Studies in 20th Century Literature Volume 27 Issue 1 Article 7 1-1-2003 "Drunken Boat": Samuel Beckett's Translation of Arthur Rimbaud's "Le Bateau ivre" Gerald M. Macklin University of Ulster Follow this and additional works at: https://newprairiepress.org/sttcl Part of the French and Francophone Language and Literature Commons, and the Modern Literature Commons This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License. Recommended Citation Macklin, Gerald M. (2003) ""Drunken Boat": Samuel Beckett's Translation of Arthur Rimbaud's "Le Bateau ivre"," Studies in 20th Century Literature: Vol. 27: Iss. 1, Article 7. https://doi.org/10.4148/2334-4415.1549 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by New Prairie Press. It has been accepted for inclusion in Studies in 20th Century Literature by an authorized administrator of New Prairie Press. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. "Drunken Boat": Samuel Beckett's Translation of Arthur Rimbaud's "Le Bateau ivre" Abstract This paper scrutinizes Samuel Beckett's translation of Arthur Rimbaud's famous poem "Le Bateau ivre." After a short introductory section which outlines how Beckett's translation fortuitously reached the public domain through the endeavors of James Knowlson and Felix Leakey and then raises some of the main issues arising from this encounter between two such celebrated authors, the article proceeds to offer a close analysis of the Beckett text in terms of Rimbaud's original. This involves a stanza-by-stanza consideration of the original and the translation as reproduced by Knowlson and Leakey and a suggested division of the two texts into four sections for the purposes of close examination.