The Samuel Beckett Letters Project is 30-plus-year research endeavor to locate, transcribe and annotate all extant letters written by Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Led by project director Lois Overbeck in the Laney Graduate School, it has resulted in the publication of four volumes of selected letters (Cambridge University Press, 2009-2016). Following this publication, Overbeck’s team began collaborating with the library to create the Location Register which provides archival location and letter metadata for each item in public archives and with the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship (ECDS) to develop the Interactive Index website which curates searchable data from all Beckett letters in public archives.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett has entered the final phase of its open-access Interactive Index Project. This tool for exploring all of Beckett’s letters in public archives supports future scholarship and research in the collections of Beckett’s letters held in archives world-wide.

Just as Beckett’s letters offer a rich context for the events of the 20th century to many fields of inquiry, so the metadata of the Interactive Index Project opens the door to Beckett’s life and works for digital humanities initiatives. Emory students have played a significant role in establishing this unique resource, and have gained invaluable research skills by working with the editors of the project.

We invite your gifts to support this work toward its live reveal in April 2023. Your donation will be matched, up to $25,000. Gifts can be made online here. For more information about supporting the project, please contact Philip Brooks, Lead Director of Development at philip.brooks@emory.edu or (678) 801-5909.

The Chinese translation of the first volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett has been published in two volumes in Dec. 2021 by Hunan Literature and Art Publishing House (HLAPH), Changsha City, the People’s Republic of China. The Chinese translation is the first version rendered outside of Western Europe.  

The translator Bo Cao, a professor of English literature at Hunan Normal University in Changsha, began his work in 2015. As a visiting scholar at Emory University in 2019, sponsored by China Scholarship Council, he refined his translation under the guidance of the Director of The Letters of Samuel Beckett Project at Emory, Dr. Lois More Overbeck. She is one of the editors of the original edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett published in four volumes by Cambridge University Press (2009-2016). The Beckett Letters project is based in the English Department of Emory University.  

Beckett’s letters from 1929-1940 present Beckett as a young writer who is growing in “sound and fury.” His letters are replete with colloquial phrases, local references, foreign languages, and even neologisms and word games. Translation also included the editorial prefaces and rigorous notes, which the editors strove to make value neutral and approachable for a world-wide readership. As a veteran translator, Bo Cao is both faithful to Samuel Beckett many voices in the letters and to the editorial contexts, while also considering how to make the letters accessible to Chinese readers – a task that is both linguistic and cultural.

Since 2005, Cao has been writing about Samuel Beckett and translating his works, including Murphy (2012), Watt (2012), More Pricks Thank Kicks (2016) as well as an edition of occasional pieces, Disjecta (2016). To be better prepared, he went to Trinity College Dublin in 2011 to further his studies under the supervision of Prof. Ian Ross. He was interested in the teaching of Irish Studies in United States and spent some time consulting with Dr. Geraldine Higgins, Director of the Irish Studies Program at Emory. Well-trained for the translation of The Letters, Cao has put to full use his knowledge of Samuel Beckett, western European culture, and both languages.

While at Emory in 2019, he presented a study of the Chinese reception of Samuel Beckett’s work, for a colloquia series on translation at the Center for Humanistic Inquiry: “The Chinese Translation of Samuel Beckett: A Critical History” (Irish University Review 51.2, November 2021). He gave that talk in Chinese at the Chinese Flagship Program, Indiana University (Bloomington), and presented it in English with a paper, “The Chinese Translation of a Samuel Beckett Letter,” at a symposium at Washington University of St. Louis. Also in 2019, he prepared a study of Beckett’s awareness of Chinese culture: “Terms of Chinese Culture in Samuel Beckett’s Dream of Fair to Middling Women and their (Re- /Back) Translations.”

The progress of the Chinese translations of Samuel Beckett’s work since the turn of the twentieth-century “mirrors both the re-evaluation of Beckett as an innovative artist and the ‘inward turn’ of Chinese intellectual circles,” writes Cao. The Chinese version of The Letters is “the heroic conclusion of Samuel Beckett’s reception in China, which began reproachfully with the publication of Waiting for Godot in 1965 by China Theatre Press, and reached its climax with the Chinese translation of the Complete Works of Samuel Beckett, in 22 volumes, by HLAPH.

