The Act of Slavery in 20th Century as Reflected in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

This study aims to analyze the act of slavery that happened in Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The characters that are involved are Pozzo as the master and Lucky as his slave. By analyzing how Pozzo oppresses Lucky, it reflects the act of slavery that also happened in reality in the 20th century when the story was written. This study is a qualitative descriptive method using the sociology of literature approach to reveal the connection between the situations in the play with the situations of the world in the 20th century. The data of this research are collected from the utterances and dialogues of the characters in the text play Waiting for Godot. The result showed that the act of slavery acted by Pozzo and Lucky also happened in the 20th century before, during, and after World War II in the 1940s. An upper-class society would enslave and oppress a lower-class society at the time because they had power and money.

Translating and publishing French theatre in China

This article examines transformations in the literary translation environment in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) specifically in relation to French-language theatre. After an initial survey of literary translation in the PRC from its foundation to the present, the article studies how French-language plays have been translated and adapted for publication. In particular, it considers how French theatre has occupied a favoured position in the Chinese translation literary system over the past four decades. It then focuses on three emblematic cases, those of Molière, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Samuel Beckett. Regarding the latter, two Chinese translations of En attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot will be examined to determine how contextual factors affected translation choices. In this way, the article seeks both to contribute to current discussions on ‘translatability’ and to consider the reception of canonical French-language writers in the Chinese literary system.

The Chinese Translation of Samuel Beckett: A Critical History

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.

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

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.

Wang Chong and the Theatre of Immediacy: Technology, Performance, and Intimacy in Crisis

In early January 2020, when Chinese theatre director Wang Chong (b. 1982) arrived in New York to remount his production of Nick Payne's Constellations for the Public Theater's Under the Radar Festival, he couldn't have predicted that this would be the last time for months that he would watch his actors from the middle of a full house. By the time his work-in-progress solo show, Made in China 2.0, opened at the Asia TOPA Festival in Melbourne, Australia, at the end of that February, it was clear that there would be no live theatre in Wang's hometown of Beijing for some time. All of China was on lockdown as the disease now tragically familiar as COVID-19 swept the country. Then, as Wang returned to Beijing in early March, businesses around the globe were shuttering, theatres were going dark, and theatre artists were confronting an unprecedented challenge to their personal safety, livelihoods, and ability to make meaningful art. In short order, some well-resourced theatre institutions began to stream performance recordings and reconfigure their seasons for online platforms. Only a month after returning home, Wang Chong joined this mass online movement with his production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, streamed live on 5–6 April 2020 as Dengdai Geduo.

Samuel Beckett and the Mathematics of Salvation

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.

Trying Again, Failing Again: Samuel Beckett and the Sequel Play

Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot has spawned several unauthorized sequel plays, which see Godot arrive on stage in 1960s Yugoslavia, 1980s Ireland, 1990s North America, and early 2000s Japan. The sequel play is a largely ignored phenomenon in literary scholarship, with the sequel form itself routinely dismissed as a derivative and inevitably disappointing text. Yet the sequel also re-situates and re-evaluates the original text, and its reiterative nature aptly parallels the paradox of non-ending in Beckett’s original Waiting for Godot. Focusing on four unauthorized stage sequels to Beckett’s play – Miodrag Bulatović’s Godo je došao (Godot Has Arrived, 1966), Alan Titley’s Tagann Godot (Godot Arrives, 1987), Daniel Curzon’s Godot Arrives (1999), and Minoru Betsuyaku’s Yattekita Godot (Godot Has Come, 2007) – this article examines how these sequels rework the cultural logic of Godot’s arrival to their own critical and political ends. These playwrights draw on the very recursive, even frustrating, nature of the sequel form itself as an exegetic framework, reproducing the trope of non-ending that characterizes Beckett’s own work. Hannah Simpson is the Rosemary Pountney Junior Research Fellow in British and European Drama at St Anne’s College, University of Oxford. She is currently working on two forthcoming Beckett-related monographs: Witnessing Pain: Samuel Beckett and Post-War Francophone Theatre and Samuel Beckett and Disability Performance.