Revisiting the romantic myth of the isolated man of letters in his Ussy-Ivory Tower, this chapter highlights some of the translatory collaborative processes in which Beckett was involved. Barbara Bray, whom Beckett met at the BBC in 1956, was then a script editor. At the BBC she translated, adapted and produced a great many texts from the French language. Beckett offered his help with this, as is testified by his lengthy and detailed remarks on Bray’s version of The Square by Duras in an unpublished 1957 letter. In return, it is likely he was influenced by Duras through the agency of Bray. What is more, the correspondence attests to the fact ...

Marguerite Duras and Samuel Beckett, both prominent writers internationally during the same period, and both living in Paris during most of their careers and rooted in French literature, appear to be a remarkable case of closely parallel writerly trajectories in conjunction with an apparent absence of exchange between them. Living in the same capital, they shared aesthetic, theatrical, editorial and political allegiances, and were both at some points intrigued by each other’s work and life. Both produced a medially diverse oeuvre including novels, theatre plays, screenplays, both worked as directors, rather often with the same actors or ...

This essay explores Beckett’s engagement with Djuna Barnes, starting with their epistolary exchanges in the 1970s and working back to his reading of her work in the 1930s in order to position Barnes as yet another modernist woman writer who, along with Gertrude Stein, facilitated Beckett’s transition away from Joyce in the 1930s. It explores their shared connection with James Joyce before developing on two key comparative critical readings of their aesthetics by Tyrus Miller and Daniela Caselli in order to situate Barnes as a valid aesthetic counterpoint to Joyce, a development on the ‘Nominalism’ versus ‘Realism’ dyad Beckett establishes ...

Louise Bourgeois and Samuel Beckett were both from comfortably bourgeois families; both had a strained relationship with one parent and undertook psychoanalytic treatment while grieving the deaths of their fathers; both were academically successful and placed great emphasis on studying; both were marked by the First and Second World Wars; both experienced the disorientations and liberations of exile and working between languages; and finally, after a period of relative neglect, both achieved celebrity and critical acclaim later in life.   Drawing on Bourgeois’s notebooks and diaries in her New York archive, in which Beckett makes fleeting ...

Maria Irene Fornes is one of the most revered American playwrights. Dramatists she influenced, actors she directed in her plays, students she mentored in her playwriting workshops, as well as academics who taught and published essays and books on her diverse output – over 40 plays in her 40-year career – share Tony Kushner’s assessment that ‘‘America has produced no dramatist of greater importance’. Born in Havana, Cuba in 1930, Fornes came to New York in 1945, and by the early 1960s, she was a central force in the establishment of the Off-Off Broadway avant-garde movement in Greenwich Village. In 1953 she saw the original production of En ...

Seeing Barbara Bray was written as a sketch for a portrait of Barbara Bray, who met Samuel Beckett shortly after he sent the text of All That Fall to BBC's Third Programme. As script editor and producer, she consulted with the author on his first radio drama and collaborated on subsequent works broadcast by the BBC. From the early 1960s, Bray, based in Paris, worked mainly as a literary translator. Over time a strong bond between them developed and an intimate relationship ensued. Erudite and with a gift for rendering complex issues in the least complicated way, Bray provided Beckett with much more than translating advice, encouraging him in ...