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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, +16 +
