Roman Jakobson famously wrote that ‘poetry by definition is untranslatable. Only creative transposition is possible.’1 Samuel Beckett’s bilingual oeuvre would appear to prove this assertion right as only eight out of the 130-odd autograph, self-contained poems listed in the 2012 edition of Samuel Beckett’s Collected Poems edited by Seán Lawlor and John Pilling appear to have been self-translated. While the self-translated poems – ‘they come’ / ‘elles viennent’, ‘Dieppe’ / ‘Dieppe’, ‘je suis ce cours de sable qui glisse’ / ‘my way is in the sand’, ‘que ferais-je’ / ‘what would I do’, ‘je voudrais que mon amour meure’ / ‘I would like my love to die’, ‘hors crâne seul dedans’ / ‘something there’,2 ‘Là’ / ‘go where never before’, and ‘Comment dire’ / ’what is the word’3 – span the six decades of the Beckettian oeuvre, it seems that Beckett only translated his own poetry on rare occasions. One can thus wonder why there are so few self-translated poems when Beckett spent so much time self-translating his prose and theatre, and what reasons presided over Beckett translating these poems in the first place: was it solely ‘pour faire remarquer moi’ (pidgin French; essentially ‘to get myself noticed’) as he quipped in Transition Forty-Eight, no. 2? The aim of this essay is threefold. First the sociohistorical and biographical contexts of production of these poems will be taken into consideration in order to understand when and why Beckett was led to self-translate his poems in the first place. Then I will proceed to analyse Beckett’s poetics of translation by focusing on three of his bilingual texts, to understand better his poiein or ‘making’ of them which involves the Jakobsonian notion of ‘creative transposition’.4 To finish, the art of self-translating poetry will be considered in the light of Beckett’s Chamfort maximes, as the notion of paradox underlying the maxims not only aptly defines Beckett’s poetics of self-translating but also encapsulates his writer’s ethos of ‘failing better’.