It was not until 1955 that Beckett finished translating, and partly recreating Waiting for Godot into his mother tongue, English. The performance took place in the Schloßparktheater in Berlin, in September 1953, which was later to become the host to further German premiers of Beckett’s pieces. Like its French model, this production provoked a variety of impulsive reactions, positive, as well as negative. Its German counterpart was to be turned into a stage production just a few months later.
Its world premier took place in a small Parisian theatre with the biblical name Théâtre de Babylône, in January 1953, and was performed in the language of the original text: French. Waiting for Godot was Beckett’s first play to be performed on stage, no less than four years after Beckett had finished writing it in January 1949. He was a man of Irish origin, who chose to leave his home country in order to lead a profoundly different life in France, experiencing a diverse culture while internalising it, and making it his own. Beckett on the other hand lived in exile through choice. As an Indian living in Britain, he was compelled to abide by laws and morals of another culture and obliged to communicate in a language with which he was comparatively unfamiliar. As a result of his writings, he was forced to live in hiding. The article, from which the section above was taken, was written by Salman Rushdie, an Indian intellectual, recognised, and often condemned, for his intriguing, and questioned, views on Muslim faith, in addition to his opinions on world politics in general. This external realisation may transpire in a type of language, for instance speech or gesture.Īlongside these concerns with translation, significant techniques of expression and repetition, as well as the apparent absence of historical and cultural aspects, and the consequences of the latter, will be discussed. Expression, in this case, is, therefore, a matter of internal transformation of thoughts and words, which is then followed by some form of external realisation of the latter. Even if a person is considered fluent in this particular language, it does not necessarily mean that the individual is, or even can be, word perfect. In some cases this may turn out to be an intricate challenge, as the individual may not find himself to be in, what I would like to label as, complete control over this system of speech. This phase may be referred to as that of internal, possibly subconscious, translation. To the ‘standard’ process of the mental construction of a sentence, another phase is added.
As already established in Rushdie’s statement above, a possible result of this decision may be the unconscious establishment of a more compound process of creation. It is often suggested that Samuel Beckett made the choice of writing in a language he himself had to master, in order to keep a distance to his own work. Diversities become particularly evident, and immensely relevant, when the English version, of which the act of translation was performed by Beckett himself, is placed in comparison to its German counterpart, constructed in cooperation between Beckett himself and his personal translator, Elmar Tophoven.
These may commonly be referred to as translations, but when engaging in a closer reading of these versions in comparison to one another, one realises that in actual fact an adaptation, and a recreation of the same play have been constructed. Several editions of the piece have been constructed, in numerous different languages. The playwright in question is the Irish writer Samuel Beckett, whose diverse versions of his play Waiting for Godot (1949) caught my attention. The article focuses entirely on the author’s own experiences with a bi- or, to an extent even trilingual playwright and his works.
The quotation above was taken from an article published in the broadly acknowledged British newspaper The Independent, on 24th February 2006, the same day a national German newspaper Die Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung chose to print it in its German translation. A man speaking English beautifully chooses to speak in French, which he speaks with greater difficulty, so that he is obliged to choose his words carefully, forced to give up fluency and to find the hard words that come with that difficulty, and then after all that finding he puts it all back into English, a new English containing all the difficulty of the French, of the coining of thought in a second language, a new English with the power to change English for ever.
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