–-S. E. Gontarski

Waiting for Godot has been a plural, bicultural, international work from its inception. The play was written in French in 1948 as En attendant Godot, between the novels Malone meurt (1948, Malone Dies, 1956) and L'Innommable (1950, The Unnamable, 1958), by an Irishman imbued with the biculturalism of his native Ireland and the internationalism of his adopted France. For critics like Eoin O'Brien, however, the French play is "unmistakedly Irish" in mannerisms, speech, and landscape. In the midst of his tirade, for example, the slave called Lucky refers to the women's version of the Irish game of hurling, "camogie," among "the practice of sports." His overlord, Pozzo, evidently buys his pipes from the fine Dublin pipe shop of O'Connell and Grafton Streets, Kapp and Peterson, Ltd. And Vladimir and Estragon let slip some overt Hibernicisms like "ballocksed" and "run amuck," according to O'Brien. But such language may finally be as Anglo as Hibernian. And the territory that Vladimir and Estragon (hardly Irish monikers) seem to have recently traversed is "Le Vaucluse" ("the Mâcon country" in English), even as Estragon insists that he has always and only lived "dans la Merdecluse" (orin "the Cackon country," in Beckett's translation). Lucky's "quaquaquaqua" punctuates his tirade in both languages with another echo of Gallic scatology, "caca." The complementary couple dreams of wandering through the Pyrenees, moreover. Before they became so disreputable, they might have jumped, "Hand in hand from the top of the Eiffel Tower." In their current state they would be denied entrance. The bond between the couple was strengthened when during a "vendange," the grape harvest, Estragon threw himself into the Rhône River, and Vladimir fished him out. Vladimir seems unable to recall the name of the farmer from whom they bartered wine for work, but he is identified specifically in the French text as the vintner Bonnelly, from whom Beckett himself bartered for potatoes and wine during the writer's war-time exile in the village of Rousillon, or Rousillon d'Apt, the less famous of the Rousillons in the département Vaucluse. (The family winery still in operates, producing a serviceable if undistinguished Côtes du Ventoux: "A Bonnelly Propriétaire-récoltant— Bâtiments neufs—Roussillon Vaucluse.") Viewed in its full multiplicity, the "unmistakedly Irish" play becomes at least as unmistakedly French, its Gallic references as prominent as its Hibernian. The publication of a bilingual edition of Samuel Beckett's most celebrated play thus underscores this cultural and linguistic plurality and is a cause for celebration. One might in fact justly wonder why it has been so long coming.

    Beckett claimed on 25 June 1953 that his translation for Grove Press "had been rushed" and noted again on 1 September 1953 that "It was done in great haste to facilitate the negotiations of [producer] Mr. Oram and I do not myself regard it as very satisfactory." After the French production had closed at the end of October, Beckett improved his English text, asking his publisher, Barney Rosset on the 14^th of December 1953 to delay publication in favor of a better text: "Could you possibly postpone setting the galleys until 1^st week in January, by which time you will have received the definitive text. I have made a fair number of changes, particularly in Lucky's tirade." Throughout the revisions French and English versions retained subtle differences, finally, beginning with their titles. The French title might well have been rendered as While Waiting for Godot, but Beckett omitted the adverb from the English. (The adverb may have resonated more fully in the French capital where a popular brand of chewing gum sold in Métro vending machines adopted the apparently simple slogan, "En attendant . . .") The French adverb accents the burden of time in the title more directly than the English text, which, on the other hand, is given a specific subtitle, "tragicomedy in 2 acts," missing from the French. On the whole the English-language text tends more toward the indefinite, loss of memory, like the vintner's name in Roussillon, grown more pronounced. Vladimir's "He said Saturday. (Pause.) I think" is decidedly less assured than "Samedi soir et suivants." On the other hand, the French text does not include Vladimir's evocation of Proverbs 13:12, "Hope deferred maketh the something sick," which gives the English text extra poignancy. Estragon's "Les gens sont des cons" lacks the Darwinian implications of "people are bloody ignorant apes." In English Estragon calls Lucky's dance "The Scapegoat's Agony," which gives the text a curious echo of Leviticus 16:7-10, intensifying the play's religious anguish, the scapegoat released to wander "into the wilderness."

