ABSTRACT
Samuel Beckett's stature as a bilingual European writer of the second half of the twentieth century, and his unique role as self-translator of work originally composed in English or in French, can raise any number of questions for the performance theorist concerned with issues of adaptation, variation, and the very act and purpose of translation itself. Here the famous dictum traduttore, traditore is under an increasing pressure to stabilize itself in the practical realm of theatre, where the challenge of mounting a script in stage time and stage space is perhaps even more vexed, but also and at the same time more concrete and multidimensional. As a point of departure for this discussion, well might we ask: where do we begin to locate a specific Beckett text?
