塞缪尔·贝克特传记，爱尔兰小说家、剧作家和诗人
Biography of Samuel Beckett
Irish Novelist, Playwright, and Poet
Samuel Beckett (April 13, 1906 – December 22, 1989) was an Irish writer, director, translator, and dramatist. An absurdist and revolutionary figure in 20th-century drama, he wrote in both English and French and was responsible for his own translations between languages. His work defied conventional constructions of meaning and instead relied on simplicity to pare down ideas to their essence.塞缪尔·贝克特（1906年4月13日至1989年12月22日）是爱尔兰作家、导演、翻译和剧作家。作为20世纪戏剧中的荒诞派和革命性人物，他用英语和法语写作，并负责自己的语言翻译。他的作品挑战了传统意义的建构，而是依靠简单化将思想精简为本质。
Fast Facts: Samuel Beckett
Full Name: Samuel Barclay Beckett
Known For: Nobel Prize-winning author. He wrote the plays Waiting for Godot and Happy Days
Born: April 13, 1906 in Dublin, Ireland
Parents: May Roe Beckett and Bill Beckett
Died: December 22, 1989 in Paris, France
Education: Trinity College, Dublin (1927)
Published Works: Murphy, Waiting for Godot, Happy Days, Endgame
Awards and Honors: Croix de Guerre, Nobel Prize (1969)
Spouse: Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil
Children: none
Notable Quote: "No, I regret nothing, all I regret is having been born, dying is such a long tiresome business I always found."
Early Life and Education (1906-1927)
Samuel Barclay Beckett may not have actually been born on Good Friday, 1906, as he later suggested. Contradictory birth certificates and registrations in May and June, suggest that this may have been an act of mythmaking on Beckett’s part. He also claimed to retain memories from the pain and imprisonment he felt inside the womb.塞缪尔·巴克利·贝克特可能并不像他后来所说的那样，在1906年耶稣受难日出生。5月和6月出生证明和登记的矛盾表明，这可能是贝克特编造神话的行为。他还声称保留了对子宫内疼痛和监禁的记忆。
Beckett was born in 1906 to May and Bill Beckett. Bill worked at a construction surveyor firm and was a very hearty man, attracted to horse racing and swimming rather than books. May worked as a nurse before she married Bill, and enjoyed gardening and dog shows as a homemaker. Samuel had an older brother, Frank, who was born in 1902.贝克特出生于1906年5月和比尔·贝克特。比尔在一家建筑测量公司工作，是一个非常热心的人，对赛马和游泳的兴趣超过了对书籍的兴趣。梅在嫁给比尔之前是一名护士，她喜欢园艺和看家狗表演。萨缪尔的哥哥弗兰克出生于1902年。
The family lived in a large tudor home in the Foxrock suburb of Dublin that was designed by Bill’s friend, the prominent architect Frederick Hicks. The grounds included a tennis court, a small barn for the donkey, and fragrant shrubs that often featured in Beckett’s later works. While the family was Protestant, they hired a Catholic nurse named Bridget Bray, whom the boys called “Bibby.” She stayed with the family for 12 years and lived with them, supplying many stories and expressions that Beckett would later incorporate in Happy Days and Texts for Nothing III. In the summers, the whole family and Bibby would holiday at Greystones, an Anglo-Irish Protestant fishing village. Young Beckett also practiced stamp collecting and cliff diving, two contradictory hobbies that presaged his later precise diligence and fixation with mortality. In the home, the Beckett boys were scrupulously clean and polite, as Victorian manners were extremely important to May.他们一家住在都柏林福克斯洛克郊区一座都铎式的大房子里，这是比尔的朋友、著名建筑师弗雷德里克·希克斯设计的。场地包括一个网球场、一个供驴子用的小谷仓，以及贝克特后期作品中经常出现的芳香灌木。当这个家庭是新教徒的时候，他们雇佣了一个叫布里奇特·布雷的天主教护士，男孩们称她为“毕比”。她在家里呆了12年，和他们一起生活，提供了许多故事和表达方式，贝克特后来将这些故事和表达融入到《快乐的日子》和《白手起家》3中。在夏天，全家和毕比都会放假在格雷斯顿，一个盎格鲁-爱尔兰新教渔村。年轻的贝克特还练习集邮和跳崖跳水，这两种自相矛盾的爱好预示着他后来的精确勤奋和对死亡的执着。在家里，贝克特家的孩子们一丝不苟地干净而有礼貌，因为维多利亚时代的礼仪对梅极为重要。