    Fully revised, Waiting for Godot was finally published by Grove Press in April of 1954, in advance of any English-language production. Beckett continued making revisions to his translation for three separate, almost simultaneous productions, however: one in London, which opened at the Arts Theatre Club on 3 August 1955; one in Dublin, which opened at the Pike Theatre on 28 October 1955; and one in America, which opened at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami Beach, Florida, on 3 January 1956, in preparation for its New York debut. By the Broadway opening at the John Golden Theater on 19 April 1956, two years after the play's publication by Grove Press, three decidedly different English-language texts were performed. The British production was a special case, since the play was censored for its West End debut to comply with the Lord Chamberlain's objections. The first Faber and Faber text of 1956 was this bowdlerized, what Beckett called mutilated, version. Faber's note to its first edition announced: "When Waiting for Godot was transferred from the Arts Theatre to the Criterion Theatre, a small number of textual deletions were made to satisfy the requirements of the Lord Chamberlain. The text printed here is that used in the Criterion production." In fact hundreds of variants existed between the Grove Press Godot of 1954 and Faber's 1956 edition. Faber went on to "correct" its Godot in 1965, in an edition they called the "complete and unexpurgated text . . . authorized by Mr. Beckett as definitive," which differed from the American text. To mark his eightieth birthday Faber and Faber collected all of Beckett's plays into a single, celebratory volume, Samuel Beckett: The Complete Dramatic Works, in which the venerable house of Fabers inexplicably reprinted the bowdlerized text of 1956, at least in its initial, hardbound release. Moreover, in March of 1975 Beckett directed the play himself for the first time and in the process produced a substantially altered, trimmer acting text. Those changes are detailed in The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett, Volume I: Waiting for Godot. Beckett also made independent revisions for the Pike Theatre production of 1955 that have never appeared in any publication of the play, even that final acting version published in The Theatrical Notebooks.

    Over the years Grove Press had silently revised its text, correcting most instances of "well" for "we'll," for instance, so that by the 1970 uniform edition in 16 volumes, The Collected Works of Samuel Beckett, with which Beckett was delighted, most of the typos had been corrected. For the publication of this centenary bilingual edition of Beckett's most famous play, Grove Press has not only reunited the long separated fraternal twins, the English and French editions of Godot, but has brought British and American texts closer to harmony. Minor differences remain. In the discussion of the Eiffel Tower, for instance, Vladimir notes, "We were more respectable in those days." The Faber edition has the couple more "presentable." And in the discussion of Vladimir's urinary difficulties, the Faber edition has the characters responding "angrily" two fewer times. And Vladimir "peers" into his hat one time fewer in the British text, Beckett revising the fourth "peers" to a "looks." But such differences as remain, mostly stylistic, are further testimony to the play's plurality not only between French and English but among English versions as well, the Grove text remaining closer to the spirit of Beckett's original translation.

Further reading

 

Ackerley, C. J. and S. E. Gontarski. The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett: A Reader's Guide to His Works, Life, and Thought. New York: Grove Press, 2004.

 

Dukes, Gerry. "Beckett's Synge-song: The Revised Godot Revisited." Journal of Beckett Studies 4.2 (spring 1995): 103-12.

 

Knowlson, James and Dougald McMillan, eds. Waiting for Godot New York: Grove Press, 1995. Volume I of The Theatrical Notebooks of Samuel Beckett. Four vols.1992-1999.

 

O'Brien, Eoin. The Beckett Country: Samuel Beckett's Ireland. Dublin: The Black Cat Press, 1986.

 

Zeifman, Hersh. "The Alterable Whey of Words: The Texts of Waiting for Godot." Educational Theatre Journal (1977): 77-84. Rpt. in Beckett: Waiting for Godot. Ed. Ruby Cohn. London: Macmillan, 1987, 86-95.

Gregory Rabassa

 New Directions; First Edition  2005

 

 

 

Review

 

 

Today's guest is Helen Oclee-Brown, a commercial translator from French and Spanish into English. Helen has an undergraduate degree in modern languages from the University of Southampton and a master’s degree in specialised translation from the University of Westminster. After working in house for an international marketing agency and for a translation company, Helen became a freelance translator in 2009. She firmly believes in the importance of professional  associations and is an active member of the British  ITI (Institute of Translation and Interpreting) and MET (Mediterranean Editors and Translators). Helen lives in Kent in South East England. We warmly welcome her first contribution to the blog. Helen@HelenOcleeBrown.co.uk 

 

 

You may not know his name but you probably have some of his work on your bookshelves. Gregory Rabassa is a giant of literary translation. He has translated more than thirty Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking authors, many of whom hail from Latin America. Rabassa's translations have opened the eyes of English-speaking readers to the rich wave of folk-inspired modern literature produced during "The Boom" by authors such as Julio Cortázar, Mario Vargas Llosa and, of course, Gabriel García Márquez.

If This Be Treason is Rabassa's slim yet thought-provoking memoir. It is liberally peppered with linguistic delights, historical facts and literary references – it's clearly the work of a master wordsmith and it really keeps you on your toes. Despite being a memoir and featuring many a personal anecdote, Rabassa maintains a sense of distance throughout. Perhaps this is because, as a translator, he is used to a life in the shadows, merely following his authors' words, an idea that he insists on "to the point of boredom" (his words not mine).

