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L’articolo discute il lavoro di curatela e traduzione dell’opera di Samuel Beckett offerto da Gabriele Frasca nel volume Romanzi, teatro e televisione uscito nella collana dei Meridiani per Mondadori, ricostruendo la lunga fedeltà del curatore e le idee che ne hanno sempre accompagnato l’attività di mediazione all’interno dell’altalenante fortuna dell’autore irlandese in Italia. In particolare, si considera la decisione di presentare l’opera di Beckett attraverso una selezione che ne privilegia gli aspetti più innovativi e ipermediali, con attenzione non solo ai romanzi e ai testi teatrali ma anche un radiodramma e alle meno note pièce televisive. Infine, si ripercorrono le strategie traduttive adottate nei confronti dell’’equilinguismo’ beckettiano, e si illustra l’idea del traduttore della necessità di superare il mito dell’originale e di usare la traduzione come strumento di interpretazione "sospeso tra creazione e critica".

Our main hypothesis is: in order to understand the singular trembling of Derrida’s philosophical work, and with it, the philosophic-political significance of it, one has to examine not only Derrida’s own conception of writing and, specifically of literature, but also the resonance of his work with that of an author who appears as his own writerly ghost: Samuel Beckett. This examination will follow the trembling between the two authors up to its utmost conclusion, where not only the limits of language, but also those of any kind of sovereignty are effaced through this quake.

Recensione del libro di Lucia Esposito, Oltre la mappa. Lo spazio delle storie nell’immaginario moderno. Shakespeare, Beckett, Danielewski.

The Italian reception of Samuel Beckett’s works, even though late, finds in Giorgio Manganelli one of the most careful and punctual interpreters. An aspect that is necessary to analyze concerns the hilarious-tragic character according to Manganelli’s interpretation, or rather the operation of emptying the tragic myth in a parodic way. The Manganelli’s “tragedie da leggere” have in common with Beckett’s plays and with Bacon’s paintings the same desecrating purpose towards the tragic myth, which they oppose a sarcastic and melancholic hilarity.

The paper investigates from a literary perspective the question of the ‘missed encounter’ between two crucial authors of 20th century: Samuel Beckett and Paul Celan. Although both living in Paris for the most part of their adult life, sharing acquaintances and friendships, Beckett and Celan never met in person. A last chance presented in March 1970, as the poet and translator Franz Wurm, a mutual friend, invited Celan to come along and meet Beckett. The meeting never took place; few weeks thereafter, Celan drowned unobserved in the Seine. In this paper, I propose a retrospective reading of the ‘missed’, or ‘failed’ encounter between Beckett and Celan within a psychoanalytic framework. I will analyse it as a negative event, re-elaborating thus an expression used by André Green in his interpretation of Henry James’ The Beast in the Jungle (1903). What Green calls negative event does not provide a patho-biographical category. On the contrary, it bridges the reverberations of the psychic work on absence with the creative process of writing and the dynamics of sublimation. Shifting the attention from the bare biographical data to the textual dimension of such ‘missed encounter’, I aim to show how the writings of the two authors may be read as an articulation of an après-coup of a non-encounter which, instead of taking place in ‘real life’, opens new margins of representation of an alterity within the ‘life of writing’. As such, writing becomes—between poetry and psychoanalysis—that ‘thirdness’ harbouring the very possibility of an encounter beyond phenomenological categories, bearing testimony for an unknown transgenerational reader.

The paper proposes a comparative analysis of the question of limit in its connections with the work of the Negative (Le Travail du négatif, A. Green) in two great proses of the 20th Century: Samuel Beckett's Company (1980) and Franz Kafka's Der Bau (The Burrow, 1923/24). The contribution articulates in two main moments: within the specificity of a psychoanalytical approach, I reconsider the problem of the Work of the Negative in literature, discussing how, in Kafka's and Beckett's works, the Negative represents a radical alterity to a philosophical perspective. In a second moment of the paper, I analyse the complexity of the representational strategy of the limit in Kafka's and Beckett's writings, investigating thus the question of subjectivity and the relationship with an Otherness through the writing, the question of memory, its construction processes by means of writing, the work of mourning, and the development of poetics of irreducibility and unrepresentability towards an ethics of literature.