To Cao, the Chinese translation is also a mark of the constructive cooperation in the international SB community. His stay at Emory opened for him a second window on Samuel Beckett and Irish studies outside of Ireland. In July 2021, he published some conclusions drawn from his talks with Lois Overbeck: “Recent Trends of Samuel. Beckett Studies” Foreign Language and Literature, a journal of Sichuan International Studies University in Chongqing City of China.

Translations are underway of the following three volumes of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, from 1941 to 1989, each undertaken by a different translator. The balance of the Chinese edition is expected to be published by 2023. It will join the German (Suhrkamp) French, (Gallimard), and Italian (Adelphi) translations of the edition. “Beckett’s correspondents and consequently his letters can be found in archives all over the world,” says Lois Overbeck, so it is both appropriate and exciting that the edition of his letters has reached such a wide audience.”

The award will be applied to confirmation of the letters of Samuel Beckett in European and non-western archives. It is expected to be completed by 30 June 2022.

The Letters of Samuel Beckett Project is grateful for this continued support that will serve archives and future scholarship.

Editing Modernist Letters: A Roundtable discussion
Editors of The Collected Letters of Ford Maddox Ford

Scott McCracken, editor of Dorothy Richardson’s letters
Sandra Spanier, editor of Kay Boyle: A Twentieth-Century Life in Letters, and The Letters of Ernst
      Hemingway and Editor of the Letters of Kay Boyle,
Lois Overbeck, an editor of the Letters of Samuel Beckett
Editing Modernist Letters - video.mp4 - OneDrive (live.com)

 

Samuel Beckett, Lettere, II, 1941 – 1956 

Poised at the Crossroads: Preservation and Public Access to Humanites Research – The Letters of Samuel Beckett. Presentation of the Location Register and the linked Data Project of The Letters of Samuel Beckett, with Emory Digital Scholarship partners Sara Palmer and Jay Varner,

Large, long-term humanities projects leave a wake of research that may become inaccessible or lost when publication is complete. Following publication of final volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett (Cambridge University Press, 2009-2016), came the big question: How can thirty years of essential primary research be preserved for future scholarship? Metadata provided a methodology: while respecting literary rights, it could describe and index the letters, integrate decades of interviews and research, and model humanities methods for new and public inquiry.
By making both the platforms and the data open access, the discovery of these intersections between the humanities and digital methodologies offers a model for other projects in the Humanities - opening research to new questions and new evidence.”

Lois More Overbeck, "Samuel Beckett's Responses to Pedagogy," The Journal of Beckett Studies 29.1 (2020) 3-26.

The Consulate General of Ireland presented a film screening in French and English of Samuel Beckett’s play Krapp’s Last tape with Rick Cluchey and La Dernière Bande with Roland Bertin. Lois Overbeck led the post-screening discussion.

Reading Samuel Beckett, The Shorter Plays, Moderator: Lois More Overbeck
Samuel Beckett’s full-length plays, especially Waiting for Godot, Endgame, and Happy Days, are fairly well-known, but his shorter plays are less frequently produced. Lois Overbeck, an editor of The Letters of Samuel Beckett (Cambridge University Press, 2009-2016), offers a series of discussions based on the shorter plays. She will introduce these intriguing dramas with close reading and open discussion of the texts, as well as share background about them from the Letters of Samuel Beckett. Discussions take place in The Luce Center so that materials held in the edition’s offices are at hand. Performances of the plays will be discussed and links to video materials will be available.

What is the Word: Celebrating Samuel Beckett—Day 1 - University Libraries | Washington University in St. Louis (wustl.edu) 

What is the Word: Celebrating Samuel Beckett—Day 2 - University Libraries | Washington University in St. Louis (wustl.edu) 

A symposium, “Homage to Samuel Beckett,” highlighted books, letters, and memorabilia gifted by noted AIDS researcher Jay Levy ’60, Hon. ’96, and his wife, Sharon, from their decades-long friendship with the playwright, which began when Jay was living in Paris after his graduation from Wesleyan. 

