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NEW INTERPRETATIONS OF
BECKETT IN THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

Translating Samuel Beckett

around the World
Edited by
José Francisco Fernández
Pascale Sardin
New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First
Century

Series Editor
Jennifer M. Jeffers, Department of English, Cleveland State University,
Cleveland, OH, USA
As the leading literary figure to emerge from post-World War II Europe,
Samuel Beckett’s texts and his literary and intellectual legacy have yet
to be fully appreciated by critics and scholars. The goal of New Inter-
pretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century is to stimulate new
approaches and develop fresh perspectives on Beckett, his texts, and his
legacy. The series will provide a forum for original and interdisciplinary
interpretations concerning any aspect of Beckett’s work or his influence
upon subsequent writers, artists, and thinkers.

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14737
José Francisco Fernández · Pascale Sardin
Editors

Translating Samuel
Beckett around
the World
Editors
José Francisco Fernández Pascale Sardin
Almería, Spain Talence, France

New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty-First Century

ISBN 978-3-030-71729-2 ISBN 978-3-030-71730-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-71730-8

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer
Nature Switzerland AG 2021
This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and
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 Acknowledgements

We would like to express our gratitude to all contributors for their enthu-
siasm towards the project and for their patient cooperation with the revi-
sions of their chapters. We would also like to acknowledge the Univer-
sity of Almería’s support of this publication, in particular we are indebted
to CEI Patrimonio for their help. Finally, we would like to extend our
thanks to Lindisfarne research group, especially to Germán Asensio Peral
for being our copyeditor; his professionalism was much appreciated.

v
 Introduction

In 2015, En attendant Godot was performed in France starring two Ivory

Coast actors: Fargass Assandé played the part of Estragon and Michel
Bohiri played that of Vladimir. Directed by Jean Lambert-Wild, Lorenzo
Malaguerra and Marcel Bozonnet, the production modernized the play
written in the aftermath of World War Two as it was made to tell the
story of two African migrants caught up in today’s European refugee crisis
in a postcolonial globalized context. Some years before that, in 2007,
Paul Chan, in partnership with Creative Time and the Classical Theater
of Harlem, had staged four outdoor performances of Beckett’s Godot in
New Orleans, just two years after the passage of Hurricane Katrina. The
play was performed in two of the neighbourhoods worst hit by the devas-
tating hurricane, in places where the sense of hopelessness was acute, and
at a time when authorities were under intense criticism for their slow,
and sometimes inadequate, response to the crisis. These examples illus-
trate both the universality of Beckett’s first performed – and most famous
and oft-performed – play worldwide, but also the desire that is felt by
present-time directors to see the works of the Anglo-Irish playwright
address topical issues. Such is also the case around the world, in places
and territories that are sometimes greatly distant from Paris, London or
Berlin where Beckett’s plays often premiered, and where neither English
nor French are the official languages in use. This book explores by whom,
how and when Beckett’s work has been translated in a number of coun-
tries and continents all over the globe, but also how it is received and

vii
viii INTRODUCTION

currently performed in contexts different from those of the English or

French originals in which the author composed his novels, plays and
poems.
In What is World Literature? David Damrosch writes that ‘world litera-
ture encompass(es) all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of
origin, either in translation or in their original language’, and that ‘a work
only has an effective life as world literature whenever, and wherever, it is
actively present within a literary system beyond that of its original culture’
(Damrosch 2003: 4). That Samuel Beckett’s oeuvre is part of world liter-
ature thus defined is now largely accepted: Beckett has become a ‘global’
artist be it from the vantage point of his texts proper, which question the
very concept of the ‘world’ (Connor 2008; Pearson 2017), or from that of
the scope of his reception which has become international (Brater 2003;
Perloff 2007; Gontarski 2008; Feldman & Nixon 2009; McDonald 2016;
McNaughton, Doshi and Engelberts 2019; Chakraborty and Tobirio
Vázquez 2020). As Rónán McDonald has noted in ‘Global Beckett’, an
entry of The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Theatre, ‘Beckett is inex-
tricably caught up in a globalized culture, branded and consumed around
the world’ (2016: 590). This ‘global turn’ in Beckettian studies had
already been acknowledged a decade earlier, in a volume titled Transna-
tional Beckett (2008), where S.E. Gontarski reflected upon the surge of
interest in Samuel Beckett in a vast array of countries at the turn of
the millennium. And recently, Thirthankar Chakraborty and Juan Luis
Tobirio Vázquez have edited a volume entitled Samuel Beckett as World
Literature (2020) that investigates what it means for Beckett to be part
of a global literature. As noted by Renata Vaz Shimbo and Fábio de
Souza Andrade in this volume: ‘Beckettian studies have become progres-
sively more open to globalized readings of Beckett’s drama and fiction,
no longer taken for an exportable formula of avant-garde art, a way into
experimentation which could be replicated in different places as an inter-
nationalist handbook, but as a corpus encouraging emergent cultures to
reinterpret the legacy of Western modernism according to the premises of
their own histories and needs’. Beckett scholars cannot but rejoice at this
vast interest in the writer in that it is bound to enrich our understanding
of the work, as it renews interpretations of it. Nevertheless, as McDonald
remarks in ‘Global Beckett’, there are also possible detrimental effects of
globalization in that such a disseminating process often goes along with
processes of standardization on the one hand, and domestication on the
 INTRODUCTION ix

other, the risk being that Beckett’s texts lose their countercultural power
in late capitalism’s marketing forces (McDonald 2016: 591).
This collection of essays differs from previous ones in that it focuses
on issues of translation, posing theoretical and practical questions about
the art of translating Beckett texts in languages other than English and
French, the languages in which Beckett created his works. In doing so,
it takes into account Beckett’s own bilingualism, and explores how the
issues of translation and reception and influence are interconnected. As
noted by Nixon and Feldman, the act of translation is ‘necessary before
any kind of sustained national reception can take place, and the quality of
translations largely determinates the nature of that reception’ (Nixon and
Feldman 2009: 6). Beckett’s career was involved from the beginning with
translation, either when he translated the work of others, a task that he
began in the late 1920s with fragments of James Joyce’s Work in Progress,
or when he translated poems for avant-garde magazines, and his gradual
adoption of the role of exclusive translator of his own work in his mature
period has been thoroughly studied (Van Hulle and Verhulst 2018: 21).
Recent research has shown the extent of the author’s involvement in the
translation of his work by other translators and scholars, or has dwelt upon
the extraordinary event of his translations affecting the content of the
original work by means of changes implemented by the author in new
editions of old texts. The study of (self)translation as a line of research in
its own right has also become a fruitful and productive field in recent times
(Collinge 1999; Louar 2018; Louar and Fernández 2018; Montini 2007;
Mooney 2011; Oustinoff 2001; Sardin-Damestoy 2002), becoming the
centre of a whole poetics, where Beckett’s bilingualism is seen to take
a prominent part in his aesthetics of failure. As a result, Beckettian self-
translation has ceased to be a curiosity, almost an anomaly associated with
the author, and as any other feature related to his style (like the ghostly
presence of Ireland in his writing, his penchant for prosthetic bodies or
his raids into a yet unknown but imagined posthumanistic world), it has
become a central concern to interpret his oeuvre.
The last unexplored frontier in this endeavour pertains to the study
of how Beckett has been translated in languages other than French,
English and perhaps even German. There is plenty of evidence of the
kind of interaction that Beckett maintained with Elmar Tophoven and
his wife Erika, both the ‘official’ translators of his work into German.
His collaborative work with the German translations of his work, there-
fore, is well documented (see Tophoven 2011 and Tophoven 2016). In
x INTRODUCTION