Samuel Beckett es uno de los escritores cuyo ejercicio autotraductor ha recibido mayor atención. Su obra Happy Days, autotraducida al francés como Oh les beaux jours, destaca –entre muchos otros aspectos– por la gran cantidad de citas literarias a las que recurre la protagonista. Este artículo analiza el tratamiento de las alusiones literarias en las traducciones catalanas de ambas versiones: Oh, els bons dies de Vicenç Altaió y Patrick Gifreu (1984) y Dies feliços de Joaquim Mallafrè (1996).

Abstract – Samuel Beckett's interest in St. Augustine is manifest throughout his oeuvre, both in terms of content and style, and can be traced from his very first works, such as Whoroscope, to his last plays and short stories. Although this interplay has been touched upon in the critical discourse on Beckett, a systematic analysis is still to be done. This paper represents a preliminary investigation into the Augustinian influence in the early Beckett, in particular Dream of Fair to Middling Women and Murphy. By considering the presence of the Confessions in these two novels I intend to show how St. Augustine's work played a significant role in the development of the young author, offering him the occasion to overcome his theory of habit as outlined in his early essay, Proust. In this text, Beckett posits habit as merely “the generic name for the countless treaties concluded between the countless subjects that constitute the individual and their countless correlative objects”. Dream still endorses this perspective, but already suggests a different dialectic of memory, will, and habit. This shift, I argue, can be connected to Beckett’s reading of Augustine's meditations, in book VIII of the Confessions, on the cleavage between the spirit and the flesh. In Murphy, we see Beckett’s 'Augustinian dialectic' fully formed: habit is no longer a veil of Maya that hides the real essence of the individual, but the condition of possibility for the subject's flight from the “mercantile Gehenna” world towards the truth of the inner self.Riassunto – L'interesse di Samuel Beckett per Sant'Agostino è evidente nell'intero corpus dell'autore – a partire dai suoi primissimi lavori, in particolare la poesia Whoroscope, fino agli ultimi drammi e racconti – e si manifesta sia sul piano del contenuto che dello stile. Nonostante il rapporto tra i due autori sia già stato oggetto dell'attenzione dei critici, una sua analisi sistematica deve essere ancora compiuta. Nel presente saggio si offre una proposta di lettura della presenza agostiniana nel primo Beckett, in particolare Dream of Fair to Middling Women e Murphy. Considerando la presenza delle Confessioni in questi due romanzi intendo mostrare come i lavori di Sant'Agostino abbino giocato un ruolo fondamentale nello sviluppo del giovane autore, offrendogli l'occasione di superare la sua teoria dell'abitudine così come l'aveva rappresentata nel saggio giovanile Proust. In questo testo, Beckett descrive l'abitudine come “il nome generico per gli innumerevoli accordi stipulati fra gli innumerevoli soggetti che costituiscono l'individuo e i rispettivi innumerevoli oggetti”. In Dream si presenta la stessa prospettiva, ma già si intravedono i segni di una differente dialettica fra memoria, volontà e abitudine. Tale slittamento può essere ricondotto alla lettura delle meditazioni agostiniane nel libro VIII delle Confessioni, nelle quali si tematizza la scissione fra la volontà dello spirito e quella del corpo. In Murphy la dialettica agostiniana di Beckett giunge a compimento: l'abitudine non è più il velo di Maya che nascone l'essenza reale dell'individuo, ma la condizione di possibilità per la fuga del soggetto dalla “mercantile Gehenna” verso la verità dell'interiorità.

O artigo procura situar a interpretação proposta por Theodor W. Adorno para a peça "Fim de partida", de Samuel Beckett, no contexto de sua concepção de autonomia da arte. Segundo a hipótese do trabalho, o conceito de autonomia subjaz ao diagnóstico histórico de Adorno a respeito do gênero dramático, o qual justifica sua leitura da peça como uma paródia do drama. O artigo busca mostrar os acertos dessa leitura perante a recepção inicial da peça, e também seus limites, uma vez que resulta em uma abordagem da experiência teatral focada primordialmente na consideração do texto teatral, em detrimento da encenação.

