• Author: Perales, Jaime

Samuel Beckett, that Irish master of brevity and wry observer of the human condition, would have been one hundred years old last year. In honor of the centennial, plays have been performed and conferences and seminars organized in various parts of the world. As one small act of homage, Grove Press in the United States published Beckett's complete works in four volumes, The Grove Centenary Editions of Samuel Beckett, edited by Paul Auster, along with a bilingual (English-French) edition of the play Waiting for Godot.

Beckett is known for being an English-language writer who was also fluent in French. In fact, he became so proficient at French that he adopted it as his literary language, and his French texts became what Baudelaire would have called "an exercise in evocative sorcery." Though he wrote in French, Beckett never allowed anyone else to translate his works into English; he did that himself.

This type of bilingual author is so unusual in the literary world that critic George Steiner called Beckett---along with Jorge Luis Borges and Vladimir Nabokov--an "extraterritorial" writer. Beckett and Borges actually won the Formentor Award in the same year (1961), and both writers became famous internationally as a result. Beckett's own renown grew even further when the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature In 1969.

But what few people know about Beckett is that he worked with the great Mexican poet Octavio Paz on an anthology of Mexican poetry at a time when both writers were little known. Beckett and Paz met in Paris in 1949 when Beckett was forty-three years old and Paz was thirty-five. At the time, Beckett was desperately trying to find both a producer for Waiting for Godot and a publishing company for Molloy, the first novel of his trilogy.

In those days Beckett's work was only known to a few. (His first novel, Murphy, had been rejected by forty-four publishers and when it finally came out, it sold only six copies the first year.) It wasn't until 1953 that Waiting for Godot would finally be performed in the Theater of Babylone to the surprise and acclaim of critics and the public alike.

Paz, though well-known in Mexico, was working at the time as a humble employee of the Mexican embassy in France and toiling away on The Labyrinth of Solitude and The Bow and the Lyre.

Meanwhile, Beckett was surviving on occasional literary jobs, some offered to him by UNESCO. During those years, he slept all day and scoured the streets...