his lifetime, Beckett often recommended that translators have a look at

the German authorized version of his texts. To Christian Ludvigsen, his
Danish translator, when explaining textual allusions pertaining to All That
Fall , Beckett wrote that the French translation, written by Robert Pinget
and ‘revised’ by him, may be of help and that there is a ‘good German
translation’ the translator might want to have a look at (Letter dated 6
Aug. 1957, Beckett 2014: 59). He was perfectly aware of the impor-
tance of providing ‘good’ translations and acted accordingly. But little
is known of what happened with Beckett and his interaction with other
languages beyond the safe area around English, French or German. What
can be gathered from what translators into third languages have said is
that he kept an open mind and encouraged inventiveness. Polish director
and translator Marek K˛edzierski once complained to Beckett that he did
not know how to render into Polish the line from Endgame ‘The bastard!
He does not exist!’: ‘I explained that in Polish there is a word cham
meaning an uncultivated, rude person, derived like Hamm’s name from
the biblical Hamm, just spelled differently. Would Hamm calling God
Cham, pronounced like his own name, be too much? Beckett seemed
amused, said it’s a good idea’ (K˛edzierski 2016: 120). Beckett was
also very keen that in the third language, as far as possible, the same
register, sound pattern and rhythm of the original should be maintained.
On one occasion, Spanish scholar Antonia Rodríguez-Gago sent him her
translations of Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu and Catastrophe, which Beckett
‘returned … very quickly including one of his little cards saying: “I have
annotated your text to the best of my poor Spanish and I hope my sugges-
tions – for they are nothing more – may prove of some help.” All his “sug-
gestions”, though they [were] not many, refer[red] to structure, none to
meaning’ (Rodríguez-Gago 1999: 234).
In a way, the investigation on Beckett around the world that is carried
out in this volume simply expands on what Beckett did during his life-
time when his daily writing was inextricably bound to revisions of trans-
lations in other languages, as he frequently wrote to correspondents
such as Barney Rosset: ‘Have just read the Spanish so-called transla-
tion of Godot. Bad. German ditto of Molloy is coming in for revision
(pretty shaky from the extracts I have seen) and I begin on Malone in
German with the translator of Godot, in Paris fortunately. Then there is
Bowles’ (Beckett 2011: 448). It would not be completely true to say
that Translating Samuel Beckett around the World is the first and only
attempt towards moving beyond the comfortable boundaries of familiar
 INTRODUCTION xi

languages in Beckett. The publication of The International Reception of

Samuel Beckett (2009), edited by Mark Nixon and Matthew Feldman,
was a major landmark in Beckett Studies in the twenty-first century. In
this deeply engaging collection of essays, Beckett was, for the first time,
understood as a global phenomenon. It also showed the skills and ambi-
tion of a second generation of Beckett scholars who took over from those
who had created Beckett Studies. The International Reception of Samuel
Beckett showed the credentials of the next generation, characterized by
a truly international spirit, as it is testified by the establishment of the
Samuel Beckett Society annual conferences that started soon after (2015)
and which stepped outside traditional centres of Beckett scholarship. The
present volume is indebted to Nixon and Feldman’s bold and inspiring
project, although it presents a marked difference in its being focused on
translation and thereby reflects upon how his work has been adapted and
transformed in an assortment of cultures around the world.
Some such territories have by now been well charted by Beckett
scholars – this is the case of Beckett’s place in German-speaking coun-
tries, a topic explored as early as 1984 by Jack Zipes, and further elab-
orated upon in two chapters of the Feldman and Nixon collection of
essays, and in a volume of the Journal of Beckett Studies in 2010, among
others. On the other hand, other countries, sometimes whole continents,
like the Indian subcontinent, where a wealth of languages are spoken,
are just beginning to be explored in relation to Beckett’s influence (see
Mahmood 1993; Chakraborty 2017). This collection, with its opening
up to countries such as Pakistan or India seeks to redress this situa-
tion and fill a void. It could also be argued that the volume shows a
strong preference for Europe (5 of the 12 chapters deal with European
countries) and therefore the opinion that a Eurocentric perspective is
still very much associated with Beckett studies would have some ground
to stand on. When The International Reception of Samuel Beckett was
published, reviewers considered inevitable that Europe should carry such
weight: ‘This is understandable since Beckett was more closely connected
to Western Europe than to the rest of the world, and because of his
fluency in several European languages …, he was more involved in the
production and translation of his works in Western Europe than he was
elsewhere’ (Kager 2012: 181). Although we start from Europe in this
journey around the world – and even if it is for obvious reasons impos-
sible to be exhaustive in the exploration of all the countries of the world
– we have included areas on the fringe of continental Europe (Iceland
xii INTRODUCTION

on one side, Turkey and Israel on the other), and have paid attention to
translations of Beckett in South America (Argentina and Brazil) for the
first time in Beckett Studies. As for the spectacular surge of interest in
Beckett in China in recent years, it has been made necessary to revisit this
country from that first approach in Nixon and Feldman’s book in 2009.
The reason for the extraordinary expansion of such a concrete field of
knowledge in the humanities is to be found in the inexhaustible ques-
tioning provoked by Beckett’s work about essential issues on human
existence on this planet, as well as by the variety of topics that Beckett
addressed in his literary production. As noted by Peter Fifield: ‘For all
its talk of impossibility and failure, [Beckett’s oeuvre] remains remark-
ably responsive to interpretative approaches, and appears to grow even
more fertile as shown by the research and performance it attracts’ (Fifield
2013: 7–8). And as Jean-Michel Rabaté remarks, ‘the complete works
of Beckett, which fit snugly in four volumes, occupy a much vaster
cultural space’ (Rabaté 2016: 7). Translating Samuel Beckett around the
World examines this cultural space from the vantage point of some of the
languages into which Beckett’s works have been adapted up to this day. It
examines how Beckett texts have been appropriated, and re-territorialized,
but also circulated, received and performed. It looks at issues of influence,
fertilization, repercussion, approval, rejection and disruption in countries
and linguistic territories that are sometimes quite far from the centres of
‘the world republic of letters’ (Casanova 2004) such as Paris, London
or New York, which are arguably privileged places of global literary
consecration and legitimization.
If this collection of essays proves anything, it is certainly that globaliza-
tion and internationalization hide a variety of local and national situations
and tableaux. The translation of Beckett texts abroad is the story of an
uneven success that depends much on the historical contexts of the coun-
tries taken into consideration. Indeed translation cannot be isolated from
historical factors and from the specific cultural and political backgrounds
of the territories investigated. For example, translations into Mandarin
Chinese are rather recent, and one can easily understand how Chinese
authorities have been instrumental in delaying the circulation of Beck-
ett’s oeuvre in this otherwise huge market. Surprisingly enough, this is
not only the case of distant, non-Western cultures; in Spain for instance,
the Francoist regime has had a long-lasting effect on the reception of
Beckett. Types of censorship actually vary from one country to another.
Up until the early 1950s, Beckett books have generally suffered abroad
 INTRODUCTION xiii

from a ‘market censorship’ (Schiffrin 2001: 106) that was lifted in many
areas of the world by the succès de scandale of En Attendant Godot in
1953, and by Beckett’s association with Nouveau Roman writers in the
following years. While this situation totally ended in most countries in
1969 when Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize, state censorship in some
countries continued. As for cultural self-censorship, it is something that
translators do not necessarily implement consciously when they cater for a
target audience and seek to make their texts acceptable to them. One may
perhaps even speak of a form of aesthetic self-censorship in the case of
Icelandic literature, which has long resisted the importation of Modernist
literature in general and of Beckett writing in particular, because Beck-
ettian narrative experimentalism did not quite agree with the Icelandic
tradition of the narrative epic. While some elements of Beckett aesthetics
resist importation, others on the contrary seem to have been facilitators,
like the non-mimetic dimension of his theatre, which resonated closely
with an ancient Turkish theatrical tradition.
The papers collected here seek to understand where and why Beckett
was translated first and why Beckett texts sometimes were on the contrary
long to be deemed acceptable literary material. They demonstrate that
there is a strong correlation between the power fluctuations in the
sociopolitical environment of a country and the success of a foreign writer
and playwright. Collective conditions – the presence of a democratic
government or of a publishing industry open to experimentalism and
avant-garde art – and/or individual efforts like that of Victoria Ocampo
in Argentina, who had strong ties with European Modernism, are often
necessary to make linguistic transfer happen and then enable translated
texts to be accepted and successful. The case of Godot is particularly
interesting in this respect. A recurrent problem in countries with (past)
authoritarian regimes is the passivity of characters in Godot, which is diffi-
cult to accept. Likewise, Beckett’s apparent apolitical stance sometimes
proved a problem for some national audiences; in Israel in 1955, for
instance, reviewers attacked Godot for its lack of direct meaning and polit-
ical commitment. Although various Beckettian texts are analysed in depth
in this volume, namely Endgame, Act Without Words , Krapp’s Last Tape,
‘Immobile’, Worstward Ho and ‘what is the word’, many authors actually
dwell on Godot. This should not surprise us as Godot – which has become
an international classic – is by far Beckett’s best-known work and often
the first one to have been translated in the countries explored here. It is
also probably the most oft retranslated text in the Beckettian corpus.
xiv INTRODUCTION

