By composing a narrative intertwining evolution, the emerging of the human brain, the quest for power, the development of religion from prehistoric to historical time, and the striving for empowerment—a will to power—Homo sapiens have assisted in writing the human story, a work of fiction. It is a work of fiction because it could not have happened this way. By employing their imagination, Homo sapiens could not have created a narrative so unbelievable and so fantastic that it cannot possibly be true. But the narrative, beginning with archaic beings, is either true or points in the direction of the truth. Along with the author of this narrative and readers of this ineluctable tale, we have been on an adventure that is fictive in its supernatural reaches and reflects elements of reality for us to ponder the following types of questions: How did Homo sapiens pull off such a change? Are we that clever and creative that we can create gods and goddesses? Can we turn ordinary humans into divine beings? Can we collect solid social support for our creations? Can we communicate with these created supernatural beings through ritualized actions? We, or our very ancient ancestors, did it all. Are we not special? Are we not powerful? Thus, if we worked more arduously, could we not deify ourselves? The answer is that we have the will to power to accomplish our self-deification. This selfdeification might, however, cause us to pause before attempting such an audacious enterprise. We might want to pause to consider at least one major problem for us. We might want to think about the following question: If we deify ourselves, who would we blame for the world's problems? We need God, the goddesses, or androgynous divine beings to have a refuge for our failures, errors, and shortcomings. Without supernatural beings to blame, we would be radically free and left to our own devices. This possibility could render us insecure and vulnerable and put us back to where we began struggling to survive in a hostile world. But as we have witnessed on our evolutionary adventure, the origin and development of religion made it possible to survive. The human discovery or creation of religion within the process of evolution—a physical, mental, and spiritual adventure—enabled Homo sapiens to survive and thrive.

Abstract

This paper deals with the issue of translating a self-translated text, focusing on the Italian version of Waiting for Godot by Carlo Fruttero published by Einaudi. In the 1950s, the status of self-translator was still unclear both for the author, who was developing the habit after the success of his first play, and for Fruttero. This produced a situation somewhat confusing: Fruttero translated originally the French play, but several modifications were later introduced starting from the English version in new issues in collected volumes. This was never disclosed in the paratext. The result is that two different Einaudi versions of the Italian Godot are available in the market today, one strictly from the very first French edition by Minuit, the other occasionally integrating or modifying from the English version by Beckett, which had in the meantime come out.

Keywords: Beckett drama translation; self-translation; Italian translations; Waiting for Godot Italian translations

The aim of this chapter is to draw a picture of the translation of Beckett's drama into Italian. The working hypothesis is: is it time for new translations?

Before delving into the subject matter, it may be useful to mention that Beckett's studies in Italy are, so far, still quite fanned out in three relatively independent branches: English Studies since the late 1960s, French Studies and Comparative Literature Studies. In this maze of independent and largely self-referring scholarly debate was Beckett made known to the Italian public. It is relevant to keep this in mind because it bears on the kind of approach scholars, editors and publishers have had towards the epiphenomenon of Beckett's bilingual and self-translated drama.

This contribution will consider the translation of Beckett's drama in Italy, focusing in particular on En attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot, but before attempting any description of the situation in its context, it is perhaps useful to outline a minimal theoretical framework in which to place the observation of the actual facts.

Although several scholars, among which myself, have written on the topic of Beckett's bilingualism and self-translation, and from multiple approaches, in relatively recent years, Chiara Montini has very effectively posed the problem of how to translate a self-translator. She deals with this in several studies, but I refer here to one article that appeared in Italy in 2013: ‘Tradurre un testo autotradotto: Mercier et/and/e Camier’.

Monkton Road is an approximately 10-mile stretch of road in Northwest Vermont, about 20 miles south of Burlington. For decades, it was a lightly traveled, local road, and traffic was not much of a concern for people or wildlife. In fact, Monkton Road was actually a rural dirt road for over a century until increased development prompted the need to pave the road. As Vermont's population grew, so did the number of vehicles on this road, also in part because GPS devices offered the route as a shortcut to Burlington. Soon, the rate of annual average daily traffic on the road reached between 2,000 and 3,000 vehicles, which became a threat to local amphibian populations who must cross this road every spring in order to breed.

