Given how connected he was, I suppose it was only a matter of time before my Indo-European research project led me in the direction of T.S. Eliot. It came in the lead I was following with Jean de Menasce, who was instrumental in getting Émile Benveniste out of France in the second world war. 

De Menasce was from a Jewish family, born in Egypt, who later converted and became a Catholic priest. He was a student of Benveniste’s in the 1930s, and became a major scholar of Zoroastrianism. De Menasce and Graham Greene were students together at Balliol College in Oxford in the early 1920s, and de Menasce got to know Eliot around that time. Eliot had only been at Oxford for a year, and left before de Menasce was there, but it seems it was on his return visits he got to know de Menasce. De Menasce translated Eliot into French, as he also did Bertrand Russell around the same time. Jean-Michel Roessli has written about Eliot and de Menasce (academia.edu).

It seems de Menasce’s archive used to be at the Bibliothèque du Saulchoir (which Foucault used at the end of his life, and which used to have the papers of the Centre Michel Foucault) but is now at the Bibliothèque universitaire des langues et civilisations (BULAC). There are a few letters from Benveniste and Dumézil there, so it’s on a list of places to visit at some point. [Update: there are papers by de Menasce at both BULAC and Saulchoir. I say a little about my visit to Saulchoir here.]

But then I found that de Menasce had donated some material relating to Eliot to Balliol College. And since I wanted to go to Oxford to see a couple of books at the Bodleian, this was an easy side-trip. The Balliol archive is not at the main college library, but at St Cross Church, Holywell, a short walk away. Going there was an interesting way to spend an afternoon, though cold, as the reading room is in the nave of the church. De Menasce’s donation includes the books Eliot dedicated to him, some of the translations he made, both in published form and proofs, a little correspondence and related materials. (The list of material is here.)

Update 24 May 2024: In the Benveniste archive at the Bibliothèque nationale de France, there are his translations of Eliot’s Four Quartets. Chloé Laplantine has dated these to 1947. As her abstract notes, there is no context to the translations in the file.