3/9/2023 0 Comments Waiting for godotIn 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. Unlike those later works, bleak to the point of toxicity and increasingly opaque, "Godot" is both funny and relatable and, in its way, fatalistically optimistic.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. He returned again and again to placing characters in a void disconnected from a larger world, if there's even a semblance of society left, including in "Endgame" and "Krapp's Last Tape" in the late 1950s and "Not I" (1972), "Footfalls" (1975) and "Rockaby" (1981). Pozzo is suitably monstrous in the first act, so much so that when he reappears in the second half, blind, and all four men end up in a pile on the floor with a snoozing GoGo using Pozzo's buttocks for a pillow, you feel both amused and awful.īeckett was in his mid-40s when he wrote "Godot," having already lived through both world wars. Into this routine blazes Pozzo (the excellent Christopher Innvar, another BSC veteran), with the bearing of a tyrant or fascist general, roaring orders to his enslaved companion, Lucky (Max Wolkowitz, who earns deserved applause for Lucky's only lines, a 700-word, five-minute monologue). Germain stage space to the greatest extent I've ever seen there.) Because they're in what seems to be a post-apocalyptic world, the road going from nowhere to nowhere, with any talk of civilization fixed long in the past, they're in their own world, coming every day to wait, building their comedy routines, banter and arguments as a way to fill the time - and, as they realize, to block out their true thoughts. (Set designer Luciana Stecconi exploits the full depth of the St. Save for one time each, they never leave that diagonal stretch of road, staring at the voids beyond it as if they are quicksand or infested swamps. DiDi's emotional sine wave has far greater amplitude than GoGo's he swings from joy to anger, but it's always undergirded by hope - he's the one always looking forward to tomorrow, even when he says toward the end, his finger bopping gently on GoGo's nose, "We'll hang ourselves tomorrow." Info: 41 and See More Collapseĭold's DiDi is the expansive one, chattering on and racing about, the Tigger to Isola's glum, Eeyore-like GoGo. Running time: Two hours and 25 minutes, with one intermissionĬontinues: 7:30 p.m. Germain Stage, Barrington Stage Company, 36 Linden St., Pittsfield, Mass.
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