As a boy, Samuel attended a small village school run by two German women, but he left at the age of 9 to attend Earlsfort House in 1915. A non-denominational prep school in Dublin proper, Beckett studied French there and became attracted to English composition, reading comics with other schoolboys. He studied with several specialty faculty members who also taught at Trinity. Additionally, on Bill’s influence, Beckett took up boxing, cricket, and tennis, which he particularly excelled at, winning local tournaments.小时候，塞缪尔就读于一所由两名德国妇女开办的乡村学校，但他在9岁时离开学校，于1915年进入厄尔斯福特之家。在都柏林的一所非教派预科学校，贝克特在那里学习法语，并开始被英语作文所吸引，与其他男生一起阅读漫画。他和几位同样在三一学院任教的专业教师一起学习。此外，在比尔的影响下，贝克特学习了拳击、板球和网球，这些他特别擅长，赢得了当地的比赛。
In 1916, following the Easter Uprising, Frank was sent to board at the Protestant-leaning Portora Royal School in the north of Ireland. At 13, Samuel was deemed old enough to board and joined the school in 1920. A well-regarded but strict school, Beckett particularly enjoyed playing sports and studying French and English literature, including the work of Arthur Conan Doyle and Stephen Leacock. 1916年，复活节起义后，弗兰克被派往爱尔兰北部倾向于新教徒的波尔多拉皇家学校（Portora Royal School）寄宿。13岁时，塞缪尔被认为已经长大到可以寄宿的年龄，并于1920年加入了这所学校。贝克特是一所声誉良好但严格的学校，他特别喜欢运动和学习法国和英国文学，包括亚瑟·柯南·道尔和斯蒂芬·利科克的作品。
In 1923, at age 17, Beckett was admitted to Trinity College Dublin to study Arts. He continued playing cricket and golf, but most importantly, became widely versed in literature. There, he was greatly influenced by Romance language professor Thomas Rudmose-Brown, who taught him about Milton, Chaucer, Spenser, and Tennyson. He was also influenced by his beloved Italian tutor Bianca Esposito, who taught him his favorite Italian writers, including Dante, Machiavelli, Petrarch, and Carducci. He lived at home with his parents and commuted to school and to performances of the many new Irish plays premiering in Dublin. 1923年，17岁的贝克特被都柏林三一学院录取学习艺术。他继续打板球和高尔夫球，但最重要的是，他对文学有了广泛的了解。在那里，他深受浪漫语言教授托马斯·鲁德摩斯·布朗（Thomas Rudmose Brown）的影响，他向他介绍了弥尔顿、乔叟、斯宾塞和丁尼生。他还受到了他深爱的意大利导师比安卡·埃斯波西托的影响，后者教他最喜欢的意大利作家，包括但丁、马基雅维利、佩特拉克和卡杜奇。他和父母住在家里，往返于学校和许多爱尔兰新剧在都柏林首映。
In 1926, Beckett began experiencing severe insomnia, which would plague him for the rest of his life. He also contracted pneumonia, and read Nat Gould’s pulp racing novels while on bed rest. His family sent him to France for the summer to try and aid his recovery, and he biked about the South with an American he met, Charles Clarke. Beckett continued his French fascination when he returned to Trinity and befriended the young French lecturer Alfred Péron, who was on a prestigious two-year exchange from the École Normale. When Beckett graduated at the end of 1927, he was recommended by Rudmose-Brown as Trinity’s exchange lecturer at the École. However, the position was temporarily occupied by the Trinity lecturer Thomas MacGreevy, who wanted to stay on for another year, despite Trinity’s insistence that Beckett take up the post. MacGreevy won, and it wasn’t until 1928 that Beckett was able to take up the Parisian posting. While frustrated over the situation, he and MacGreevy became close confidantes in Paris.1926年，贝克特开始经历严重的失眠症，这将困扰他一生。他还染上了肺炎，在卧床休息时读了纳特·古尔德的赛马小说。他的家人夏天把他送到法国，试图帮助他康复，他和一个美国人查尔斯·克拉克骑着自行车在南方转悠。贝克特回到三一学院后，继续了他对法语的迷恋，并与年轻的法语讲师阿尔弗雷德·佩伦交上了朋友，后者正与埃科尔·诺尔曼进行为期两年的著名交流。1927年底贝克特毕业时，鲁德摩斯·布朗推荐他担任三一学院交换讲师。然而，这一职位暂时被三一学院讲师托马斯·麦格里维（Thomas MacGreevy）占据，尽管三一学院坚持让贝克特担任这一职务，但他仍想再留任一年。麦格里维赢了，直到1928年，贝克特才能够担任巴黎人的职务。虽然对形势感到沮丧，但他和麦格里维在巴黎成了亲密的知己。