The prose of the Carinthian writer Lilian Faschinger features complex intertextual networks. By integrating as well as interweaving quotations and motives from Samuel Beckett’s Malone Dies, Thomas Bernhard’s Frost and Dante Alighieri’s Divina Commedia, her picaresque novel Magdalena Sünderin does more than merely engage in postmodern playfulness. This article investigates how Faschinger’s text makes use of its intertextual elements to ridicule the literary canon. It also poses the question whether this can be interpreted as a tongue-in-cheek feminist act against male domination in the literary scene as such.

This paper explores how the notions of “translingualism” and “translingual imagination” (Kellman) can by applied to the understanding of Beckett’s bilingual work. To do so, the first part of the paper focuses on the interrelated issues of bilingualism and self-translation within his oeuvre and on the possible uses of the concept of “translingualism” to better define both their nature and their results. The focus is then shifted, in the second and third parts of the article, on Imagination morte imaginez and on the English version of this text, Imagination Dead Imagine. The purpose of these analyses is to explore one of Beckett’s representations of imagination and to underline, through a comparison of the different versions of this short work, its unique translingual nature.

The complex zone of what I refer to as the aesthetical absurd is examined in the works of Modernists Kafka, Giacometti, and Beckett. This aesthetic zone, addressed through cognitive poetics, exists between artistic notion, the artist’s ideal cognitive image, and the actual performance or resulting image born in reality. Artistic ideal is evaluated as the aesthetic image or notion that exists in a tentative nascent and emotive state, but one that the artist strives to produce in the world—to reconstruct from the cognitive zone of creativity—but at times fails to bring to completion or fruition. This ever present bifurcation between these two conflictive states leads to a new view of the Sisyphean absurd. Kafka stands as the beginning point of the discussion. His fragmented, at times incomplete, writing serves as a touchstone to position the aesthetics of the later Beckett and Giacometti, a sculptor. Beckett mirrors Kafka’s sensibility, and relates his negative aesthetic, one lacking or hiding any visible scaffolding for the artistic process. Beckett and Giacometti were friends and collaborated on crafting props for a staging of his signature play Waiting for Godot, a failed attempt. An assessment of the aesthetics of these three artists advances the understanding of their works in terms of the aesthetical absurd.

L’ article a pour objet l’étude des didascalies méta-interactionnelles. L’analyse est menée à partir d’une observation du système didascalique que contient la pièce En attendant Godot de Samuel Beckett. Il s'agit, dans une première partie, de statuer sur la définition et la délimitation de ces empans textuels qui constituent l'une des deux composantes de la textualité dramatique. Dans une seconde partie, on s'attache à décrire les contenus que recouvre la catégorie des didascalies dîtes métainteractionnelles.Dans les deux cas, on cherche à préciser les particularités stylistiques de Beckett en la matière.

According to Michail Bachtin, the characters of a novel are always thought and perceived as ‘others’, that is, as bodies in principle external to both reader and writer. The concept of ‘performance’, when applied to the act of reading, shows the limitation of this theory as it deconstructs the relationship between otherness and identity. In Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamamable the main character cannot be considered as an ‘other’ in Bachtin’s sense, and requires a different theory of character as an always changing ‘becomingother’ in the process of reading. A similar dynamic interaction between the representation and the presence of the character can be eventually detected in the ‘reverse trompe l’oeil’ technique adopted by the young American artist Alexa Meade.

[Reading Samuel Beckett's "Fin de Partie". Notes from a seminar]. The paper sets out the results of a didactic workshop about Fin de Partie (1957) by Samuel Beckett held by the Author at the ISPF. After clarifying the link between the concept of absurdity and the concept of contradiction, and touching the issue in Giuseppe Rensi, Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus, the Author presents his ontological reading of Beckett’s play.

