Alliances in translation: Beckett, Genet, Rimbaud and Celan (Ireland, France, Germany, Samuel Beckett, Jean Genet, Arthur Rimbaud, Paul Celan)

"Alliances in Translation," investigates relations formed at the threshold between different worlds in works by Beckett, Genet, Rimbaud and Celan. This threshold becomes visible thanks to the figural work translators and queers perform in and with them, just to the side of the ways we tend to think about representation. Though translators and queers are usually understood to speak for other people---translators for an author in a foreign language and queers for a sexual minority---I argue they know how to speak with people who are considered other, whether because of their aesthetic, linguistic, or socio-political singularity.; My first chapter follows the conversation of forms initiated by the narrator of Beckett's Malone meurt and its translation as Malone Dies when he watches his neighbors, an occasion when he observes that "people," categorically, "are queer." I pursue this conversation by showing how Malone's porous narratives shift to welcome the appearance of an unnamed "someone" and to mark the movements of Sapo around a peasant family.; My second chapter considers the conversations Genet frontally invites us to participate in by interpellating his reader as "you" in the Journal du voleur, and juxtaposes them first with the way the narrator represents his interactions with Lucien, a lover who accompanied the Journal's writing, and then with the way context is inscribed in Walter Benjamin's essay on "The Task of the Translator" and Genet's novel. My third chapter traces the constellated conversations Genet pursues with Palestinians as they are offered in his late novel, Un captif amoureux. Both chapters draw on and critique the existing English language translations of these novels.; Following Peter Szondi's suggestion that Paul Celan's translations of Shakespeare's sonnets perform things the originals merely describe, my fourth chapter stages the conversation between Rimbaud's "Bateau ivre" and Celan's German translation of the poem. Celan's translation shows how political and poetic conversation has and has not changed since Rimbaud's time and holds out for future changes by relating to Rimbaud's mournful "now" even as it marks its troubled freedom and difference from its youthful precedent.