Early Work and World War II (1928-1950)
“Dante...Bruno. Vico...Joyce.” (1929)
Whoroscope (1930)
Proust (1931)
Murphy (1938)
Molloy (1951)
Malone muert (1951)
L’innommable (1953)
While teaching in Paris, Beckett participated in the native and expat Irish intellectual scenes. He studied French with George Pelorson, and was notorious for refusing to meet in the mornings, as he slept through them. Becket was also enamored with James Joyce, and began working for him as an unpaid secretary. Joyce had grown up poor and enjoyed making an errand boy of posh Protestant Beckett. Beckett, along with a host of young Irishmen, assisted Joyce in some phrasing and research for Finnegan’s Wake to help make up for the author’s poor eyesight. Beckett claimed that “Joyce had a moral effect on me. He made me realize artistic integrity.” 在巴黎教书期间，贝克特参加了爱尔兰本土和外籍知识分子的活动。他和乔治·佩洛森一起学法语，并因在早晨睡觉时拒绝见面而臭名昭著。贝克特也迷恋詹姆斯·乔伊斯，并开始为他做一名无薪秘书。乔伊斯从小很穷，喜欢给时髦的新教徒贝克特做个跑腿的男孩。为了帮助一些可怜的爱尔兰人和作家的研究，帮助一些可怜的年轻人起床。贝克特声称“乔伊斯对我有道德上的影响。他让我认识到艺术的完整性。”
In 1929, he wrote his first publication, a glowing essay defending Joyce’s genius and technique, “Dante...Bruno. Vico...Joyce.” The culmination of his critical work was Proust, a long exploration on Proust’s influence, which was published in 1931 and well received in London, if gibed in Dublin. Beckett always translated his own work into French, but refused with Proust as he thought it pretentious. 1929年，他写了他的第一本出版物，一篇为乔伊斯的天才和技巧辩护的热情洋溢的文章《但丁……布鲁诺》。他的评论作品的高潮是普鲁斯特，一个关于普鲁斯特影响的长期探索，发表于1931年，在伦敦受到好评，如果在都柏林被嘲笑的话。贝克特总是把自己的作品翻译成法语，但他拒绝了普鲁斯特，因为他认为这是自命不凡。
His friends’ attempts to relieve Beckett’s depression resulted in his submission to Nancy Cunard’s chapbook contest and 1930 publication of his poem Whoroscope, a farcical meditation on Descartes. While in Paris, Beckett also engaged in serious flirtations with his cousin Peggy Sinclair and Lucia Joyce, but returned to Trinity to lecture in 1930. He only lasted in academia for a year and, despite his three-year contract, left to travel Europe and write, settling in Paris in 1932, where he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women and attempted to get translation work. An intentionally incoherent and episodic narrative, the text would not be translated until 1992, after Beckett’s death.他的朋友们试图缓解贝克特的抑郁情绪，结果导致他屈从于南希·库纳德（Nancy Cunard）的查普书大赛（chapbook Competition），并于1930年出版了他的诗歌《Whooscope》，一部关于笛卡尔的滑稽沉思。在巴黎期间，贝克特还与表弟佩吉·辛克莱和露西亚·乔伊斯进行了认真的调情，但在1930年回到三一讲学。他只在学术界呆了一年，尽管有三年的合同，他还是离开欧洲去写作，1932年定居巴黎，在那里他写了他的第一部小说《对中等妇女公平的梦想》，并试图获得翻译工作。直到1992年，贝克特的叙述才被有意翻译成不连贯的。
He bounced back and forth between Dublin, Germany, and Paris until 1937, when he moved to Paris for good. In 1938, he published his first English language novel, Murphy. After his brief but tempestuous affair with Peggy Guggenheim, he met the slightly older Suzanne Deschevaux-Dumesnil, and the pair began dating. Beckett remained in Paris, by virtue of his Irish passport, after World War II formally began in France in 1939 and the German occupation began in 1940. He said “I preferred France in war to Ireland in peace.” For the next two years, he and Suzanne operated with the resistance, translating communications as part of the Gloria SMH team out of England. When their group was betrayed, the couple fled to the Southern village of Roussillon, where Beckett and Deschevaux-Dumesnil stayed undercover and wrote until the liberation in 1945. 他在都柏林、德国和巴黎之间来回穿梭，直到1937年，他永远搬到巴黎。1938年，他出版了他的第一部英文小说《墨菲》。在他与佩吉·古根海姆短暂但风流韵事之后，他遇到了年纪稍大的苏珊娜·德谢沃·杜梅斯尼尔，两人开始约会。1939年第二次世界大战在法国正式开始，1940年德国开始占领，贝克特凭借爱尔兰护照留在巴黎。在接下来的两年里，他和苏珊娜一起与抵抗军合作，把通讯翻译成英国格洛里亚SMH团队的一部分。当他们的团队被背叛后，这对夫妇逃到了南部的鲁西隆村，贝克特和德谢沃·杜梅斯尼尔一直卧底写作，直到1945年解放。
