Waiting for Godot - Beckett Selections (3)

Author: (French) Samuel Beckett
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-06-01
Features: Where are you now? What time is it now? Who are you now? Don't ask me that. Just say I. Don't think about it. Call this a question, an assumption. Move quickly forward. Call this progress, call this speed. There might be a day when everything is difficult to step forward, I will simply stay there, there, not go out, according to an old habit, far away from home, spending days and nights outside, which is not far. On April 13 this year, it was the 100th anniversary of the birth of the world-famous writer Samuel Beckett. Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House launched "Beckett Selected Works." The entire set consists of 5 volumes and 1.25 million words, collecting all the works written in French by Beckett after he settled in Paris, France, translated primarily by Yu Zhongxian, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences and editor-in-chief of "World Literature." Samuel Beckett won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature for "his novels and plays, in which he with a unique form has opened a new field of literature with the awareness of modern man's spiritual poverty," but in China, many people's understanding of him is limited to his famous work "Waiting for Godot." It is reported that Beckett's formal literary career began with novel writing and poetry, and his number of novels far exceeds his dramatic works. From the perspective of literary expression, Beckett is known for his portrayal of the elusive and delicate inner world. As a form with stronger individuality, the novel is more suitable for Beckett. His trilogy of novels in French, "Molloy," "Malone is Dying," and "The Unnamable," broke tradition,, reducing plot and character development to only monologues of wandering thoughts. This writing style directly led to the literary experiments of the French New Novel movement. Many critics believe that this trilogy is more powerful and important than "Waiting for Godot," and few modern literary works have a deeper understanding of human experience. During Beckett's lifetime, there was a saying internationally: Borges, Nabokov, and Beckett were the three greatest living writers. However, in China, Beckett's novels were largely ignored, which can be considered a great loss for the Chinese translation community. The 5-volume "Beckett Selected Works" launched by Hunan Literature and Art, including the trilogy "Molloy," can be said to have largely made up for this lack in a great way.