The volume also proves that ready-made dichotomies about translation

need to be reassessed. As illustrated by some of the authors in the book,
the process of ‘domestication’ – usually connoted negatively in transla-
tion studies (Venuti 2008) – can actually conceal politically progressive
and subversive appropriations of Beckett texts. What is more, questions
of acceptability (moral, political or aesthetic) often go hand in hand with
questions of accessibility; because of its hermetic dimension and because
Beckett’s writing is rooted in European culture, it is quite often distant
from some of the receiving audiences considered in the following pages.
The linguistic and sociocultural challenges of translating Beckett into
languages other than French, English and German are at the core of the
investigations conducted by the authors of the essays collected here. Do
Pakistani translators maintain Beckett’s puns in his theatre? How is the
stylistic experimentalism of later prose or poetic texts like Worstward Ho
rendered in different international variants of the Portuguese language?
Alongside such sociopolitical and aesthetic issues, the authors of the
following essays underline the importance of biographical factors in the
translating history of Beckett’s texts around the world. Beckett’s indi-
vidual friendships with some translators have shaped the landscape of
translation of his work in some languages. This was the case with Dutch
in the Netherlands, due to the strength of Jacoba van Velde’s relation-
ship with the author. The serendipitous agency of Avigdor Arikha in
bringing Beckett’s texts to Israel is also explored. In the following pages
as well, translation appears as a critical process of interpretation and nego-
tiation that keeps evolving in time as retranslations of Beckett texts are
felt to be needed by publishers or performers. The issue of language is
also central to many of the papers presented. Translation as a linguistic
transfer between different languages containing inbuilt differences, is an
art in essence doomed to ‘incompletion’ and ‘imperfection’ (Derrida
1985: 165–166). It presented Beckett both with an ordeal and a blessing,
a perfectly imperfect means of (re)writing. In that, it strongly echoes
his own paradoxical sense of linguistic deprivation and predicament, and
presented him with a fertile means of expression that pushed him to
continue creating until his death. In seeking to create his ‘literature of
the unword’, a kind of writing exploring the gulf between signified and
signifier, Beckett already performed a form of translation and disrupted
referential models of communication. Thus the difficulty for translators is
to reproduce this radical rhetoric in their respective languages, a rhetoric,
what is more, that evolved greatly during his career.
 INTRODUCTION xv

As stated before, what we are concerned with in this collection of

essays is what happens when the process of translation continues, by other
hands, beyond the usual languages in which Beckett wrote, English and
French. Yet, partaking in a bilingual oeuvre, Beckett’s texts actually thrive
on the intersection between English and French. Beckett indeed favoured
a dynamism or continuous movement back and forth between languages
that translation in multiple settings all over the world is constantly re-
enacting. The rationale behind this volume of essays is that the interme-
diate space in Beckett’s writing where things happen is, in fact, occu-
pied by the languages and cultures of the world, all of them effectively
contributing through translation to creating the far distant murmur which
is so familiar to readers of his work. The act of translation into a third
language, in this particular case, could be aptly considered a continuation
of the denaturalization of language that the author himself implemented
when he started writing in French: ‘“sinning” against a foreign language’
writes Erika Myhálycsa, ‘becomes a necessary step towards the creative
misuse of the mother-tongue, a transgressive, demystifing linguistic prac-
tice’ (2013: 347). French, explains James McGuire, had a ‘weakening
effect’ on the language of his birth. When he in turn translated back into
English, the same effect was duplicated, producing a strained language:
‘That is to say, Beckett’s English becomes estranged, no longer native
… It has acquired its own, original signifying potential, which has been
twice distanced from the Queen’s English’ (1990: 259). When the text
is repeated again by means of its translation into a third language, one
more step in the same direction is made, a linguistic act connected to the
original estrangement devised by the author. Language was always foreign
to Beckett. Thus the Beckettian text finds itself at home by being abroad
because it is never removed from the crossroads of languages where it was
originated.
Of course, translation is a process fraught with external (societal,
cultural and political) and internal (linguistic and personal ability of the
translator) constraints that affect it. In the different chapters of Trans-
lating Samuel Beckett around the World the reader will have the oppor-
tunity to witness instances when the translator(s) could do nothing but
acknowledge defeat and reach a compromise. But going back to the
paradoxical condition of the Beckettian text in translation, there is an
a priori set of qualities in Beckett’s writing (its indeterminacy, its frag-
mentation and its continuous self-questioning nature) that is particu-
larly fruitful when observing translations in other languages. Beckett was
xvi INTRODUCTION

always haunted by what could not be said and he always advocated

the impossibility of saying, together with the imperious need to say. In
this context, the study of the translation (diverse, uncertain, inchoate
and subject to multiple contingencies) of his works into other languages
suddenly appears as the ideal training ground for Beckett scholarship, as
two factors are conjoined in a way that is not found together anywhere
else – the necessity to make Beckett known in a third country through
versions in a new language, on the one hand, and the impossibility to
render his work with the same precision that the author conceived it, on
the other.
Because they themselves translate a self-translator, translators of Beckett
into languages other than French, English (and German), arguably have
sometimes up to three source texts at their disposal. The enormous poten-
tial in terms of availability of resources that Beckett’s bilingualism presents
to the translator of his texts into a third language has not been lost
for scholars working in the field: ‘Contrary to what has been frequently
said’, Rodríguez-Gago writes, ‘I have found Beckett’s bilingualism a great
help, for one can always turn to the author and see how he, as trans-
lator, has solved a particular problem and, if possible, follow his example’
(Rodríguez-Gago 1999: 232). Finding a compromise between precision
and a thorough knowledge of Beckett’s work, together with the recourse
to a certain audacity when stuck with a problem, seems to be an adequate
way to approach the transfer of languages when it comes to Beckett’s
literary production (Fernández 2018).
But despite Beckett’s example, which can be of great assistance to trans-
lators, the professionals in this field do carry out their work in sometimes
complicated circumstances, as all kinds of pressures (political, societal and
commercial) impinge on their task. The main force towards a good trans-
lation lies in the very handling of language on the part of the translator.
The fragmented, obsessional and sometimes ‘queer’ (Beckett 2011: 356)
quality of Beckett’s discourse can put a great strain even on seasoned
translators, who might find themselves tempted to domesticate the text
they are working with in order to bring it closer to the reader. This situa-
tion is doubly complicated in the case of languages that bear little relation-
ship to the original English or French in which Beckett wrote. As Mariko
Hori Tanaka remarked, some ‘words in English have more meanings than
the equivalent in Japanese’. Considering with dismay the expression ‘to
and fro’ at the beginning of Beckett’s poem ‘Neither’, she realized that
the phrase simply was not possible in her language: ‘So to make sense I
 INTRODUCTION xvii