And yet following an author's words does not mean shirking any responsibility. Far from it. The translator's greatest burden is to consider his own treason, as Rabassa goes on to do in the first of his memoir's three sections. Here, he plays on the old Italian cliché traduttore, traditore. Does he, or any translator, betray the language, the culture, the author or "saddest of all" himself when translating? As translators well know, some sort of betrayal (or loss) is almost inevitable. Indeed Rabassa goes so far to say that translation is mere imitation because we cannot perfectly replicate in one language what we say in another. And yet we must try. As Rabassa says, "Translation may be impossible, but it least it can be essayed."

Rabassa also uses the first section to delve into his background. For someone who fell into translation, he was quite well prepared. The child of word-loving parents, with grandparents from four different countries, he enjoyed a linguistic education and embarked on a brief military career that took him to far-flung Europe and Africa as a cryptographer. Rabassa then goes on to set out his stall on such thorny issues as translation theory (as a proud "dinosaur" he's not a fan), large publishing houses (he doesn't much like them either) and what he sees as the role of the translator (again, you simply follow the words).

He is rather scornful about teaching translation: "I've tried to teach the unteachable. As I have said before, you can explain how translation is done, but how can you tell a student what to say without saying it yourself? You can tell him what book to read but you can't read it for him." And reading is a hugely important subject, as silly as that sounds, because Rabassa seldom reads the books he translates before getting down to work, saying "When I'm translating a book, I'm simply reading it in English". Incidentally, Rabassa sees translation as an art, not a craft ("You can teach Picasso how to mix his paints but you cannot teach him how to paint his demoiselles").

The second section is the meatiest part of this tome. In it, Rabassa discusses the thirty or so authors that he has translated. He deals with them in chronological order because each work influenced the next in some way. It's an experience game, after all. Rabassa recalls some of the authors with great affection, having met many of them, become great friends or simply studied their work when a student. Some he some lavishes with praise: Juan Benet is the Proust of Spain, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the direct heir to Cervantes, and Clarice Lispector, he says, "looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf" – high praise indeed. His deft, understated phrasing also lends itself to the heart-breaking fate suffered by Lispector, with the brutally simple note that she "was not treated well by life".

Unsurprisingly, Rabassa devotes more pages to Gabriel García Márquez than to any other author, having translated six of his novels. García Márquez was said to have preferred Rabassa's English translation to his original. True to form, Rabassa deals with this compliment in characteristically modest style: "My mystical feeling […] is that Gabo already had the English words hiding behind the Spanish and all I had to do was to tease them out". As a side note – and a rather shocking one – Rabassa did not receive any royalties from this work.

Politics is an inescapable theme, although one Rabassa does not dwell on too much. Magic realism, that oft-debated term, was in Rabassa's mind a folkloric call for freedom and justice. Elsewhere, he briefly mentions how difficult it was to send drafts back and forth to José Lezama Lima in Cuba and describes how "the brutes who have ruled the place so often" left writers impelled to explore the darker aspects of the Latin American psyche. Against the weight of such history, it's hard not to share Rabassa's mischievous delight that Demetrio Aguilera-Malta, founder of the Ecuadorian Socialist Party, was given his big break by the beacon of capitalism that is The Wall Street Journal.

Throughout the book Rabassa plays down his role, commenting rather charmingly that he is "quite aware that the translator is the squire of the arts, but comfortable with the fact that it was Sancho Panza who made Don Quixote possible". He sees it as his job to transpose rather than to translate, and he goes to great lengths to ensure that his translations retain that sense of "the other". To do this, he proposes a pleasant little test: reading the translation in the character's local accent. How many of us have found ourselves doing just that when reading one of his translations?

In the third (very short) section, Rabassa judges his own treason – he has dismissed all other (often self-appointed) authorities within the book. Reassuringly, he suffers from the same affliction as many translators: he is simply never satisfied with his work when he looks back at it. One can never be too sure of oneself. So, are we translators guilty as charged? I will leave it up to you to find out the verdict.

Some have criticised this book for being a bit brief, but I suspect that it is purposefully short. The real stars of the show are the works themselves, both the authors' original Spanish or Portuguese texts and Rabassa's English readings. And with that in mind, I feel that this book, for all its brilliance, should come with a warning. If you're blessed (or cursed, depending on your viewpoint) with an inquisitive mind, then this tiny tome may not be a quick read. I for one couldn't help but reach for the originals in my collection and compare sections to Rabassa's exquisite translations. Time well spent, in my opinion.

Helen Oclee-Brown, Commercial Translator