After returning to Paris, Beckett set about processing the war through an intense period of writing. He published nearly nothing for five years, but wrote an immense amount of work that, with the help of Deschevaux-Dumesnil, found publication at Les Éditions de Minuit in the early 1950s. Beckett’s non-trilogy trilogy of detective novels, Molloy and Malone meurt were published in 1951, and L’innommable was published in 1953. The French-language novels slowly lose all sense of realism, plot, and conventional literary form. In 1955, 1956, and 1958, Beckett’s own translations of the works into English were published.回到巴黎后，贝克特开始用紧张的写作时间来处理这场战争。五年来，他几乎什么都没有发表，但他写了大量的作品，在德谢沃·杜梅斯尼尔的帮助下，于20世纪50年代初在《米努伊特报》上发表。贝克特的非三部曲侦探小说三部曲《莫洛伊和马龙·梅尔特》于1951年出版，L'innommable于1953年出版。法语小说慢慢地失去了所有的现实感、情节感和传统的文学形式。1955年、1956年和1958年，贝克特自己翻译成英文的作品出版了。
Dramatic Work and Nobel Prize (1951-75)
Waiting for Godot (1953)
Endgame (1957)
Krapp’s Last Tape (1958)
Happy Days (1961)
Play (1962)
Not I (1972)
Catastrophe (1982)
In 1953, Beckett’s most famous play, Waiting for Godot, premiered at the Théâtre de Babylone on the Parisian Left Bank. Roger Blin produced it only after serious convincing by Deschevaux-Dumesnil. A short two-act play in which two men wait for a third who never arrives, the tragicomedy immediately caused a stir. Many critics thought it a scam, hoax, or at least, a travesty. However, the legendary critic Jean Anouilh deemed it a masterpiece. When the work was translated into English and performed in London in 1955, many British critics agreed with Anouilh. 1953年，贝克特最著名的戏剧《等待戈多》在巴黎左岸的巴比伦剧院首演。罗杰·布林是在德谢沃·杜梅斯尼尔认真说服后才制作的。这是一部两幕剧的短剧，两个男人在等待第三个永远不会到来的人，这出悲剧立刻引起了轩然大波。许多评论家认为这是一个骗局，骗局，或者至少是一个讽刺。然而，传奇评论家让·阿诺伊尔认为这是一部杰作。当这部作品被翻译成英文并于1955年在伦敦演出时，许多英国评论家都同意阿努伊尔的观点。
He followed Godot with a series of intense productions that cemented his status as a visionary 20th century playwright. He produced Fin de partie (later translated by Beckett as Endgame) in 1957 in a French language production in England. Each character is unable to perform a key function, such as sitting or standing or seeing. Happy Days, in 1961, focuses on the futility of forming meaningful relationships and memories, yet the urgency of this pursuit in spite of that futility. In 1962, mirroring the trash-bin figures in Endgame, Beckett wrote the play Play, which featured several actors in large urns, acting with only their floating heads. This was a productive and relatively happy time for Beckett. While he and Deschevaux-Dumesnil had been living as partners since 1938, they formally married in 1963. 他跟随戈多创作了一系列紧张的作品，巩固了他作为20世纪有远见的剧作家的地位。1957年，他在英国的一部法语作品中制作了《Fin de partie》（后来被贝克特译为Endgame）。每个角色都不能执行一个关键功能，例如坐、站或看。1961年的《快乐的日子》关注的是建立有意义的关系和记忆的徒劳，尽管这是徒劳的，但这种追求的紧迫性却是徒劳的。1962年，贝克特模仿《终局》中的垃圾桶人物，创作了这部话剧，剧中几位演员戴着大骨灰缸，头上只有浮头。对贝克特来说，这是一个富有成效和相对快乐的时期。虽然他和德谢沃·杜梅斯尼尔自1938年以来一直是伴侣，但他们在1963年正式结婚。
Beckett was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1969, for his work in both English and French. In the Prize speech, Karl Gierow defined the essence of Beckett’s work as existentialist, found “in the difference between an easily-acquired pessimism that rests content with untroubled scepticism, and a pessimism that is dearly bought and which penetrates to mankind’s utter destitution.”1969年，贝克特因其英文和法文著作而获得诺贝尔文学奖。在获奖演讲中，卡尔·吉罗将贝克特作品的本质定义为存在主义者，他发现“存在于一种容易获得的悲观主义中，这种悲观主义满足于无忧无虑的怀疑主义，另一种悲观主义是花钱买来的，并渗透到人类的赤贫之中。”