had to use verbs instead’, she lamented (qtd in van der Weel and Hisgen
1993: 353). Even the title she found impossible to translate: ‘We have no
words for “neither”, so I had to explain it by saying something like “not
knowing which is the way”’ (Ibid.). At the end of the day, translating
Beckett is like walking a tightrope and one of the aims of the present
volume is to examine some of the solutions found in different languages
to overcome such trial.
This book is divided into three sections: reception of Beckett in
Northern Europe (Iceland, Sweden and the Netherlands), reception in
Southern Europe and South America (Spain, Italy, Argentina and Brazil)
and reception in the Middle-East and Asian countries (Turkey, Israel,
Pakistan, India and China). An appendix with the list of main translations
of Beckett into the language studied in each case is also included at the
end of the chapters. Section I opens with an essay by Astradur Eysteinsson
entitled ‘Embraces – Empty Spaces. Translation and Reception of Samuel
Beckett in Iceland’. Surprisingly enough, Beckett translations started in
Iceland in 1958 with the publication of Acte sans paroles published in an
Icelandic literary journal. Waiting for Godot was not staged until 1960 at
the Reykjavik City Theatre. Because of its lack of identifiable topics and
its inherent nihilism, Beckett drama was difficult to accept by Icelandic
audiences used to epic narratives. But this first production of a Beckett
play was one further step in the introduction of European modernism in
Iceland. Godot was followed on stage by Ionesco’s Rhinoceros in 1961
and Pinter’s The Caretaker in 1962, and further paved the way for a
novel non-realist, experimental vein in Icelandic drama that began in the
1960s and continued into the 1980s. Strikingly, Beckett in Iceland has
been more accessible as a playwright than as a prose writer. If some of his
short stories were published in 1987, Molloy, the first Beckett novel to
appear in its entirety in Icelandic, came out only in 2001. The translation
did not attract much attention, perhaps because the epic tradition was still
too strong and the literary culture still too resistant to such experimental
writing.
In ‘Beckett in Sweden Then and Now. (Re)Translating Waiting for
Godot ’, Charlotta Palmstierna Einarsson explores how in her country
Beckett’s oeuvre is well known, and how, if most of his works have been
translated, few people actually read them. To account for this paradox, the
author of this chapter firstly surveys the modes of consecration of Beckett
in Sweden after the first Swedish production of Waiting for Godot took
place in 1954 in a peripheral theatre, and traces the trajectory of Beckett
xviii INTRODUCTION

plays from periphery to centre. Translations being without doubt one of

the main channels of legitimization of an author and a work, the focus
is secondly on the translation process itself, and on how it is likely to
change the value of a text. Two translations of Godot are compared: the
first 1954 one and a translation produced in 1990, which is in current
use today. The translation process is examined from the vantage point of
the respective translators, who did not translate Godot in the same era,
and who did not share the same views on the act of translating. While
the first translation was based on the French 1952 Minuit text, and was
essentially skopos-oriented, the 1990 Swedish translation took into account
Beckett’s later English editions of Godot, as well as his theatrical notes. To
the source-oriented retranslator, Beckett’s interventions as director should
be considered improvements to the text, which a translator must take into
consideration.
Onno Kosters’s ‘Stopped in Holland: Samuel Beckett in Dutch Trans-
lation’ traces the chaotic history of translations of Beckett texts in the
Netherlands. This is intimately linked to the biography of the author
and to his friendship with Jacoba van Velde. Van Velde, who occasion-
ally served as an agent for Beckett and was instrumental in getting his
first full-length plays to the Dutch stage very quickly, translated his drama
and some of his prose works into Dutch until her death in 1985. Ever
since the early fifties, Beckett, and the Estate after him, have defended van
Velde’s rights over her translations; and even if these are now outdated,
full of flaws and based only on the French versions, they have never been
revised. In the 1990s the newly founded journal of the Dutch Samuel
Beckett Foundation became an important venue for new translations. And
since 2000, next to such literary journals, small publishing houses and
private presses have continued to publish Beckett’s texts in Dutch. As a
result, only More Pricks Than Kicks remains untranslated in the Nether-
lands to this day. What is more, the effect of Beckett translations on Dutch
national literature was significant, especially in the late 1970s and 1980s,
when interest in Beckett among avant-garde writers in the Netherlands
surged. Finally, Onno Kosters discusses his own 2006 rendering of Watt ,
which he based on the two authorized source texts.
Opening Section II, Robert Patrick Murtagh’s paper is entitled ‘“Half
in Love”: The Translation and Reception of Samuel Beckett in Spain’.
Despite the geographical and cultural proximity between France and
Spain, despite Beckett’s friendship with Spanish dramatist Fernando
Arrabal and despite the fact that Waiting for Godot was translated into
 INTRODUCTION xix

Spanish as early as 1954, Beckett’s work has incompletely permeated

Spanish culture to this day and the influence of his theatre is only marginal
in Spain. The purpose of this chapter is to expose the political, historical
and cultural reasons behind this surprising relative indifference to Beckett
drama. Following the Spanish Civil War, foreign works were rejected by
the Francoist regime to protect the state from possible subversive anti-
Spanish sentiment. As a result, under Franco, Final de partida, Luce
Moreau Arrabal’s translation of Fin de partie, was performed in a heavily
bowdlerized version, which rendered the play at times senseless and did
not reflect well upon the playwright. When state censorship ended in
the mid-1970s, new translations did arrive, but the ‘Beckett moment’
had passed, and the problem of translation remains to this day. Beckett
texts in Spain suffer from being published by many different publishing
houses, and a majority of translations are but poor reflections of their orig-
inals. There is also a pressing need for secondary sources, such as James
Knowlson’s authorized biography, to be rendered available in Spanish.
Antonio Gambacorta explores Beckett’s collaboration with an Italian
translator in ‘“My Italian is not up to more”: Samuel Beckett, Editor of
“Immobile”’. As is well documented, Beckett showed interest in transla-
tions even into languages he did not master, and would proofread trans-
lations in the languages he knew like German and Italian, which he had
studied as a young man alongside French, or in which he was self-taught
like Spanish. But, as Antonio Ganbacorta reminds us, Beckett’s involve-
ment with the Italian translations of his work was not a norm, and it
was generally far from reaching the level of engagement he had with the
Tophovens. One counter-example of his involvement with an Italian text
is provided by ‘Immobile’, the translation of which is carefully examined
in this chapter. The Italian text was done by Luigi Majno, the owner of a
Milanese art gallery, when he took it upon himself to translate ‘Still’ for
a livre d’artiste he was preparing with Stanley William Hayter in the early
1970s. On this occasion, Beckett adopted an editing role that impacted
heavily on what would become ‘Immobile’. This chapter examines the
‘corrections and suggestions’ Beckett provided. They show a concern to
maintain the identity of the text, and represent a rare example of the
author’s involvement in the translation of his work in Italian.
In ‘Translations of Beckett’s Work in Argentina’, Lucas Margarit and
María Inés Castagnino show how Beckett has been present ever since the
1950s in Argentina, where interest in his theatre has influenced the revival
of the theatre scene. Waiting for Godot was performed many times from
xx INTRODUCTION

