erence to “It is I who live there now” (Ich wohne jetzt selbst darin) suggests
that this hasn’t always been the case. In Wittgenstein’s terms, the meaning
can only be established by studying each word group or sentence in the larger
context in which it occurs. What does “now” (jetzt) mean in “It is I who live
there now”?
In Philosophical Investigations §383, Wittgenstein writes:
We are not analyzing a phenomenon (e.g. thought) but a concept (e.g.
that of thinking), and therefore the use of a word. So it may look as if
what we were doing were Nominalism. Nominalists make the mistake
of interpreting all words as names, and so of not really describing their
use, but only, so to speak, giving a paper draft on such a description.Most modernist poets, we might note, are in one form or another nominal-
ists: Ezra Pound, as I suggest in a related essay here, builds his Cantos using
collocations of proper names—a proliferation of restaurants, churches, fres-
coes, Provençal castles, Roman deities—so as to create a dense network of
meanings. In more recent poetry, such nominalism has been practiced with
beautiful irony by Frank O’Hara in poems like “Khrushchev is coming on
the right day!”
But nominalism, as Wittgenstein understood so well, is a way of avoid-
ing the concept “the use of a word.” Unlike Pound, Beckett uses generic
Irish names like Molloy, Malone, and Moran, and foregrounds everyday
language—“Yes, I work now, a little like I used to”—puncturing this matter-
of-fact statement with the quali¤cation “except that I don’t know how to
work anymore.” What could be easier to translate than the sentence “I don’t
know how to work anymore”? And yet what does such a sentence mean? Why
doesn’t Molloy know how to work anymore, and how does it relate to his
past? Is he just making an excuse? Is his idleness the consequence of old age?
Or has he lost one of his faculties or perhaps a limb?
It may well be that Beckett, like Wittgenstein, is so famous around the
world because his enigmas are not so much textual as conceptual—and hence
translatable. Such poetic language has great resonance at our moment of
globalization—a moment when monolingualism is, unfortunately, increas-
ingly common. In this context, as Roubaud also understands, poetry empha-
sizes not a speci¤c language but simply language as an investigative tool. As
Wittgenstein reminds us, “You learned the concept ‘pain’ when you learned
language” (Philosophical Investigations §384).
Wittgenstein on Translation 81