Resumo Procuramos demonstrar, a partir de uma relação entre a noção adorniana de estilo tardio e obras tardias de Deleuze - sobretudo L’épuisé, que trata da obra igualmente tardia de Beckett para a televisão - que há no pensamento deleuziano uma importante reflexão sobre a morte. Procuramos salientar a presença desta ideia e diferenciar a morte da noção de negativo, criticada pelo autor. Uma vez traçada a natureza desta reflexão, pretendemos questionar sua relevância no estudo da obra de Beckett.

A poem from "Les Fleurs du mal" is discreetly present both in the conclusion to Fin de partie and the opening of "Du côté de chez Swann". This essay examines the nuances and differences in this re-use of a Baudelairian text between Samuel Beckett’s play and Marcel Proust’s novel.

This paper looks at some key moments in the Beckett oeuvre in which Dante appears. Traversing published and unpublished texts, the paper shows how initially Dante is a modernist auctoritas; later, we encounter the promise of keeping Dante ‘out of sight’; we are told of Belacqua’s foolish bequeathing of copies of the Comedy; and we witness lavish investments in Dantean loci communes giving very meagre literary returns. Dante, I contend, is a very good way to think of the relation between waste and function in Beckett: the examples provided in this study demonstrate the importance of the ambiguous relation between what is claimed to have been discarded, lost, or given away in a moment of folly and what is being made to work. The overall argument is that Dante is not a source in its explicative sense, but is instead part of the Beckett archive: on the one hand we have, in reality and in fiction, a number of Divine Comedies on the shelves of Beckett’s Library; on the other, Dante is part of the potentially infinite layers, as described in Malone Dies, which constitute the very language of the Beckett œuvre.

Recensão a Jorge Gomes Ribeiro, Em baixo e em cima: A propósito de Beckett, Prefácio de Carlos J. Pessoa, Amadora, Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema, 2014, 57 pp.

Ah! Que Beckett este, pelo Teatro Nacional São João!

Il presente intervento si propone di fare il punto sugli aspetti teorici e sugli studi su Samuel Beckett autotraduttore. Dopo una breve panoramica sull’attività di traduttore che Beckett intraprese soprattutto in anni giovanili, verranno messe a confronto le modalità autotraduttive delle diverse fasi della lunga carriera dell’autore, individuandone le caratteristiche peculiari: traduzione “delayed”, successiva e concomitante (Grutman 2013). Si tenterà infine di definire quale sia il punto di svolta che porterà l’autore alla consapevolezza di dover tradurre nella sua altra lingua tutto ciò che scrive, e come questo abbia influenzato la sua poetica alla luce di un bilinguismo che si configura non come doppia appartenenza, ma come doppia estraneità. Si cercherà infine di definire secondo quali gerarchie di autorevolezza questi testi vengano percepiti dall’autore. This paper investigates Samuel Beckett as self-translator from a theoretical and a historical-critical point of view. After a brief overview of Beckett’s activity as a translator of others, the essay concentrates on the different attitudes towards self-translation in Beckett’s long literary career: from delayed, to successive and to simultaneous translations (Grutman 2013). This work explores the turning point when Beckett becomes aware of his self-translating activity in order to establish how this awareness influenced the author’s poetics, especially in the light of his bilingualism intended as a double estrangement instead of a double belonging. And finally the paper deals with the idea Beckett had of his texts: is there a hierarchy of authority between originals and translations?

Habit plays an ambiguous role in Samuel Beckett's oeuvre: on the one hand, as he claims in his essay Proust, habit is merely considered as “the guarantee of a dull inviolability”, a protective screen dividing the subject from reality; on the other hand habit, as the area of friction between activity and passivity, is the object of extensive meditation and a pivotal element in the representation of Beckett's characters. In this paper I intend to investigate this ambiguity in the light of Félix Ravaisson's and Maine de Biran's philosophical reflection on the theme of habit and though a reading of the short story All Strange Away

Donigan Cumming is a multidisciplinary artist and an experimental movie maker. He realized the movie Locke’s Way (2003) with the intention to produce his own Recherche du temps perdu, in a work that combines video, photography and performance. Forty-five years before Cumming, Samuel Beckett was also inspired by À la recherche du temps perdu when he wrote Krapp’s last tape. As Cumming mentions the important influence of Beckett in his work, we can observe many similarities between both works. If the analyse of Locke’s Way allows to show how the work of Cumming and the way it includes many forms of creative approaches generate different kinds of hybridity, it also reveals the interdisciplinary range of Proust beyond theatre, video, photography and performance.