1956 to 1975 by the troupe that premiered it, and after the restoration
of democracy, from the mid-1980s, Beckett plays have been even more
present all over the country. In the late fifties and early sixties, Molloy
and Malone muere were published by Victoria Ocampo’s publishing house
Sur, which also introduced Woolf and Faulkner to the South American
public. Another important early translation was that of Act Without Words
as Acto sin palabras by poet Roberto Juarroz in 1962, which is evoked at
length in this chapter. More recently, Argentinian translations of Beckett
texts have been authored by academics such as Laura Cerrato and have
appeared, after 1992, in the journal Beckettiana. Finally, the author turns
to Esperando a Godot translated by Pablo Palant in 1954 and published in
Buenos Aires; this was the first Argentinian translation of a Beckett text.
A playwright himself, Palant was linked to the Argentinian avant-garde of
the first half of the twentieth century. He mainly did his version from the
French text with an eye on the English one, which had just come out,
making it accessible to a national audience, but also readable by Spanish
speakers at large.
In the next chapter, entitled ‘The Meremost Minimum: Beckett’s
Translations into Brazilian Portuguese’, Renata Vaz Shimbo and Fábio de
Souza Andrade study Beckett’s influence in Brazil, a country where Beck-
ettian reception began relatively soon. Since the late fifties, there have
been many memorable Brazilian productions of Beckett plays, even if the
translated play texts were not necessarily printed. As for Beckett’s novels,
they found their way into Brazilian Portuguese in the 1980s. Never-
theless, serious gaps in the translation of his works persist in Brazilian
Portuguese, and Brazilian readers of Beckett sometimes only have access
to translations made in Portugal, while differences between the spoken
language in Portugal and in Brazil are more important than usually
acknowledged. This fact is illustrated by the detailed comparative anal-
ysis of the two available versions of Worstward Ho in Portuguese –
one by the Brazilian translator Ana Helena Souza and the other by
the Portuguese translator Miguel Esteves Cardoso. Cardoso’s Pioravante
marche was published in 1988, while Souza’s Pra frente o pior, came out
in 2012. While Cardoso’s translation seems to pay greater heed to the
book’s strangeness, which results in a rather hermetic Portuguese text,
Another random document with
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 “It’s more’n Ah be, though,” said he dubiously. “Ah found him
standing over t’ corpse loike this ’ere, wi’ this in his hand.” He
produced the revolver from his pocket. “And in t’ other hand he
gotten letter ye spoake of, lass, that ye said would enreage him.”
“And what did he say? Did you accuse him?”
“He said he didn’t do it, an’ Ah, why, Ah didn’t believe him.”
“But I do,” said Freda calmly.
“Weel, but who could ha’ done it then?” asked he, hoping that she
might have a reason to give which would bring satisfaction to his
mind also.
But in Freda’s education faith and authority had been put before
reason, and her answer was not one which could carry conviction to
a masculine understanding.
“My father,” she said solemnly, “could not commit a murder.”
“Weel, soom folks’ feythers does, why not your feyther? There was
nobody else to do it, an’ t’ poor feller couldn’t ha’ done it hissen, for
he was shot in t’ back.”
“I will never believe my father did it,” said Freda.
“Happen he’ll tell ye he did.”
Freda shook her head.
“I have been very foolish,” she said at last, “to listen to all the
things I have heard said against him. And perhaps it is as a
punishment to me that I have heard this. He was good and kind
when I was a baby: how can he be bad now? And if he has done bad
things since then, the Holy Spirit will come down into his heart again
now, if I pray for him.”
“Amen,” said Barnabas solemnly.
This farmer had no more definite religion himself than that there
was a Great Being somewhere, a long way off behind the clouds,
whom it was no use railing at, though he didn’t encourage honest
industry as much as he might, and whom it was the parson’s duty to
keep in good humour by baptisms, and sermons, and ringing of the
church-bells. But he had, nevertheless, a belief in the more lively
religion of women, and thought—always in a vague way—that it
brought good luck upon the world. So he took off his hat reverently
when the girl was giving utterance to her simple belief, and then he
led the horse past the dead body, and jumping up into the cart
beside her, took up the reins.
 CHAPTER VI.
After a little more jolting along the highroad they turned to the right
up one less used, and soon came in full sight of the Abbey ruins.
Just a jagged dark grey mass they looked by the murky light of this
dull evening, with here and there a jutting point upwards, the outline
of the broken walls softened by the snow.
Freda sat quite silent, awestruck by the circumstances of her
arrival, and by the wild loneliness of the place. A little further, and
they could see the grey sea and the high cliffs frowning above it.
Barnabas glanced down at the grave little face, and made an effort
to say something cheering.
“It bean’t all so loansome as what this is, ye know. Theer’s t’ town
o’ t’other soide o’ t’ Abbey, at bottom of t’ hill. And from t’ windows o’
Capt’n Mulgrave’s home ye can see roight oop t’ river, as pretty a
soight as can be, wi’ boats a-building, an’ red cottages.”
“Oh!” said Freda, in a very peaceful voice, “I don’t mind the
loneliness. I like it best. And I have always lived by the sea, where
you could hear the waves till you went to sleep.”
“Aye, an’ you’ll hear ’em here sometimes; fit to split t’ owd cliffs
oop they cooms crashing in, an’ soonding like thoonder. Ye’ll have a
foin toime here, lass, if ye’re fond of t’ soond o’ t’ weaves.”
“My father has a yacht too, hasn’t he?”
“Aye, an a pretty seeght too, to see it scoodding along. But it goes
by steam, it isn’t one of yer white booterflies. That sort doan’t go fast
enough for t’ Capt’n.”
Freda was no longer listening. They were on the level ground now
at the top of the hill. To the right, the fields ran to the edge of the cliff,
and there was no building in sight but a poor sort of farm-house, with
a pond in front of it, and a few rather dilapidated outhouses round
about. But on the left hand hedged off from the road by a high stone
wall, and standing in the middle of a field, was the ruined Abbey
church, now near enough for Freda to see the tracery left in the
windows, and the still perfect turrets of the East end, and of the
North transept pointing to heaven, unmindful of the decay of the old
altars, and of the old faith that raised them.
Barnabas looked at her intent young face, the great burning eyes,
which seemed to be overwhelmed with a strange sorrow.
“Pretty pleace, this owd abbey of ours, isn’t it?” said he with all the
pride of ownership.
“It’s beautiful,” said Freda hoarsely, “it makes me want to cry.”
Now the rough farmer could understand sentiment about the old
ruin; considering as he did that the many generations of Protestant
excursionists who had picknicked in it had purged it pretty clear of
the curse of popery, he loved it himself with a free conscience.
“Aye,” said he, “there’s teales aboot it too, for them as loikes to
believe ’em. Ah’ve heard as there were another Abbey here, afore
this one, an’ not near so fine, wheer there was a leady, an Abbess,
Ah think they called her. An’ she was a good leady, kind to t’ poor,
an’ not so much to be bleamed for being a Papist, seeing those were
dreadful toimes when there was no Protestants. An’ they do seay
(mahnd, Ah’m not seaying Ah believe it, not being inclined to them
soart o’ superstitious notions myself) they say how on an afternoon
when t’ soon shines you can see this Saint Hilda, as they call her,
standing in one of t’ windows over wheer t’ Communion table used
for to be.” Perceiving, however, that Freda was looking more
reverently interested than was quite seemly in a mere legend with a
somewhat unorthodox flavour about it, Barnabas, who was going to
tell her some more stories of the same sort, changed his mind and
ended simply: “An’ theer’s lots more sooch silly feables which
sensible fowk doan’t trouble their heads with. Whoa then, Prince!”
The cart drew up suddenly in a sort of inclosure of stone walls. To
the right was an ancient and broken stone cross, on a circular flight
of rude and worn steps; to the left, a stone-built lodge, a pseudo-
Tudor but modern erection, was built over a gateway, the wrought-
iron gates of which were shut. In front, a turnstile led into a
churchyard. Barnabas got down and pulled the lodge-bell, which
gave a startingly loud peal.
“That yonder,” said he, pointing over the wall towards the
churchyard, in which Freda could dimly see a shapeless mass of
building and a squat, battlemented tower, “is Presterby Choorch. An’
this,” he continued, as an old woman came out of the lodge and
unlocked the gate, “is owd Mary Sarbutt, an she’s as deaf as a
poast. Now, hark ye, missie,” and he held out his hand to help Freda
down, “Ah can’t go no further with ye, but ye’re all reeght now. Joost
go oop along t’ wall to t’ left, streight till ye coom to t’ house, an’ pull
