T.S. Eliot, dal ristorante alla terra desolata

In the second collection of his poems published in 1919, Eliot added a group of lyrics he had written in French some years before. These poems are his only attempt to write poems in a language different from English. He would never translate his French poems in English but was going to reuse almost literally the last lines of “Dans le restaurant”, the longest of the group, translating them into English in his poem The Waste Land, published in 1922. In a poem characterized by multilingualism, it is odd that Eliot choose not to use the original form of the lines but to translate them. Eliot had written those poems in a period of his life in which he was still fascinated by French symbolist and post-symbolist poetry but had already decided to move to London in order to live there. When he wrote The Waste Land, his choice of England and of English language, but also the overcoming of his juvenile literary passions, were clearly asserted and Eliot choose to recuperate a portion of these French lines (as well as of other poems written in English) in The Waste Land. The reuse of those lines inside a later poem, therefore, could be an attempt by Eliot to regain possession of some of his previous production, whatever language it was written in, disseminating it in his new poem and putting it in a different context. However, there could be something more in his choice.