Presentation: Lois Overbeck, “A Journey of Letters” 

Gift of Beckett Letters by Levy ’60 Inspires Homage Symposium

Translation in Word and Image: Assumptions and Implications

Walter S. Melion, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Art History and Director, FCHI
Lois Overbeck, Director, The Letters of Samuel Beckett Project, Department of English

The Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry and The Letters of Samuel Beckett co-organized a series of four afternoon colloquia, one in Fall 2019 and three in Spring 2020, on the comparative topic of literary and pictorial translation. They examined four types of translation:

• translation of literary texts from one language to another, one culture to another, one medium to another;
• translation of ancient, medieval, or early modern texts into a modern vernacular language and, connected to this, of prosody into prose;
• translation of visual images across media, e.g., of a painting into a reproductive print;
• the translational dynamics of the emblem, a composite literary genre that brings words and images into mutual relation, jointly translating text into image, image into text.
  

Dr. Bo Cao, professor of English Language and Literature at College of Foreign Studies, Hunan Normal University, Hunan Province, China, will be in residence at Emory University for 2019. He is the Chinese translator of the first volume of The Letters of Samuel Beckett to be published Hunan Literature and Art Press. He is working with Lois More Overbeck, one of the editors of the original edition of The Letters of Samuel Beckett published in four volumes by Cambridge University Press (2009-2016). The Beckett Letters Project is based in the English Department of Emory University. The Letters of Samuel Beckett has been translated into German (Suhrkamp Verlag), French (Editions Gallimard), and Italian (Adelphi Edizioni).

While at Emory, Dr. Cao will complete his translation of The Letters of Samuel Beckett: 1929-1940. He will also familiarize himself with the research for all four volumes of Beckett’s letters, so that he can guide colleagues who are translating the other three volumes. The full Chinese edition of The Letters will be available by the end of 2021. “The publication of The Letters in Chinese will be monumental, marking the completion of the Beckett translation project and rewriting the reception of Beckett in China,” said Bo Cao. To him, The Letters, a biography with “no commentary,” is as significant as Beckett’s works themselves.

In 2016 Hunan Literature and Art Press published The Complete Collection of Samuel Beckett in Chinese. In that series are Dr. Cao’s translations of Beckett’s novels Murphy, Watt (first edition in 2012), and More Pricks Than Kicks (2016), as well as his collection of occasional pieces edited by Beckett scholar Ruby Cohn: Disjecta (2016).

According to Dr. Cao, critical Chinese playwrights and novelists are curious about Beckett’s avant-garde works, and foreign literature scholars now find Beckett so fascinating and consider it their mission to remove political mis-readings of the previous decades. This renewed interest reflects changes in China. As to the difficulties of translation, Dr. Cao says that Beckett alludes to much classical European philosophy and arts, which are not widely known by Chinese readers. Beckett uses many invented terms and plays many word games for which it is difficult to find exact equivalents in Chinese. The translation of The Letters of Samuel Beckett is a great intellectual challenge.



Dr. Cao is Director of Center for British and Irish Literature at College of Foreign Studies, Hunan Normal University, where he also directs Department of Translation Studies. Since getting a Ph.D. degree in 2005 at Shanghai International Studies University, he has written on Irish and British authors and English-Chinese translation. Among his monographs are A Study of Samuel Beckett’s Novels of Failure (Beijing: Commercial Press, 2015) and Humanity Exploration: A Study of 18th Century British Novels (Beijing: Guangming Daily Press, 2009). Among his translations is also the Irish national epic The Tain (Changsha: Hunan Education Press, 2008). He is Secretary General of China British Literature Association.

The Beckett Letters project at Emory welcomes Dr. Bo Cao, and looks forward to arranging discussions within the Emory community about issues of translation as well as explorations of the cultural interactions invited by the study of literature. His presence at Emory offers a rich opportunity to share ideas.