Beckett did not stop writing after his Nobel; he simply became more and more minimalist. In 1972, Billie Whitelaw performed his work Not I, a severely minimalist play in which a floating mouth spoke surrounded by a black curtain. In 1975, Beckett directed the seminal production of Waiting for Godot in Berlin. In 1982, he wrote Catastrophe, a stridently political play about surviving dictatorships. 贝克特在获得诺贝尔奖后并没有停止写作，他只是变得越来越简约。1972年，比利·怀特劳（Billie Whitelaw）表演了他的作品《不是我》（Not I），这是一部极简主义剧目，在黑色幕布的包围下，一张浮动的嘴在说话。1975年，贝克特在柏林导演了一部开创性的作品《等待戈多》。1982年，他写了一部关于独裁者幸存的尖锐的政治剧《灾难》。
Literary Style and Themes
Beckett claimed that his most formative literary influences were Joyce and Dante, and saw himself as part of a pan-European literary tradition. He was close friends with Irish writers including Joyce and Yeats, which influenced his style and their encouragement bolstered his commitment to artistic rather than critical output. He also befriended and was influenced by visual artists including Michel Duchamp and Alberto Giacometti. While critics often view Beckett’s dramatic works as central contributions to the 20th century movement, Theater of the Absurd, Beckett himself rejected all labels on his work.贝克特声称，他最具影响的文学作品是乔伊斯和但丁，他认为自己是泛欧文学传统的一部分。他与包括乔伊斯和叶芝在内的爱尔兰作家是亲密的朋友，这影响了他的风格，他们的鼓励使他致力于艺术创作而不是批评作品。他还与包括米歇尔·杜尚和阿尔贝托·贾科梅蒂在内的视觉艺术家交朋友，并受到他们的影响。虽然评论家们经常把贝克特的戏剧作品看作是对20世纪荒诞派戏剧运动的重要贡献，但贝克特本人却拒绝给自己的作品贴上所有的标签。
For Beckett, language is both an embodiment of the ideas of what it represents, and a corporal meaty experience of vocal production, auditory understanding, and neuronal comprehension. It cannot be static or even completely understood by the parties exchanging it. His minimalist absurdism explores both the formal concerns of literary arts—linguistic and narrative fallibilities—and the human concerns of meaning-making in the face of these dissonances.对贝克特来说，语言既是它所代表的思想的体现，也是声音产生、听觉理解和神经元理解的肉身体验。它不能是静态的，甚至不能被交换它的各方完全理解。他的极简荒诞主义探索了文学艺术的形式关注，语言和叙事的谬误，以及面对这些不和谐的人类意义创造的关注。
Death
Beckett moved into a Parisian nursing home with Deschevaux-Dumesnil, who passed away in August, 1989. Beckett stayed in good health until he had difficulty breathing and entered a hospital shortly before his death on December 22, 1989.贝克特和1989年8月去世的德谢沃·杜梅斯尼尔一起搬进了巴黎一家疗养院。1989年12月22日，贝克特在去世前不久进入了一家医院，直到呼吸困难。
Beckett’s New York Times obituary described his personality as ultimately empathetic: “Though his name in the adjectival form, Beckettian, entered the English language as a synonym for bleakness, he was a man of great humor and compassion, in his life as in his work. He was a tragicomic playwright whose art was consistently instilled with mordant wit.”贝克特在《纽约时报》的讣告中形容他的个性最终是感同身受的：“虽然他用形容词的形式叫贝克蒂安（Beckettian），作为凄凉的同义词进入英语，但他是一个幽默和富有同情心的人，在他的生活和工作中都是如此。他是一位悲喜剧剧作家，他的艺术一直被灌输尖刻的智慧。”
Legacy
Samuel Beckett is considered one of the most impactful 20th century writers. His work revolutionized theater making and minimalism, influencing countless philosophical and literary greats including Paul Auster, Michel Foucault, and Sol LeWitt.塞缪尔·贝克特被认为是20世纪最具影响力的作家之一。他的作品彻底改变了戏剧制作和极简主义，影响了无数哲学和文学巨匠，包括保罗·奥斯特、米歇尔·福柯和索尔·勒维特。
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