Stopped in Holland: Samuel Beckett in Dutch Translation

Abstract

Translations into Dutch of Beckett’s works have been published from the early 1960s. Through his friendship with Geer and Bram van Velde, Beckett met their sister Jacoba shortly after the Second World War, and from the mid-1950s she became the most important translator of his works into Dutch. Jacoba sometimes collaborated with her life partner Frits Kuipers, who also single-handedly translated some of Beckett's major prose works. From the 1980s Martine Vosmaer and Karina van Santen took over from Van Velde and Kuipers as Beckett's main translators, but since the mid-1970s many of his works have also been translated by others. This chapter discusses the history of the translation of Beckett into the Dutch language, from its very beginnings to its latest title. In a brief aside, the author discusses his own translation into Dutch of Watt.