Samuel Beckett and the Mathematics of Salvation

2021 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-29
Author(s):  
Chris Ackerley
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
The Self ◽  
Waiting For Godot

Abstract One of the thieves was saved .… If, as Vladimir concludes at the outset of Waiting for Godot, “It’s a reasonable percentage,” then why not accept Pascal’s celebrated exhortation to believe, rather than to risk in the afterlife the terrors of the abyss or the inferno? This essay traces Beckett’s use of the motif of the two thieves with respect to the truism of Credo quia absurdum est, as manifest in the calculus that underlies the Monadology of Leibniz and informs Beckett’s writing from Murphy to How It Is, and his sense of the self as something that is/was neither One nor Zero.

Samuel Beckett's Disruptive Translations of ‘je voudrais que mon amour meure’

2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-178
Author(s):  
Trask Roberts
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
The Self ◽  
Irish Poetry ◽  
Poetic Translation

Self-translators are often granted freedoms in their translations unimaginable for standard translators. Whereas a standard translation usually prizes sameness (or invisibility as Lawrence Venuti argues), the self-translator may instead highlight difference or disruption. A burgeoning subfield of criticism has outlined the ways in which one of the most famous of these self-translators, Samuel Beckett, makes use of his role as translator to further the reach of his work beyond the constraints of a monolingual text. Whereas most of this criticism has taken aim at Beckett's prose and theater, this essay asks what can be gleaned about Beckett's translation style from his early poetry. Here I focus on Beckett's four-line, untitled poem which begins ‘je voudrais que mon amour meure’ (‘I would like my love to die’). Originally published in 1948 in the bilingual journal Transition Forty-eight, this poem would go on to be edited, translated, reedited, and retranslated over the course of nearly thirty years. The various iterations and translations of the poem are not always harmonious and instead force the reader to consider more deeply the themes of the poem and to question the role of translation. I read the poem in light of Beckett's 1934 essay ‘Recent Irish Poetry’ as well as consider it in response to W.B. Yeats' 1899 poem ‘He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead’. By situating the poem in this context, I argue that this poem is a manifestation of Beckett's argument in the essay that poetry must take into account the division between poet and object. His short poem demonstrates this division as well as that between original and translation and thus allows us a window onto his translation project at large. Considering Beckett's poetic translation permits us to consider how a complementarity of intention towards language does not necessarily entail complementary translations.

scholarly journals Register in Samuel Beckett’s Writings in English and French:

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 40-48
Author(s):  
Bentolhoda Nakhaei
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Publishing House ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
English Version ◽  
French Version ◽  
Semantic Framework ◽  
Translation Analysis ◽  
Waiting For Godot ◽  
Stylistic Changes

Abstract Samuel Beckett, the Irish author and playwright was born in 1906 in County Dublin, Ireland and died in 1989, in Paris, France. From 1929 to 1989, Beckett wrote letters through which his life is depicted. His letters were published in the form of four volumes entitled as follows: volume I: 1929-1940 (published in 2009), volume II: 1941-1956 (published in 2011), volume III: 1957-1965 (published in 2014), and lastly, volume IV: 1966-1989 (published in 2016). These letters were later translated in French by the publishing house of Gallimard between 2014 and 2018. Within a morpho-semantic framework of analysis, one may wonder to what extent there exists stylistic affinities between his letters and his famous tragicomedy entitled Waiting for Godot (published in 1952). In other terms, are there constant, and/or shared stylistic units? To what extent has the register been changed from his letters to his play? How may the vocabulary, punctuation, and grammar differ from the English version of Waiting for Godot to the French version? Do these stylistic changes from English to French affect the notions of 20th-century man in the society in France? By drawing on certain theories of theoreticians in linguistics and translation studies such as Brian T. Fitch, Anthony Uhlmann, and Saeid Rahipour, this research seeks to present a linguistic and translation analysis of Beckett’s register in his four volumes of letters and English, and French versions of his play Waiting for Godot. Hence, this study aims to investigate the extent to which the Irish writer’s register has been differentiated in the corpus under study by the passage of time to suit the stylistic norms of 20th century in France and England.

The Chinese Translation of Samuel Beckett: A Critical History

2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (2) ◽  
pp. 282-295
Author(s):  
Bo Cao
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
Aesthetic Response ◽  
Chinese Translation ◽  
Critical History ◽  
Translation Practice ◽  
Third Stage ◽  
Waiting For Godot ◽  
History Of ◽  
Harsh Criticism ◽  
Second Period

In light of the relevant merits and defects of translation practice over sixty years, this article presents a critical history of the Chinese translation of the work of Samuel Beckett. The article argues that the history may be divided into two periods: the pre-1980 period and the post-1980 period, with China's reopening to the outside world in the late 1970s as the watershed. The first period is dominated by the politically propelled translation of Waiting for Godot and harsh criticism of Beckett as a ‘decadent’ author. The second period, characterized by a more complex aesthetic response, may be further divided into three stages: the first stage is marked by the pioneering Proust as a booklet on irrationalism and the debatable Collection of Samuel Beckett translated from French; the second stage by the annotated Complete Works of Samuel Beckett; the third stage by the scholastically motivated Letters of Samuel Beckett. In retrospect, the transition between the two periods is a dramatic one from political misreading to aesthetic appreciation. Or, rather, the progress of the Chinese translation since the turn of the twentieth century mirrors both the re-evaluation of Beckett as an innovative artist and the ‘inward turn’ of Chinese intellectual circles.

Samuel Beckett and Anthropomorphic Insolence

2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chris Ackerley
Keyword(s):  
Samuel Beckett ◽  
The Self

Samuel Beckett's writings display a contradictory attitude to Romanticism, their incipient lyricism ruthlessly constrained and the "impulse to animise" rejected in favour of a view of nature as atomistic, mineral and organic. Beckett's distrust of the dictum that "man is the measure of all things" leads in to a sustained critique of the anthropomorphic impulse and of any epistemology (including Romanticism) that thus asserts the self. I then critique, from the perspective of , two Romantic tenets: "mythical fancy" and the transcendental impulse. The essay concludes where it begins, with Beckett's ambiguous attraction to a tradition he rejected, this constituting his experience of the romantic agony.

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