Or, as Chris Slesar, environmental resources coordinator at the Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans), put it more empathetically, 2,000–3,000 vehicles a day “is not a terribly busy road by US standards. However, it is unquestionably and significantly busy if your lifecycle requires you to crawl slowly across the road on your belly in the dark, sans reflective apparel, at least twice a year.” That is, this relatively short section of Monkton Road, just under a mile long, bisects two important pieces of amphibian habitat. Monkton Road runs directly between upland and wetland habitats, which means amphibians must cross this road to breed during their spring migration.

For many years, a greater number of amphibians were being reproduced than were being killed on this stretch of road. More recently, however, increased traffic was claiming the lives of about 50 percent of amphibians who tried to cross this section of the road during their spring migration. Groups of concerned citizens and local researchers would gather at night to help move these amphibians across the road, attempting “nocturnal bucket-brigade rescues for the amphibians,” which was limited in its success and also put people at risk. In 2005, it became clear that this grassroots method, in which citizens manually carried these amphibians across the road, was not sustainable in the long term.

The Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (PMNM) is located in the northwestern part of the Hawaiian Archipelago and is one of the world's largest marine protected areas. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI) consist of a group of small, remote islands and atolls northwest of the Kauai and Niihau islands and include one of the most pristine coral reef ecosystems in the world. This ecosystem supports a large number of apex predators and other endemic species and is a critical habitat for many threatened and endangered species. In June 2006, almost 140,000 square miles of this marine environment were designated as the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands MNM; one year later, the area was renamed Papahānaumokuākea.

The PMNM also encompasses the Midway Atoll, which has been in the media in recent years due to the vast quantities of marine plastic debris that litter its shores and threaten the Laysan Albatross that nests in the NWHI region (Figure 9.1). In addition to the more well-known Laysan Albatross, however, the national monument is also a transit corridor that is used by approximately 14 million seabirds of different species for breeding, foraging, and stopping over during migrations. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands also provide an important stopover habitat for shorebirds as they migrate through the central Pacific and are home to the Laysan Finch, Nihoa Finch, and Nihoa Millerbird, which are all endangered and found only on “one or a few islands, putting their populations at risk from predators, storms, and other catastrophic events.” Finally, “at least six species of terrestrial plants found only in the region are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, some so rare that because of the difficulty of surveying these remote islands, they have not been documented for many years.”

The Creation of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (PMNM)

At the time that PMNM was created in 2006, it already “covered 140,000 square miles of ocean around the uninhabited northwestern islands of Hawaii.” Then, in 2016, former president Barack Obama expanded the boundaries of the national monument, which “more than quadrupled Papahānaumokuākea's size, to 582,578 square miles, an area larger than all the national parks combined.”

Suppose we seriously reflect on life within the context of the Big Bang origin of the universe and the operation of evolution and its natural selection. In that case, it is reasonable for us to conclude that it is the result of an impossible process. It disrupts our minds to think that this is how we came to be. It is less stressful and more comforting to think that we were created by a beneficial divine being along with the universe. It surely beats coping with the possibility that we evolved from more primitive life forms like chimpanzees or a lineage of beings closer to us in bodily and mental characteristics. Regrettably, we will never know how precisely life originated, although this fact has not stopped scientific scholars from offering possible scenarios. It is possible, for instance, that life began by a sequence of chemical reactions. However, such a succession of chemical steps cannot be duplicated yet in a lab experiment. Instead, researchers adopt the philosophical view that life is a cosmic imperative: it had to happen given all the evidence in our possession.

According to Darwin, life's origins depend on three essential resources: all terrestrial life depends on liquid water because it is needed by all living cells; life needs a reliable energy source like that provided by the Sun; life depends on various chemicals elements. It is the case that all living organisms incorporate atoms of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and some other elements, which combine to form essential biomolecules. This process suggests the following steps of life: a synthesis of simple molecules; the assembling of macromolecules; finally, these macromolecules create an evolving, self-replicating, and autonomous collection of chemical elements. With the unfolding of each step, what is developed becomes more complex. In short, this chemical system becomes capable of Darwinian evolution, a scientific revolution.