This essay focuses first, on the notion of generation mainly in Beckett’s works, and secondly shows that Proust’s conception of habit, seen as a soothing force, allows Beckett to break free from a view of history as repetition.

Prispevek se ukvarja s posebnimi procedurami spomina v sodobni dramatiki, ki kljub navidezni absolutnosti sedanjosti, ki jo vedno znova reprezentira, velikokrat uporablja spomin, a ne več kot kontinuiteto spomina v smislu svetega Avguština in njegovih Izpovedi, ampak diskontinuiteto spomina v smislu beckettovskih junakov, pri katerih spomin dekonstruira veljavnost samega sebe. Na podlagi primerov (ne več)dramskih taktik od poznega modernizma do (ne več)postdramskega bomo prikazali transformacije drame spomina in spominjanja od negotovosti in izbrisa spomina poznega Samuella Becketta, preko raziskav spomina in osebne ter skupne identitete Dušana Jovanovića do postdramskih sopostavitev kolektivnega spomina novejše zgodovine in sedanjosti v dramski pisavi Simone Semenič. Teza, ki jo preverjamo, je, da sintetični model dramske gradnje ni brez alternative, ampak ga je v sodobni drami zamenjal analitični in »pripovedni« model gradnje ne več dramske pisave, v katerem se spomin emancipira od primata sedanjosti dramskega dejanja. V nasprotju z avguštinovsko pripovedjo, ki prikaže preteklost skozi spominjanja junakov v sedanjosti, s tem pa jim zagotovi tudi identiteto, je v sodobni dramatiki ravno obratno. Junaki so oropani tradicionalnih oblik spomina in pripovedi, saj bi njihova sposobnost povedati zgodbe, ki so del spomina, izključevala »kaos«, ki se zdi Beckettu bistven za formo, ki bo »dopuščala kaos« in »oskrbela zmešnjavo« ter zamenjala klasično dramsko obliko.

Il saggio tratta del significato della sedia a dondolo nel romanzo Murphy di Samuel Beckett, considerata come esempio della ‘simbologia geometrica’ dell’autore. Si sostiene che la forma della sedia a dondolo possa essere interpretata in relazione all’interesse di Beckett per i numeri irrazionali quali mezzo per illustrare il tipo di relazione fra i suoi personaggi e il mondo. Si propone inoltre di mettere in relazione in questo senso la sedia a dondolo con un altro oggetto tipicamente beckettiano, la bicicletta, che si rivela caratterizzata da una simbologia a essa complementare. La relazione fra questi due oggetti, si sostiene infine, può fungere da paradigma per una tipologia dei personaggi beckettiani, tesi fra una fuga verso un altrove indefinito e una fuga verso un’interiorità staccata dal mondo.

Artigo sobre a evolução dos elementos cómicos e trágicos na obra de Samuel Beckett, apresentado em conferência no âmbito da iniciativa "Beckett no TAGV", na Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Coimbra a 15 de Maio de 2006.

Portefólio dedicado a Samuel Beckett em Portugal (1959-2006).

Artigo sobre textos de Samuel Beckett.

El objetivo principal del artículo es mostrar que, en aspectos significativos, la obra artística de Franz Kafka, Samuel Beckett y Francis Bacon se hace cargo de ciertas aporías de la subjetividad moderna y puede entenderse como una respuesta crítica a las mismas dentro del horizonte de la modernidad. La especificidad de este arte crítico se analiza a través de una red de conexiones: en primer lugar, trazando contrastes entre la lógica de la acción presente en la tragedia moderna, y la lógica del acontecimiento propia de la epopeya griega arcaica y la tragedia antigua; luego, estableciendo diferencias entre el sujeto de la tragedia moderna y el del arte crítico del siglo XX; y, por último, mostrando la existencia en éste de tensiones entre la lógica de la acción y la lógica del acontecimiento.