It does however pose some tricky technical problems, as Beckett himself noticed when warily contemplating translating L'Innommable: "The simplest thing is for me to translate it myself, though I do not intend to take it on for the moment.  I am by no means a good translator, and my English is rusty, but I simply happen to be able still to write the queer kind of English that my queer French deserves" — where "deserves" refuses to commit itself between a merited boon and a merited blight.

The problem is sharpened by the fact that George Craig's translations of the French would sit alongside letters written by Beckett himself in English. The temptation must have been great to write a kind of Beckett-ese. But Craig's translations are full of felicitous, literary touches, as when "dans l'eau" is rendered as "five fathoms under", and that echo of Ariel's song in The Tempest ("Full fathom five thy father lies") is justified a few lines later when Beckett writes of his solitary games of chess, and we are reminded, with difference of course, of the discovery of Miranda and Ferdinand playing chess later in that play.

As with the first volume of Beckett's letters, the quality of the editing here is exceptional, the reach, scope and precision of the annotation often astonishing.