As it develops, life manifests three distinct characteristics: a chemical system, metabolism, and variation. These features mean that all life forms must be chemical systems. It also means that life develops and sustains itself by gathering energy and atoms from its environment, which is essentially metabolism. Moreover, all living forms need to display variation.

Abstract

In 1976, while Samuel Beckett was rehearsing Footfalls and That Time in Berlin, an American avant-garde composer, Morton Feldman, made him a surprise visit. Beckett was utterly astonished when Feldman asked him to write a libretto for his new opera that had been commissioned by the Teatro dell’Opera in Rome. The Irish playwright told Feldman that he did not like opera and suggested him to use one of his own existing texts, as the French composer Marcel Mihalovici had done. However, Feldman immediately replied that those works did not need music in them. Furthermore, Feldman had never composed an opera and thus had no idea of what he wanted from him. He just knew that Beckett was the only person who could offer him the ‘quintessence’ of what he was searching for. After Feldman showed him a score of one of his own pieces, Beckett wrote what he considered the main theme of his life on it: ‘To and fro in shadow, from outer shadow to inner shadow. To and fro, between unattainable self and unattainable non-self.’ At the end of the month, while Feldman had already started composing the music, Beckett sent him unexpectedly a card with a handwritten text called Neither, containing 86 words in 10 lines. The opera Neither premiered at the Teatro dell’Opera on 13 May 1977 receiving a very negative reception. The opera had no plot, no scenery, and apparently no ‘Beckett’ but solely a soprano that sang in a seemingly wordless manner.

Keywords: Libretto; non-self; re-elaboration; repetitiveness; voice

At the end of the play Happy Days (1961), while being swallowed up slowly by the sand in the desert, the female protagonist Winnie sings softly a waltz. It is an English translation of the love duet ‘Lippen schweigen’ from Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow (1905).

In 1996, US provocateur John Perry Barlow, in his 1996 ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’, announced

Nicholas Negroponte equally colourfully forecast that the nation state would shortly evaporate like a mothball left in the sun, something at odds with experience in 2022 and recognition that states are useful for provision of welfare, biosecurity, consumer protection, utilities and other purposes. This book began by describing New Horizons in terms of an archipelago of islands within a virtual world. The existence and operation of that world involve a range of law, some embodied within each island (and internalised by players in ways that they might not recognise) and some functioning as a legal framework around the game. That law demonstrates the problematical nature of claims by Barlow and Negroponte, in particular because the players and owners of the game (just like the physical infrastructure enabling the game) are located in terra firma and thus susceptible to enforcement action by nation states or private entities endorse by those states. This chapter offers a high level of some of that law and its implications.

Abstract

Beckett's deep immersion in the visual images of the Italian Old Masters emerges in the pages of several scholars, although this story has yet to be told in coherent and comprehensive terms. This essay focuses mainly on the Irish playwright's interest in, not to say fascination with, Michelangelo Buonarroti, a giant through whom he may have found his artistic way. From his first published story, Assumption to Catastrophe, in which Protagonist stands on a plinth like a sculpture, Michelangelo was firmly rooted in Beckett's mind and played a pivotal role in his theatre, a role that is somehow impossible to describe with precision but inescapable.

Keywords: Michelangelo; sculpture; directing; stone; contrapposto; Bruce Nauman; Old Masters; curatorship; Giorgio Vasari.

In the Italian Rooms

The impact of Italian Old Masters on Beckett's plays is a story not yet written in coherent and comprehensive terms, even if Beckett's deep immersion in the visual images of Italian Old Masters emerges in the pages of several scholars. It suffices here to mention James Knowlson, who reports that Beckett's first visit to Florence, in 1927, was ‘a breathtaking revelation:’ the Pitti Palace, ‘the sinister Uffizi’ gallery, the Academia with Michelangelo's David; the Church of Santa Maria Novella, the Brancacci Chapel of Santa Maria del Carmine with Masaccio's famous frescoes.

