Translating Others, Discovering Himself: Beckett as Translator

This paper examines the work of Samuel Beckett in the light of his early work as a translator of the works of other writers.  In his translations for Negro: An Anthology (1934), the Anthology of Mexican Poetry (1958), or commissioned translations for journals such as “This Quarter”, early pre-figurings of Beckett’s own thematic and linguistic concerns abound.  Rarely viewed as more than acts of raising money for himself, Beckett’s acts of translation, examined chronologically, demonstrate a writer discovering his craft, and developing his unique voice, unencumbered by the expectations of originality.  This essay posits that Beckett’s works, with their distinctive voice and characterisation, owe much to the global perspective he gained through translating across cultural, continental divides, as well as experimenting with form, which became a staple of Beckett’s own work.  Without formal training or theoretical grounding in translation, Beckett utilises the act of translation as a means of finding himself, revisiting it as a means of shaping his own unique literary voice

A text become provisional: revisiting the capital of the ruins

This essay is a reexamination of Samuel Beckett's The Capital of the Ruins, the untransmitted radio script written for Raidió Éireann (now Raidió Teilifís Éireann) in 1946 following his work with the Irish Red Cross in Saint Lô. The first half of this essay is concerned with the archival and publishing history of the text. This section examines the variants introduced by various editors or publishers and makes a case for a definitive edition of the text based on the edited photocopy of the typescript held in the Beckett International Foundation archive at the University of Reading. The second half of this essay then uses this close attention to the text to reconsider the focus of The Capital of the Ruins and the extent to which the piece is more firmly directed towards socio-political aspects of post-neutrality Ireland than has previously been identified

Samuel Beckett and the oral-aural contract

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