t’ bell o’ t’ gate an’ Mrs. Bean, or happen Crispin himself will coom
an’ open to ye.”
The fact was that Barnabas did not for a moment entertain the
idea that Captain Mulgrave would have the heart to leave his newly-
recovered daughter, and the farmer meant to come up to the Abbey-
house in a day or two and let him know quietly that he had nothing to
fear from him as long as he proved a good father to the little lass.
But just now Barnabas felt shy of showing himself again, and he
shook his head when Freda begged him to come a little way further
with her. For a glance through the gates at the house showed her
such a bare, gaunt, cheerless building that she began to feel
frightened and miserable.
“Noa, missie, Ah woan’t coom in,” said Barnabas, who seemed to
have grown both shyer and more deferential when he had landed the
young lady at the gates of the big house; “but Ah wish ye ivery
happiness, an’ if Ah meay mak’ so bawld, Ah’ll shak’ honds wi’ ye,
and seay good-bye.”
Freda with the tears coming, wrung his hand in both hers, and
watched him through the gates while he turned the horse, got up in
his place in the cart and drove away.
“Barnabas! Barnabas!” she cried aloud.
But the gates were locked, and the old woman, without one word
of question or of direction, had gone back into the lodge. Freda
turned, blinded with tears, and began to make her way slowly
towards the house.
Nothing could be more desolate, more bare, more dreary, than the
approach. An oblong, rectangular space, shut in by high stone walls,
and without a single shrub or tree, lay between her and the building.
Half-way down, to the right, a pillared gateway led to the stables,
which were very long and low, and roofed with red tiles. This bit of
colour, however, was now hidden by the snow, which lay also, in a
smooth sheet, over the whole inclosure. Freda kept close to the left-
hand wall, as she had been told to do, her heart sinking within her at
every step.
At last, when she had come very near to the façade of the house,
which filled the bottom of the inclosure from end to end, a cry burst
from her lips. It was shut up, unused, deserted, and roofless. What
had once been the front-door, with its classic arch over the top, was
now filled up with boards strengthened by bars of iron. The rows of
formal, stately Jacobian windows were boarded up, and seemed to
turn her sick with a sense of hideous deformity, like eye-sockets
without eyes. The sound of her voice startled a great bird which had
found shelter in the moss-grown embrasure of one of the windows.
Flapping its wings it flew out and wheeled in the air above her.
Shocked, chilled, bewildered, Freda crept back along the front of
the house, feeling the walls, from which the mouldy stucco fell in
flakes at her touch, and listening vainly for some sound of life to
guide her.
 CHAPTER VII.
Freda Mulgrave was superstitious. While she was groping her way
along the front of the dismantled house, she heard a bell tolling
fitfully and faintly, and the sound seemed to come from the sea. She
flew instantly to the fantastic conclusion that Saint Hilda, in heaven,
was ringing the bell of her old church on earth to comfort her in her
sore trouble.
“Saint Hilda was always good to wanderers,” she thought. And the
next moment her heart sprang up with a great leap of joy, for her
hand, feeling every excrescence along the wall, had at last touched
the long swinging handle of a rusty bell.
Freda pulled it, and there was a hoarse clang. She heard a man’s
footsteps upon a flagged court-yard, and a rough masculine voice
asked:
“Who’s that at this time of night?”
“It is Captain Mulgrave’s daughter. And oh! take me in; I am tired,
tired.”
The gate was unbolted and one side was opened, enabling the girl
to pass in. The man closed the gate, and lifted a lantern he carried
so as to throw the light on Freda’s face.
“So you’re the Captain’s daughter, you say?”
“Yes.”
Freda looked at him, with tender eyes full of anxiety and inquiry.
He was a tall and rather thickset man with very short greyish hair
and a little unshaved stubble on his chin. Her face fell.
“I thought——” she faltered.
“Thought what, miss?”
There was a pause. Then she asked:
“Who are you?”
She uttered the words slowly, under her breath.
“I am your servant, ma’am.”
“My servant—you mean my father’s?”
“It is the same thing, is it not?”
 “Oh, then you are Crispin Bean!”
The man seemed surprised.
“How did you know my name?”
“They told me about you.”
“What did they tell you?”
“That you were a ‘rough-looking customer.’ ”
The man laughed a short, grim laugh, which showed no
amusement.
“Well, yes; I suppose they were about right. But who were ‘they’?”
“The people at Oldcastle Farm.”
The man stopped short just as, after leading her along a wide,
stone-paved entry, between the outer wall and the side of the house,
he turned into a large square court-yard.
“Oh!” he said, and lifting his lantern again, he subjected the young
lady to a second close scrutiny. “So you’ve been making friends with
those vermin.”
Freda did not answer for a moment. Presently she said, in a stifled
voice:
“I am not able to choose my friends.”
“You mean that you haven’t got any? Poor creature, poor creature,
that’s not far from the truth, I suppose. That father of yours didn’t
treat you over well, or consider you over much, did he?”
Freda grew cold, and her crutch rattled on the stones.
“What do you mean? ‘Didn’t treat me well’!” she whispered. “He
will, I am sure he will, when he sees me, knows me.”
“Oh, no, you’re mistaken. He’s dead.”
Freda did not utter a sound, did not move. She remained
transfixed, benumbed, stupefied by the awful intelligence.
“It isn’t true! It can’t be true!” she whispered at last, with dry lips.
“Barnabas saw him to-day—just now.”
“He was alive two hours ago. He went out this afternoon, came in
in a great state of excitement and went up to his room. Presently I
heard a report, burst open the door, and found him dead—shot
through the head.”
“Dead!” repeated Freda hoarsely.
She could not believe it. All the dreams, which she had cherished
up to the last moment in spite of disappointments and disillusions, of
a tender and loving father whom her affection and dutiful obedience
should reconcile to a world which had treated him harshly, were in a
moment dashed to the ground.
“Dead!”
It was the knell of all her hopes, all her girlish happiness. Forlorn,
friendless, utterly alone, she was stranded upon this unknown corner
of the world, in a cheerless house, with no one to offer her even the
comfort of a kindly pressure of the hand. The man seemed sorry for
her. He stamped on the ground impatiently, as if her grief distressed
and annoyed him.
“Come, come,” he said. “You haven’t lost much in losing him. I
know all about it; he never went to see you all these years, and didn’t
care a jot whether you lived or died, as far as any one could see.
And it’s all nonsense to pretend you’re sorry, you know. How can you
be sorry for a father you don’t remember?”
“Oh,” said Freda, with a sob, “can’t you understand? You can love
a person without knowing him, just as we love God, whom we can
never see till we die.”
“Well, but I suppose you love God, because you think He’s good to
you.”
“We believe He is, even when He allows things to happen to us
which seem cruel. And my father being, as I am afraid he was, an
unhappy man, was perhaps afraid of making me unhappy too. And
he did send for me at last, remember.”
“Yes, in a fit of annoyance over something—I forget what.”
“How do you know that he hadn’t really some other motive in his
heart?” said Freda, down whose cheeks the tears were fast rolling.
“He was a stern man, everybody says, who didn’t show his feelings.
So that at last he grew perhaps ashamed to show them.”
“More likely hadn’t got any worth speaking of,” said the man
gruffly.
“It’s not very nice or right of you to speak ill of your master, when
he’s de-ad,” quavered Freda.
“Well, it’s very silly of you to make such a fuss about him when
he’s de-ad,” mimicked the man.
Although he spoke without much feeling of his late master, and
although he was somewhat uncouth of speech, manner and
appearance, Freda did not dislike this man. As might have been
expected, she confounded bluntness with honesty in the
conventional manner. Therefore she bore even his little jibes without
offence. There was a pause, however, after his last words. Then he
asked, rather curiously:
“Come, honestly, what is your reason for taking his part through
thick and thin like this? Come,” he repeated, getting for the moment
no answer, “what is it?”
Freda hesitated, drying her eyes furtively.
“Don’t you see,” she said, tremulously, “that it is my only
consolation now to think the very, very best of him?”
The man, instead of answering, turned from her abruptly, and
signed to her with his hand to follow him. This she did; and they
passed round one side of the court-yard under a gallery, supported
by a colonnade, and entering the house, went through a wide, low
hall, into an apartment to the right at the front of the building. It was a
pretty room, with a low ceiling handsomely moulded, panelled walls,
and an elaborately carved wooden mantelpiece, which had been a
good deal knocked about. The room had been furnished with solid
comfort, if without much regard to congruity, a generation or so back;
and the mahogany arm-chairs having been since shrouded in
