"Problems with Remainders: English, Irish, and American Traces in the English Translations of Samuel Beckett's Eleutheria"
This is a tale of two translations, one lauded by most critics, the other excoriated. Yet both translations offered valuable insight into the work of one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers by introducing to the general public a fully realized, mature work, previously known only by a select few scholars. The two translations, one good, one supposedly bad, also raise some intriguing questions regarding the process of literary translation. This is the story of the translation of Eleutheria, a play written in French by Samuel Beckett, an Irishman whose native tongue was English, the Greek title of which means 'freedom'.