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MY WAY WITH THE WORK OF SAMUEL BECKETT
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GABOR ROMHANYI TOROK
Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis (Where you are worth nothing, want nothing)"
The artist who stakes his being is from nowhere, has no kith.”
I shall write a book [...] where the phrase is self-consciously smart and slick,
but of a smartness and slickness other than that of its neighbours on the page.
[...] The experience of my reader shall be between the phrases, in the silence,
communicated by the intervals, not the terms, of the statement [...] his
experience shall be the menace, the miracle, of an unspeakable trajectory.*
ABSTRACT
Ever since I read the exquisite Hungarian translation of Samuel Beckett's
Krapp’s Last Tape in 1962 (when I was seventeen), his work has been an
intermittent stream of my life. In 1970, with minimum knowledge of English
I lexiconized every single word of Malone Dies. In the middle of the seventies
I began to learn French and started to lexiconize the Three Novels. It was in
those days that I began to correspond with Samuel Beckett. My translation of
Mal vu mal dit/Ill Seen Ill Said was published in 1982 — so began my translator
career. In May 1982 I managed to talk with Beckett over the phone in Paris,
and he allowed me to translate his Three Novels (He had known me from my
letters written to him). The Hungarian Three Novels was published in 1987.
I asked Beckett to help me to spend some research time at the Samuel Beckett
Archives, in Reading. He was generous enough to support me, so at the end of
1988 I spent two and a half months there. I made notes on Dream of Fair to
Middling Women. My translation of it was published in 2001, and my How It
Is was out in 2007. At present I am writing an essay on III Seen III Said. It seems
to me that in studying the Beckettian oeuvre I have known the twilight and the
silence counterbalanced by the unsurpassable humour of Samuel Beckett.
1 Vivian Mercier: Beckett/Beckett, Oxford, Oxford University, 1979, 163.
? Samuel Beckett: Disjecta, London, John Calder, 1983, 148.
3 Samuel Beckett: Dream of Fair to Middling Women, London, John Calder, 1993, 138.
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