voluminous chintz covers with a pattern of large flowers on a dark
ground, the room looked warm and cheerful. Tea was laid on the
table for two persons. Freda’s sharp eyes noted this circumstance at
once. She turned round quickly.
“Who is this tea for?” she asked.
“Captain Mulgrave’s death was not discovered until it was ready.”
“But it was laid for two. Was it for you also?”
“Yes.”
Freda’s face fell.
“You think it was derogatory to his dignity to have his meals with
me?”
“Oh, no, no indeed,” said Freda blushing. “I knew at once, when
you said you were a servant, that it was only a way of speaking. You
were an officer on board his ship, of course?”
“Yes,” said he.
 “But I had hoped,” said Freda wilfully, “that he had expected me,
and had tea made ready for me and him together.”
“Ah!” said the man shortly. “Sit down,” he went on, pointing
brusquely to a chair without looking at her, “I’ll send Mrs. Bean to
you; she must find a room for you somewhere, I suppose.”
“For to-night, yes, if you please. Mrs. Bean—that is your wife?”
He nodded and went out, shutting the door.
Freda heard him calling loudly “Nell, Nell!” in a harsh, authoritative
voice, as he went down the passage.
She thought she should be glad to be alone, to have an
opportunity to think. But she could not. The series of exciting
adventures through which she had passed since she left the quiet
convent life had benumbed her, so that this awful discovery of her
father’s sudden death, though it agitated her did not impress her with
any sense of reality. When she tried to picture him lying dead
upstairs, she failed altogether; she must see him by-and-by, kiss his
cold face; and then she thought that she would be better able to pray
that she might meet him in heaven.
It seemed to her that she had been left alone for hours when a
bright young woman’s voice, speaking rather querulously, reached
her ears. Freda guessed, before she saw Mrs. Bean, that her
father’s fellow-officer or servant (she was uncertain what to call him)
had married beneath him. However, when the door opened, it
revealed, if not a lady of the highest refinement, a very pleasant-
looking, plump little woman, with fair hair and bright eyes, who wore
a large apron but no cap, and who looked altogether like an
important member of the household, accustomed to have her own
way unquestioned.
“Dear me, and is that the little lady?” she asked, in a kind,
motherly voice, encircling the girl with a rounded arm of matronly
protection. “Bless her poor little heart, she looks half-perished.
Crispin,” she went on, in a distant tone, which seemed to betray that
she and her husband had been indulging in a little discussion, “go
and put the kettle on while I take the young lady upstairs. Come
along, my dear. I’ll get you some hot water and some dry clothes,
and in two-twos I’ll have you as cosy as can be.”
 Mrs. Bean looked a little worried, but she was evidently not the
woman to take to heart such a trifle as a suicide in the house, as
long as things went all right in the kitchen, and none of the chimneys
smoked. Crispin, who seemed to have little trust in her discretion,
gave her arm a rough shake of warning as she left the room with the
young lady. Mrs. Bean, therefore, kept silence until she and her
charge got upstairs. Then she popped her head over the banisters to
see that Crispin was out of hearing, and proceeded to unbend in
conversation, being evidently delighted to have somebody fresh to
speak to.
 CHAPTER VIII.
“Oh,” began Mrs. Bean, with a fat and comfortable sigh, “I am glad to
have you here, I declare. Ever since the Captain told me, in his short
way, that you were coming, I’ve been that anxious to see you, you
might have been my own sister.”
“That was very good of you,” said Freda, who was busily taking in
all the details of the house, the wide, shallow stairs, low ceilings, and
oaken panelling; the air of neglect which hung about it all; the
draughts which made her shiver in the corridors and passages. She
compared it with the farm-house she had just left, so much less
handsome, so much more comfortable. How wide these passages
were! The landing at the top of the staircase was like a room, with a
long mullioned window and a wide window-seat. But it was all bare,
cold, smelling of mould and dust.
“Isn’t this part of the house lived in?” asked Freda.
“Well, yes and no. The Captain lives in it—at least did live in it,”
she corrected, lowering her voice and with a hasty glance around.
“No one else. This house would hold thirty people, easy, so that
three don’t fill it very well.”
“But doesn’t it take a lot of work to keep it clean?”
“It never is kept clean. What’s the good of sweeping it up for the
rats?” asked Mrs. Bean comfortably. “I and a girl who comes in to
help just keep our own part clean and the two rooms the Captain
uses, and the rest has to go. If the Captain had minded dust he’d
have had to keep servants; I don’t consider myself a servant, you
know,” she continued with a laugh, “and I’m not going to slave myself
to a skeleton for people that save a sixpence where they might
spend a pound.”
It would have taken a lot of slaving to make a skeleton of Mrs.
Bean, Freda thought.
They passed round the head of the staircase and into a long
gallery which overlooked the court-yard. It was panelled and hung
with dark and dingy portraits in frames which had once been gilt.
 “Does any one live in this part?” asked Freda, shivering.
Mrs. Bean’s candle threw alarming shadows on the walls. The
mullioned window, which ran from end to end of the gallery, showed
a dreary outlook of dark walls surrounding a stretch of snow.
“Well, no,” admitted her guide reluctantly. “The fact is there isn’t
another room in the house that’s fit to put anybody into; they’ve been
unused so long that they’re reeking with damp, most of them; some
of the windows are broken. And so I thought I’d put you into the
Abbot’s room. It’s a long way from the rest of us, but it’s had a fire in
it once or twice lately, when the Captain has had young Mulgrave
here. It’s a bit gloomy looking and old fashioned, but you mustn’t
mind that.”
Freda shivered again. If the room she was to have was more
gloomy than the way to it, a mausoleum would be quite as cheerful.
“The Abbot’s room!” exclaimed Freda. “Why is it called that?”
“Why, this house wasn’t all built at the same time, you know.
There’s a big stone piece at this end that was built earliest of all. It’s
very solid and strong, and they say it was the Abbot’s house. Then in
Henry the Eighth’s time it was turned into a gentleman’s house, in
what they call the Tudor style. They built two new wings, and carried
the gallery all round the three sides. A hundred and fifty years later a
banqueting room was built, making the last side of the square; but it
was burnt down, and now there’s nothing left of it but the outside
walls of the front and sides.”
This explained to Freda the desolate appearance the house had
presented as she approached it. The deep interest she felt in this,
the second venerable house she had been in since her arrival in
England, began to get the better of her alarm at its gloominess. But
at the angle of the house, where the gallery turned sharply to the
right, Mrs. Bean unlocked a door, and introduced her to a narrow
stone passage which was like a charnel-house.
“This,” said Mrs. Bean with some enthusiasm, “is the very oldest
part; and I warrant you’ll not find such another bit of masonry, still
habitable, mind, in any other house in England!”
Was it habitable? Freda doubted it. The walls of the passage were
of great blocks of rough stone. It was so narrow that the two women
could scarcely walk abreast. They passed under a pointed arch of
rough-hewn stone, and came presently to the end of the passage,
where a narrow window, deeply splayed, threw a little line of murky
light on to the boards of the floor. On the right was a low and narrow
Gothic doorway, with the door in perfect preservation. Mrs. Bean
opened it by drawing back a rusty bolt, and ushered Freda, with
great pride, into a room which seemed fragrant with the memories of
a bygone age. Freda looked round almost in terror. Surely the Abbot
must still be lurking about, and would start out presently, in dignified
black habit, cowl and sandals, and haughtily demand the reason of
her intrusion! For here was the very wide fireplace, reaching four feet
from the ground, and without any mantelshelf, where fires had
burned for holy Abbot or episcopal guest four hundred years ago.
Here were the narrow windows deeply splayed like the one outside
from which the prosperous monks had looked out over their wide
pasture-lands and well-stocked coverts.
Even in the furniture there was little that was incongruous with the
building. The roughly plastered walls were hung with tapestry much
less carefully patched and mended than the hangings at Oldcastle
Farm. The floor was covered by an old carpet of harmoniously
undistinguishable pattern. The rough but solid chairs of unpolished
wood, with worn leather seats; the ancient press, long and low,
which served at one end as a washhand-stand, and at the other as a
dressing-table; a large writing-table, which might have stood in the
scriptorium of the Abbey itself, above all, the enormous four-poster
bedstead, with faded tapestry to match the walls, and massive
