Samuel Beckett Wanted No Trilogy Like the Quintilogy of the Torah

Samuel Beckett wrote
to his English publishers
regarding Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnameable,
“I beseech you, please, no trilogy,”
as if he did not want the novels
to be like a table
that, when
standing on just three legs, is unstable,
in contrast to five volumes of the Torah, a quintilogy

whose stability is reinforced
by Onkelos’s Aramaic translation of all five volumes
attributed to Moses,
foreshadowing Beckett’s
transnational fluent translation
of all his works from French to English,
including Waiting for Godot — Godot’s absence
this bard supposes
recalling God’s, transforming into waiting actors
all the Jewish nation.

At this year’s sedarim I’ll wonder whether
arami in “Arami oved avi” implies
that my forefathers spoke Aramaic,
as I trill midrashically, like Beckett,
when he translated God to Godot ….
than our unidentified forefathers
less archaic.

Deut. 26:5 states:

וְעָנִ֨יתָ וְאָמַרְתָּ֜ לִפְנֵ֣י ׀ יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֗יךָ אֲרַמִּי֙ אֹבֵ֣ד אָבִ֔ ׃

And You shall then recite as follows before your God: “Arami oved avi, My father was a fugitive Aramean.”

In “Go on, go on, go on:  Samuel Beckett’s three influential novels from the 1950s, reissued,”  TLS, 3/14/25, Cal Revely-Calder, writes, reviewing the reissue of Samuel Beckett’s three influential novels from the 1950s, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable:

We’re listening to voices. They last for three books. First book: it’s a man, en route to see his mother; he heads into the country, becomes decrepit, and fails. Then it’s another man, on a mission to find the first; he has no more success. Second book: it’s a man in a bed, writing until he dies, which we’re led to believe he does. (The prose trails off suggestively, though that isn’t exactly proof. As Wittgenstein noted, “death is not an event in life”.) Third book: whoever it is, they open with “keep going” and end with “I’ll go on”. Make of that what you will….

“Not ‘trilogy’, I beseech you.” So Beckett wrote to John Calder, his English publisher, on hearing in 1958 of a plan to collect them as one beneath that name. He didn’t mind their being put “between the same boards” – in another letter he called them, opaquely, a “unity” – but he refused the sequential link. It was the sort of objection he made; compare, say, his refusal to approve all-female productions of Godot. But he was overruled more often than posterity might have you believe, and in 1959 an Olympia Press edition appeared, covered in avocado green and subtitled “A Trilogy”. (He translated them all himself, bar a little aid from a young man, Patrick Bowles, with Molloy.) In French, by contrast, Les Éditions de Minuit has held the line, keeping them separate. And this month, in Britain, Faber is republishing them equally separately in English, to mark seventy years since the English appearance of Molloy. Ignore the publicity bumf, which speaks of “the iconic trilogy of novels by the Nobel Prize-winning legend, relaunched for a new generation”: the new books are standalone paperbacks, well designed and set, and at no point in the introductions by Colm Toíbín, Claire-Louise Bennett and Eimear McBride does the word “trilogy” ring out. (Those introductions are mostly interesting and stylistically various, though there are a couple of historical errors – an erratic date, an omitted name – and, more meaningfully to my mind, it would have been nice to hear from further afield: Lydia Davis, perhaps, or Éric Chevillard. Neither short fiction nor French literature, to both of which Beckett means much, is too well read in the anglosphere.)