Les archives de Krapp : enregistrement, traduction, langue

According to James Knowlson, Beckett wrote at the same time that he was working on what he found to be the extremely painful task of translating into English. Given this context, this article studies as a drama not only of memory and repetition, but also of translation. On the biographical level, Beckett the self-translator is at this time conducting a return to an English which, on the level of personal history and early memories, can only remain originary for him, despite his decision to compose so often in French. Indeed, dramatizes English as the language of the personal archive, while also insisting on the exteriority of this idiom, giving us a "mother tongue" or "native language" which has been reified and mechanized in the most literal fashion