While writing that Beckett generally ‘preferred the Dutch and Flemish painters to the Italians’, the biographer argues he ‘was not insensitive to the wonders of the Florentine Tizianos, Giorgiones, Peruginos, Uccellos and Masaccios’. Insensitive he certainly was not, as is proved by the many references to Italian art scattered throughout his artistic oeuvre and in numerous letters.

Unlike the broken man C in That Time, for whom the National Portrait Gallery is merely a place to shelter from the rain and cold, Beckett was famously an assiduous and knowledgeable visitor and also a connoisseur of the Italian Old Masters. Sometimes he even rightly doubted what the curators and the official catalogues said about an artist. Notably, experts had to conclude Beckett was right when he observed that Giorgione's Venus Sleeping in Dresden's Gemäldegalerie was ‘in a mess’. As he suggested to his friend MacGreevy, ‘the putto with the arrow and the bright bird sitting at her feet (by Giorgione or Titian?) was painted over with senseless landscape in the 19th century and the whole line of the left leg is destroyed’.

Not so long ago, before the age of Trump, Professor Gautam Mukunda's mentor asked him why so many crazy people run countries (Mukunda 2012). The answer gave rise to a brilliant book called Indispensable. I will have much more to say about that later. In the meantime, we are exploring a new field of research called “heroism science,” a term apparently coined three years after Mukunda's book appeared (Allison 1, 2015). Much of the scholarship in this area has been gloomy. For instance, psychologists Paul Babiak and Robert Hare produced startling statistics about mental illness in the executive suite in their book Snakes in Suits. They found that 3.5 percent of the 200 executives they studied were psychopaths, compared to just 1 percent of the general population (Babiak 2006). As if that statistic weren't scary enough, they argue that psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism form a “dark triad” in the corporate world. Unfortunately, many compromised leaders have ample charisma, which intensifies their impact and perhaps hides their faults (Mukunda 2012).

In this book, we have approached the hero (and her or his journey) from a hybrid perspective, on a spectrum from scoundrel to saint, with a dynamic outlook. We regard heroism not just as a personal characteristic, but as a series of actions in given situations and contexts. This is what makes “hybrid heroism” so fascinating, part of a tradition harking back to the story of Lucifer, the lapsed angel turned avenger. Instead of alternating between good and evil, the hybrid hero moves along a continuum between the extremes.

Storytellers have long understood the vast appeal of these warring opposites. Alfred Hitchcock believed that strong villains made strong movies (Stone 2019). Indeed, rogues and heroes often compose “opposing sides of the same story” (Gölz 2019, 27). In fact, we as audiences can experience fear and pleas-ure simultaneously, a phenomenon known as “co-activation,” which explains the seemingly inexplicable appeal of horror (Stone 2019). Even mass marketer Disney exploits these contradictory sensations: witness the company's public relations campaign in Japan with the slogan “Welcome to the world of delightful villains” (Prusa 2016, 2).

(a) History of the Kings of the Ottoman Lineage and Their Holy Raid(s) against the Infidels

• 1. I narrated this history because the urge suddenly came into my heart.

• 2. Even words are an anxiety. They are inspiration.

• What is the cure for this? It is completing (the work).

• 3. Those kings whom I mentioned?

• I have spoken of their deeds and characters.

• 4. Some were infidels, some showed cruelty—more of that in them than kindness.

• 5. Concerning the justice of the Mongol Sultans:

• Hear now the explanation of what it was.

• 6. They did not mention the fact that

• Cingīz Ḫān clearly oppressed the people.

• 7. They [the Mongol rulers] oppressed them with the law, but they did not paint their hands with blood.

• 8. Lawful oppression and confiscation

• Are amenable to the people as a form of justice.

• 9. For us there are many deficiencies in those accounts.

• Let us speak now without (such) defects.

• 10. Since all those of a cruel nature have been remembered,

• let us bring to mind those of a just nature.

• 11. Let us recall those lords who, first to last,

• were both Muslims and dispensers of justice.

• 12. The duty of all of them is to fight infidels.

• What they wear and eat is their licit property.

• 13. Let us make it [the history] the conclusion to this book

• and, with it, let this (İskender)-nāme be complete.

