Digitized Beckett: Samuel Beckett’s Self-Translation Praxes Mediated through Digital Technology

The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP) brings together digital facsimiles of the manuscripts of Samuel Beckett’s works – documents currently held in over thirteen libraries and archives in Europe and North America – with the aim of furthering genetic criticism. Incorporating three of the eight modules available for researchers engaging with the BDMP website as of August 2020, together with one forthcoming monograph study whose corresponding digital module has yet to be made live on the site, this article will, in effect, make use of three novels and one novella, all in both their French and English iterations, in order to present concrete examples of the ways in which the exposition of idiosyncratic features of Beckett’s œuvre is being facilitated by this nascent digital archive.

The Pentimenti Principle

Considering deleted passages in a manuscript as a draft’s “draff,” this article investigates the status of such cancelled passages. Since they did not make it into the published text, are they still part of that work, or where do they belong? The proposed pentimenti model suggests a possible answer to this question by comparing cancelled passages to what in the visual arts are the visible traces of earlier painting beneath the top layer. The manuscripts of Beckett’s Fin de partie / Endgame in the recent digital genetic edition of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project serve as a case study to illustrate this pentimenti model.

Putting Students “In Whitman’s Hand”

Catherine Waitinas leads readers step-by-step through a digital manuscript project on Walt Whitman’s poetry that she created for a variety of courses from general education to graduate seminars. Using handwritten manuscripts digitized in the Walt Whitman Archive, Waitinas’s students meld old and new technologies, placing penmanship in conversation with big data analysis and The Walt Whitman’s Archive’s tools like the archive’s search engine. Waitinas describes how archival assignments like these are infinitely scalable; they can be used in relation to many other archives, and Waitinas gives suggestions for one-day to full-unit versions of the assignment.

Samuel Beckett's ‘Psychology Notes’ and The Unnamable

This essay reexamines Samuel Beckett's The Unnamable by treating his ‘Psychology Notes’ as part of the genetic dossier for this text. By developing a parallel between The Unnamable and ‘textbook’ psychoanalysis in terms of a shared obsession with abjection, the essay will demonstrate that some of the symptoms and obsessions suffered by the unnamable voice (‘prison psychosis’, ‘coprosymbolism’ and ‘genital discharge’) are traceable to the Notes. At the same time, the commitment to cure, control and explanation in psychoanalysis is resisted, and Beckett's text ultimately stages a failed talking cure. The genetic identification of these intertextual connections is enhanced by the availability of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP). Using the same scholarly tool, the essay also examines some of the variations between the English and the French versions of the text, in order to shed further light on the significance of the Notes to the manuscript corpus of L'Innommable/The Unnamable.

Notes on a Newly Discovered Draft of the Poem ‘Le Petit Sot’

During our work on the transcription of the manuscript notebooks of Malone meurt for the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project, we recently discovered a draft of the poem ‘Le Petit Sot’ which, to the best of our knowledge, was so far unknown to Beckett scholars. In this article, we situate the draft in its material and chronological context, and relate these findings to the authorship debate surrounding Beckett's ‘Petit Sot’ poems. In doing so, we argue that it contributes to the emergence of a pattern towards stylistic simplification and ignorance in his work, which can be traced from the French poems he started writing at the end of the 1930s, to late works such as the mirlitonnades, Stirrings Still and ‘comment dire’ / ‘what is the word’. As a consequence, what Beckett once referred to as his post-war ‘revelation’ might better be conceived of as a gradual, bilingual process rather than a sudden epiphany.

Edição Genético-digital dos manuscritos tradutórios e do Diário de D. Pedro II

O artigo relata as pesquisas desenvolvidas nos últimos seis anos pelo NUPROC, na Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina, para divulgar a atividade intelectual do imperador Dom Pedro II. Nestes anos de pesquisa analisamos sistematicamente pela primeira vez no Brasil as traduções literárias, de várias línguas clássicas e modernas, realizadas pelo Imperador e ignoradas pelos registros oficiais que focaram notadamente seus atos políticos e administrativos. Essas análises redundaram em várias publicações e trabalhos acadêmicos (iniciação científica, TCC, dissertações, teses e pesquisas de pós-doutorado). Agora, uma vez coletados, organizados, transcritos e analisados os manuscritos originais e digitalizados a que tivemos acesso, pretendemos disponibilizar todo esse material inédito para todos os pesquisadores e grupos que estiverem interessados na História do Brasil Imperial e da tradução e da literatura no Brasil no século XIX. Para isso queremos transformar essas transcrições em edições genéticas acessíveis em plataformas digitais e hipertextuais no formato de transcrições hiperdiplomáticas, ao exemplo das dos grupos Projekt HyperNietzsche e The Beckett Digital Manuscript Project. Além desse objetivo concreto, o artigo (e o projeto ao qual faz referência) pretende levantar a questão ainda pouco discutida no Brasil da interface necessária entre Humanidades e suportes digitais.

Territoriality and the Technics of Drylands Science in Palestine and North America

At the turn of the 20th century, agricultural experts in several countries assembled a new agro-scientific field: dryland farming. Their agricultural research practices concomitantly fashioned a new agro-ecological zone—the drylands—as the site of agronomic intervention. As part of this effort, American scientists worked in concert with colleagues in the emerging Zionist movement to investigate agricultural practices and crops in Palestine and neighboring regions, where nonirrigated or rainfed agriculture had long been practiced. In my larger manuscript project, I consider how the reorganization of rainfed farming as dryfarming is central to the history of both the Middle East and North America, where it was closely related to modern forms of power, sovereignty, and territoriality. I suggest that American interest in dryfarming science emerged out of a practical need to propel and sustain colonization of the Great Plains, but later became a joint effort of researchers from several emerging settler enterprises, including Australia, Canada, and the Zionist movement. In contrast to a naturally ocurring bioregion, I argue that the drylands spatiality was engineered through, rather than outside, the territorialization of modern power.

Editing Beckett's Twin Texts

This article tries to envision and assess the feasibility of a critical multilingual edition of Beckett's works, against the background of both traditional editorial theory and new developments in the field. In the case of Beckett's theatrical work, he kept revising his texts in performance. German editorial practice in particular has offered several examples of dealing with this kind of variance, reflecting the author's multiple and changing intentions over time in a critical edition. The situation becomes more complex in Beckett's case due to the multilingual aspect of his work. One way to reflect the multiplicity of Beckett's texts would be to present them as both product and process, in the form of critical multilingual editions with revision narratives connected to, and informed by, the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project ( www.beckettarchive.org ). In this way, the various versions of Beckett's work are not reduced to a critical apparatus but exist alongside the critically edited twin texts, calling the readers’ attention to crucial points of textual variation, rather than smoothing them out.