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GÁBOR ROMHÁNYI TÖRÖK
I became acquainted with the works of Samuel Beckettin 1962. I was seventeen
at the time. I read Krapp’s last Tape in a periodical, in an unsurpassable
Hungarian translation. I had never met a literary work that transmitted so
much valuable information in so compact a space. In my eyes it was more
valuable than Proust’s thousands-of-pages-long A la recherche du temps
perdu. Later I memorized it and wanted to perform it on the University
Stage, but my contemporaries dissuaded me. Once I even went to Dublin, the
birthplace of the work, where “at the end of the jetty, in the howling wind,
never to be forgotten, when suddenly I saw the whole thing. The vision at
last." At one time I toyed with the idea of attempting a new translation of
the play, but the experience of the Hungarian text had been so intense that
even from the French and English of the original the Hungarian sentences of
the translation came into my mind. I was powerless to suppress their lasting
impression, and so abandoned the attempt.
By the middle of the 1960s I had learnt a certain amount of English, and
then I came upon Malone Dies, the second book in the Three Novels. This is
the second Beckett text that I read constantly in French, English, German, and
Hungarian. Then, I looked up the words in the text, putting the Hungarian
meaning above the original French or English words in red, blue, and green
ink. (The translation of my own of Molloy — Malone meurt — L’Innommable
was published in one volume by Magvető, Budapest only in 1987). I would
designate the genre of prose poem for the work on account of its unforgettable
poetic phrases and sentences:
But the silence was in the heart of the dark, the silence of dust and the things that
would never stir, if left alone. And the ticking of the invisible alarm clock was in
the voice of that silence which, like the dark, would one day triumph too. And then
all would be still and dark and the things at rest forever at last.°
Or:
[...] he has come to that stage of his instant when to live is to wander the last of the
living in the depths of an instant without bounds, where the light never changes
and the wrecks look all alike. Bluer scarcely than white of egg the eyes stare into the
space before them, namely the fullness of the great deep and its unchanging calm.°
* Samuel Beckett: Krapp's Last Tape and Embers, London, Faber and Faber, 1959, 15.
5 Samuel Beckett: Three Novels (Molloy — Malone Dies — The Unnamable): Malone Dies,
London, Picador Ed., 1979, 186.
6 Ibid., 214.
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