• 14. I shall compose a ġazāvetnāme for you.

• Listen, but do not interrupt me.

• 15. Do not ask why the holy raiders were mentioned last.

• Do not ask why they appeared at the end.

(b) Apology for Postponing the Deeds of the Holy Raiders

• 16. What comes later is better than what comes earlier.

• Those who think will understand why I say this.

• 17. The True One was munificent when He bestowed on humans power, intelligence, and life—that is, existence.

• 18. Intelligence, no doubt, was best of those three, and it had to appear at the end of them.

• 19. That Messenger [Muḥammed] came at the end of the prophets.

• He was the last and the one honored above all.

• 20. It is the Qurān which appeared last of the four books.

• It is through (its) superiority that it abrogated them.

• 21. Because man came last of all,

• Through his superiority, he mastered all.

Thus far, we have focused largely on how roads and interstate systems can bisect habitats in ways that can prevent species from migrating or making their way to breeding sites; moreover, when roadways bisect habitats, species run the risk of losing their biodiversity through inbreeding. Within the field of road ecology, however, there has been less focus on the ways that railroads and railway systems can similarly disrupt ecosystems as a result of train tracks and tunnel systems being constructed in vulnerable habitats. Railway systems perhaps receive less attention because they are less consistently traveled than roads and highways.

Wildlife Implications of Railways Versus Roadways

At the same time, it is also inaccurate to make an easy comparison between cars and trains, as they and their environmental implications are far from the same, and each has different impacts on ecosystems and biodiversity. While train traffic may be less frequent than car traffic, trains travel much faster than cars. Additionally, interstates and railways are also structurally and physically different, “especially in the case of electrified railways, where overhead lines along the rail tracks can represent an additional source of impacts. All these differences are likely to affect wildlife responses to roads and railways.” And while trains are often viewed as a more climate-friendly and sustainable mode of transportation compared to vehicles, they too contribute to pollution, wildlife deaths, and habitat fragmentation. That said, statistically, railways are significantly safer than roadways, at least for people and cargo.

As described by Borda-de-Água et al., a 2013 report by the European Railway Agency notes that the “fatality risk in the period 2008–2010 measured as the number of fatalities per billion passenger-km is 0.156 to railway passengers and 4.450 for car occupants. In fact, following the same report, transport safety is only surpassed by the airline industry with 0.101 fatalities per billion passenger-km.” Railways are also more environmentally friendly than roads because a diesel-powered train is more energy efficient than its equivalent number of cars, and an electric-powered train is not a direct source of greenhouse gas emissions. Railways generally also occupy less land than roads and interstates.

Samuel Beckett's interest in Italian culture dated from his juvenile years. It is well known that he graduated from Trinity College in modern languages (French and Italian) and that he took private lessons from his language tutor, Dr Bianca Esposito, a figure who nurtured his interest in Italian literature, was fictionalized as Adriana Ottolenghi in Dante and the Lobster and remained in his memories till the last days. The first trip to Italy took place in 1937, starting from Florence and its Renaissance heritage. While these Italian connections are by now an integral part of Beckett's biography, the way in which his early works established a strong connection between the Italian language and Italian arts has been far less noticed. The most clear examples in this regard come from Beckett's early prose works, More Pricks Than Kicks and Dream of Fair to Middling Women. Belacqua Shuah, the ‘hero’ of More Pricks Than Kicks, is an eager student of Italian and a witty connoisseur of Italian art, with a specific interest in the Renaissance. He clearly acts as Beckett's mouthpiece. Walking and singing through the streets of Dublin, he ironically superimposes Florence to the Free State capital:

Belacqua's Italian imagery vehiculates a subtle attack on Irish provincialism and on British stereotypes about Italy as an exotic, timeless museum. However, Beckett's negotiations with Italian art and language run far deeper. The creative multilingualism of his erudite, post-Joycean intellectuals draws on this imagery in order to outline a parody of modernist cosmopolitanism itself. Beckett, as stated in his Dante… Bruno. Vico.. Joyce, was well aware of the dangers of ‘the neatness of identifications’.