How I did not translate Beckett

Abstract

ABSTRACTConsummately bilingual, during most of his life Samuel Beckett wrote his works in either English or French, and then translated them himself into the other language. His self-translations, however, could be strikingly different in places to the first text, to such an extent that each time the result might arguably be considered a “second original” of the same work. In this article, I explore several possible approaches to translating dual works of this kind (twin-texts), based on my ongoing experience translating Beckett’s Trilogy (Molloy, Malone meurt and L’Innommable, later translated by Beckett as Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable) into Spanish. The question of why merely theoretical, potential or even unfeasible translations might prove to be interesting, if not sometimes preferable to actual translations, is also discussed.