Beckett’s bilingualism, self-translation and the translation of his texts into the Croatian language

Abstract

1 IntroductionBeckett is the single writer in the world who had written his entire work in two languages, English and French.1 He is not the only bilingual writer in the world, but he is one of the few who wrote in two languages at the same time.2 Beckett's bilingualism was entirely voluntary, considering the fact that he was not persecuted, for political, economic or religious reasons, as many exiled artists have been. His need for French can be seen as driven partly by aesthetic and partly by psychological needs (Beer 1994:214).Samuel Beckett, Irish born in Dublin, began writing in English during the 1930's, but after the Second World War, he decided to write exclusively in French. In conversations with Juliet Charles, he explained that French him to escape the habits inherent in the use of native (Charles 1986:27), while saying that in French it was easier to write without a style (Gessner 1957:32). The switch to the French language represents a significant turning point in Beckett's writing. Writing in French gave Beckett control over his style and allowed him to create texts that were quite different from the work he had previously written in English. His style in French was bare, uncomplicated, basic and simple. In 1956, Beckett returned to English as an original language of creation, with the writing of his first radio play, All That Fall. From that point on, Beckett will self-translate all of his texts or write versions in two languages at the same time. The 1950's were the beginning of Samuel Beckett's bilingual creation.3 During his literary career, Samuel Beckett wrote more than fifty texts. Approximately half of Beckett's texts were originally written in English, and half in the French language. All of the texts written after the novel Murphy (1938) have been translated either to English or French by Samuel Beckett himself.Beckett's work exists in multiple versions because he revised his texts as he translated them, so that each self-translation became a textual transformation of the first version. The translation became a new and parallel text, a continuation of the work on the text. While translating, Beckett often changed the new version and showed that, it is impossible to repeat exactly the same thing in the process of translation.Samuel Beckett not only translated his own texts, but he also worked closely with the other translators of his texts. He helped them and supervised their work.4 Beckett also supervised the translation of his texts to Italian and German. The situation with his texts becomes even more complicated if we consider the fact that Beckett, working as a theatrical director, changed his own texts, so that even within a single language there are multiple versions of the texts.5 Those facts make the process of translating his texts to other languages, beside English and French, rather complicated. The translator is confronted with a problem of choice. Which version of Beckett's texts should one translate? Do the original and self-translated texts have equal status?During the last three decades, the interest for Beckett's bilingualism and the translations of his texts into different languages has been raised in Beckett's studies. This is not surprising considering the significance of the translation of Beckett's texts for any culture. So far, a critical or comparative analysis of the translations of Samuel Beckett's text into Croatian has never been done. This paper examines all of his translations published in Croatian between 1958 and 2010, but the aim of the paper is not to analyze each translation and determine its quality, but to determine the position of Croatian translators toward Beckett's bilingualism and self-translations. The main aim of the research was to establish which version of each text was chosen to be translated, original/first or self-translated version.2 Beckett's bilingualism and self-translationSelf-translation (or auto-translation) usually differs from other forms of translation. …