A Dispatch from the Valerie Eliot Bequest

The Magdalene Armstrong T. S. Eliot Research Fellow, Dr Michelle Taylor, writes about her research into the Valerie Eliot bequest.

Among the over 200 translations of T. S. Eliot’s work in Valerie Eliot’s bequest to Magdalene College is Henri Fluchère’s French translation of Murder in the Cathedral, printed in Switzerland in 1943 for Albert Béguin’s series Les Cahiers du Rhône. I find it exhilarating to imagine Eliot’s abstract tragedy of Anglo-Catholic church history in the context of the French Resistance, nestled in Béguin’s literary list alongside writers like Louis Aragon, Paul Éluard, and Saint-John Perse (whose Anabase Eliot himself had translated in 1930). It is, of course, another archival thrill entirely to see Eliot’s marginal ‘NO!’ next to a quoted translation of The Hollow Men in Fluchère’s explanatory essay.

My research, as Magdalene’s inaugural Armstrong T. S. Eliot Research Fellow, examines both T. S. Eliot’s philosophy of translation and his history of being translated – often, I am finding, in service of some kind of cultural diplomacy, as with Béguin and Fluchère. Eliot is a good figure with whom to think about translation, and by extension the twentieth-century construction of ‘world literature’, not only because of his dialectical way of acting and thinking (about translation and about everything else), and not only because his work underwent so much translation both in his lifetime and after, but also because he is at the same time a polyglot and a philosopher-errant (the best kind).

Magdalene’s collections, however, were my initial inspiration for the project, since they contain an extraordinary variety of his works in translation; my second has been the small intriguing histories like these that started to pop up when I began to look, in a very nonempirical way, at the patterns of Eliot’s translations, at least in book form. I was surprised by the preponderance of drama in the collection and in Eliot’s history of translation, though perhaps I should not have been. Consider some of the international translation and performance history of Murder in the Cathedral: in French, in Paris, in 1945; in German, in Berlin and Cologne, in 1946; on the BBC East India Service in Hindustan, in 1948; and at the National Theater of Northern Greece in 1967 – the first year of the military junta. (This last performance is of special interest to me, a third-generation Greek American, a heritage learner of the language, and a general enjoyer of the work of George Seferis.) Eliot’s work had ends outside of England and English that may not have felt so apparent to audiences who saw the play, for example, when it was first performed on site at Canterbury Cathedral. But there is much in the play that would seem to lend itself to translation – his choice of Ancient Greek drama as a backbone, for example, which incorporated a set of tropes already recognised as open to the particular modes of reading that for David Damrosch constitute the world literary ‘classic.’ Eliot’s drama is, admittedly, not much favoured today – other works seem more representative of his century-defining poetic gifts. Thinking about these works as potentially more open to translation and to global spread, however, opens up new ways we can appreciate not only their role in literary history, but their achievements as literary works.

By Dr Michelle Taylor (2024), Armstrong T. S. Eliot Research Fellow