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INTRODUCTION
what Paul K. Saint-Amour calls “bukimi” or “pre-traumatic syndrome.” Anita
Rakéczy’s “Shoes That Are Left Behind: Gabor Tompa’s Beckett Heritage”
is a detailed record of the internationally acclaimed Romanian-Hungarian
director Gabor Tompa’s innovative achievement in staging Beckett’s plays. In
Tompa’s Waiting for Godot, for example, the stage is covered with abandoned
shoes, and on top of a large heap of shoes at center stage, reminiscent of
death camps, is an old, discarded TV-set; from the screen appears a boy.
Tompa often uses electronic devices to surprise the audience; his staging
is filled with a jack-in-the-box-like enjoyment. What is unique in Beckett’s
influence is that there are many experimental artists in various genres who
admire Beckett and create their artworks — often with free use of the very
latest technology — that are inspired by and allude to his work. Llewellyn
Brown’s essay “Body, the Gaze and Abstraction: from Samuel Beckett to
Bruce Nauman” illuminates Beckett’s intentional dissociation between the
impersonal dimension of language and the body image stripped of personal
elements by focusing on Bruce Nauman’s tribute film entitled “Slow Angle
Walk (Beckett Walk).” The film projects a transposition of Watt’s manner
of walking, which Nauman himself performed as Beckett prescribed while
having his feet and movements filmed from peculiar angles, so that he looked
like an object, invoking a Lacanian “Other.” Yoshiko Takebe, in “Translating
Silence: Correlations between Beckett, Chekhov and Hirata,” seeks the
possibility of translating Chekhov into different times and cultures by looking
into Oriza Hirata’s android version of The Three Sisters. Hirata is a Japanese
director whose theatre features tranquility and silence. By using an android
robot instead of an actor, he creates a mechanical, inhuman atmosphere and
strengthens the neutrality and obscurity of the play.
Part 3, “Practitioner Voices,” comprises three essays that focus on
Beckett from the viewpoint of practitioners. The first two highlight voices of
prominent Hungarian dramaturgs and translators who devoted themselves to
bringing Beckett to Hungarian audiences in the time when the country had
a socialist regime, and freedom of cultural investigation was restricted. It is
fortunate that their testimony is included in this book. Marton Mesterhazi,
radio dramaturg and script editor, in his essay “How We Made the Hungarian
Version of Samuel Beckett’s All That Fall,” conveys the difficulty he faced in
promoting Beckett’s radio play in the early 1960s when “fig-leafing” prevailed,
as well as his relief and delight when his plan to produce All That Fall was
finally accepted by the Head of Drama Department of Hungarian Radio, after
which it was broadcast on 11 January 1968, in Late Night Radio Theatre. Gabor
Romhanyi Torok is an important Hungarian translator of Beckett’s numerous
prose works, including his Three Novels (1987) and Dream of Fair to Middling
Women (2001). Török’s “My Way with the Work of Samuel Beckett” testifies
how deeply he was impressed by Beckett’s art and by the kindness of the author,
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