worm-eaten carvings of Scriptural subjects: all these combined to
make the chamber unlike any that Freda had ever seen.
“There!” said Mrs. Bean, as she plumped down the candlestick
upon the writing table, “you’ve never slept in a room like this before!”
“No, indeed I haven’t,” answered Freda, who would willingly have
exchanged fourteenth century tapestry and memories of dead
Abbots for an apartment a little more draught-tight.
“Ah! There’s plenty of gentlemen with as many thousands as the
Captain had hundreds, would give their eyes for the Abbot’s guest
chamber in Sea-Mew Abbey. Now I’ll just leave you while I fetch
some hot water and some dry clothes. They won’t fit you very well,
you being thin and me fat, but we’re not much in the fashion here.
Do you mind being left without a light till I come back?”
Freda did mind very much, but she would not own to it. Just as
Mrs. Bean was going away with the candle, however, she sprang
towards her, and asked, in a trembling voice:
“Mrs. Bean, may I see him—my father?”
The housekeeper gave a great start.
“Bless me, no, child!” she said in a frightened voice. “Who’d ever
have thought of your asking such a thing! It’s no sight for you, my
dear,” she added hurriedly.
Freda paused for a moment. But she still held Mrs. Bean’s sleeve,
and when that lady had recovered her breath, she said:
“That was my poor father’s room, to the right when we reached the
top of the stairs, wasn’t it?”
Again the housekeeper started.
“Why, how did you know that?” she asked breathlessly.
“I saw you look towards the door on the left like this,” said Freda,
imitating a frightened glance.
Mrs. Bean shook her head, puzzled and rather solemn.
“Those sharp eyes of yours will get you into trouble if you don’t
take care,” she said, “unless you’ve got more gumption than girls of
your age are usually blest with. We womenfolks,” she went on
sententiously, “are always thought more of when we don’t seem
over-bright. Take that from me as a word of advice, and if ever you
see or hear more than you think you can keep to yourself, why, come
and tell me—but nobody else.”
And Mrs. Bean with a friendly nod, and a kindly, rough pat on the
cheek which was almost a slap, left the girl abruptly, and went out of
the room.
But this warning, after all the mysterious experiences of the last
two days, was more than Freda could bear without question. She
waited, stupefied, until she could no longer hear the sound of Mrs.
Bean’s retreating footsteps, and then, with one hasty glance round
her which took in frowning bedstead, yawning fireplace and dim
windows, she groped her way to the door, which was unfastened,
and fled out along the stone passage. Her crutch seemed to raise
strange echoes, which filled her with alarm. She hurt herself against
the rough, projecting stones of the wall as she ran. The gallery-door
was open: like a mouse she crept through, becoming suddenly afraid
lest Mrs. Bean should hear her. For she wanted to see her father’s
body. A horrible suspicion had struck her; these people seemed
quite unconcerned at his death; did they know more about it than
they told her? Had he really shot himself, or had he been murdered?
She thought if she could see his dead face that she would know.
Tipity-tap went her crutch and her little feet along the boards of the
gallery. The snow in the court-yard outside still threw a white glare
on the dingy portraits; she dared not look full at them, lest their eyes
should follow her in the darkness. For she did not feel that the
dwellers in this gloomy house had been kith and kin to her. She
reached the landing, and was frightened by the scampering of mice
behind the panelling. Still as a statue she stood outside the door of
her father’s room, her heart beating loudly, her eyes fixed on the faint
path of light on the floor, listening. She heard no sound above or
below: summoning her courage, she turned the handle, which at first
refused to move under her clammy fingers, and peeped into the
room.
A lamp was burning on a table in the recess of the window, but the
curtains were not drawn. There was a huge bed in the room, upon
which her eyes at once rested, while she held her breath. The
curtains were closely drawn! Freda felt that her limbs refused to
carry her. She had never yet looked upon the dead, and the horror of
the thought, suddenly overpowered her. Her eyes wandered round
the room; she noted, even more clearly than she would have done at
a time when her mind was free, the disorder with which clothes,
papers and odds and ends of all sorts, were strewn about the
furniture and the floor. On two chairs stood an open portmanteau,
half-filled. She could not understand it.
Just as, recovering her self-command, she was advancing towards
the bed, with her right hand raised to draw back the curtain, she
heard a man’s footsteps approaching outside, and turned round in
terror. The door was flung suddenly open, and a man entered.
“Who’s in here?” he asked, sharply.
“It is I,” said Freda hoarsely, but boldly. “I have come to see my
father. And I will see him too. If you don’t let me, I shall believe you
have killed him.”
She almost shrieked these last words in her excitement. But the
intruder, in whom she recognised the man she knew as Crispin
Bean, took her hand very gently and led her out of the room.
 CHAPTER IX.
Freda was so easily led by kindness that when, not heeding her
passionate outburst, Crispin pushed her gently out of the room, she
made no protest either by word or action. He left her alone on the
landing while he went back to get a light, and when he rejoined her, it
was with a smile of good-humoured tolerance on his rugged face.
“So you think I murdered your father, do you, eh?” he said, as he
turned the key in the lock and then put it in his pocket.
“Why don’t you let me see him?” asked she, pleadingly.
“I have a good reason, you may be sure. I am not a woman, to act
out of mere caprice. That’s enough for you. Go downstairs.”
Freda obeyed, carrying her crutch and helping herself down by the
banisters.
“Why don’t you use your crutch?” called out Crispin, who was
holding the lamp over the staircase head, and watching her closely.
“If you can do without it now, I should think you could do without it
always?”
He spoke in rather a jeering tone. At least Freda thought so, and
she was up in arms in a moment. Turning, and leaning on the
banisters, she looked up at him with a gleam of daring spirit in her
red-brown eyes.
“It’s a caprice, you may be sure,” she answered slowly. “I am not a
man, to act upon mere reason.”
Crispin gave a great roar of derisive laughter, shocking the girl,
who hopped down the rest of the stairs as fast as possible and ran,
almost breathless, into the room she had been in before. Mrs. Bean
was bringing in some cold meat and eggs, and she turned, with an
alarmed exclamation at sight of her.
“Bless the girl!” she cried. “Why didn’t you wait till I came to you? I
have a bundle of dry clothes waiting outside, and now you’ll catch
your death of cold, sitting in those wet things!”
“Oh, no, I sha’n’t,” said Freda, “we were not brought up to be
delicate at the convent, and it was only the edge of my dress that
was wet.”
Mrs. Bean was going to insist on sending her upstairs again, when
Crispin, who had followed them into the room, put an end to the
discussion by drawing a chair to the table and making the girl sit
down in it.
“Have you had your tea?” asked Freda.
“I don’t want any tea,” said he gruffly. “I’ve got to pack up my
things; I’m going away to-night.”
“Going away!” echoed Freda rather regretfully.
“Well, why shouldn’t I? I’m sure you’ll be very happy here without
me.” And, without further ceremony, he left the room.
Mrs. Bean made a dart at the table, swooped upon a plate and a
knife which were not being used, and with the air of one labouring
under a sudden rush of business, bustled out after him.
There was a clock in the room, but it was not going. It seemed to
Freda that she was left a very long time by herself. Being so tired
that she was restless, she wandered round and round the room, and
thought at last that she would go in search of Crispin. So she opened
the door softly, stepped out into the wide hall, and by the dim light of
a small oil lamp on a bracket, managed to find her way across the
wide hall to the back-door leading into the court-yard. This door,
however, was locked. To the left was another door leading, as Freda
knew, into Mrs. Bean’s quarters. This also was locked. She went
back therefore to the room she had left, the door of which she had
closed behind her. To her astonishment, she found this also locked.
This circumstance seemed so strange that she was filled with alarm;
and not knowing what to do, whether to call aloud in the hope that
Mrs. Bean or Crispin would hear her, or to go round the hall, trying all
the doors once more, she sat down on the lowest steps of the
staircase listening and considering the situation.
A slight noise above her head made her turn suddenly, and
looking up she saw peering at her through the banisters of the
landing, an ugly, withered face. Utterly horrorstruck, and convinced
that the apparition was superhuman, Freda, without a word or a cry,
sank into a frightened heap at the bottom of the stairs, and hid her
eyes. She heard no further sound; and when she looked up again,
the face was gone. But the shock she had received was so great that