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The remarks that follow are concerned with the relationship between literary texts and their translated versions. I begin with a famous instance of self-translation: Waitingfor Godot, Samuel Beckett's English version of En attendant Godot. Beckett claimed that there is no implication of a divine creature, benevolent, malicious or indifferent, behind the name of the play's central personality - we cannot call him a character because he never appears. For a French-speaking public, Beckett pointed out, there would be no such overtones to the word "Godot".
That seems to be all that needs to be said. Yet the matter is not as simple as Beckett's assertion would suggest. For English-speaking audiences and readers, the implications of the word "Godot" are impossible to banish or overlook, precisely because Beckett plays so teasingly with notions of the divine and its dealings with bewildered humanity. Constantly invoked, anticipated and in a way worshipped, Godot sends ambiguous messages of promise by way of puzzling emissaries, yet never makes good any promise. His clients, subjects, creatures (or whatever they may be) succumb to doubt, even rebellion, yet they find that they cannot abandon the notion that Godot exists, that he will arrive. That, surely, is a religious sentiment, and it is reinforced by the allusions to the Gospels scattered throughout the text.
One could explain the anomaly in several ways: mischievousness on Beckett's part in not owning up to a fundamental intention behind his work; the operation of his subconscious when, as an English-speaker, he was fashioning a French text filled with all manner of metaphysical speculation; or merely an accident. From my point of view, it matters little which of these possibilities, or any other, one might settle on. The essential point is that in English the name of that focal personality both concentrates and sharpens the play's speculative tendency, its peculiar, bleak and despairing attempt to justify the ways of God to men. In the English text it is impossible to ignore that conjunction; without it the play seems lesser, diminished in the scope of its references and allusions.
Such an attitude is by no means uncommon among Beckett's Englishlanguage critics and commentators - those, that is to say, who discuss Waitingfor Godot as if it were an independent...