The latest BDMP volume discusses Samuel Beckett’s late prose text Company/Compagnie. Company was first composed in English between the years 1977 and 1979, with Beckett breaking a 20-year-long pattern of composing primarily in French to craft this meticulously structured 59-paragraph masterpiece of his late prose. Its French companion, Compagnie, was translated in only two weeks, in August 1979, yet the French came into print in early 1980, some months before the English ‘original’. Bot...

This volume of the BDMP charts the genesis of three iconic Beckett plays: Not I (1973), That Time (1976) and Footfalls (1976), all translated into French by their author. Including analyses of abandoned archival precursors – the ‘Kilcool’ drafts (1963) and the ‘Petit Odéon’ Fragments (1967–1968) – the book covers a crucial period in Beckett’s playwriting career, during which his long-held ambition to stage a mouth babbling in the dark became a catalyst for some of his most in...