Janusz Pyda OP: Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot and Endgame in French, his adopted language, and only later translated them into English, his native language. With Krapp's Last Tape it was the reverse: he wrote it in English and then translated it into French. What made him choose one rather than the other as the first?

Antoni Libera: When people asked him why, in the mid-1940s, he suddenly began to write in French, a foreign language, he replied, variously, ‘It was a different experience from writing in English. It was more exciting for me, writing in French’ or (a remark made in 1956) ‘Parce qu'en français c'est plus facile d’écrire sans style […]’ (‘Because in French it's easier to write without a style’), or that using his adopted tongue allowed him ‘to escape the habits inherent in the use of native language’ and avoid ‘Anglo-Irish exuberance and automatisms’. And in Dream of Fair to Middling Women Belacqua says, ‘Perhaps only the French language can do it. Perhaps only the French language can give you the thing you want.’ These remarks reveal something of his approach to language as the stuff of artistic creation, but they do not explain everything.

The factors which dictated his choice in the case of plays differed slightly from those which predominated in the case of prose works. In the case of plays the deciding factor seems to have been the function of the characters. We have already mentioned, in our discussions of both Godot and Endgame, that the main, if not the only, subject of Beckett's dramatic works was the human being in the broadest sense and that his aim was to bring out the complexity of human nature by giving a separate voice to each of its aspects and parcelling these out among his characters, so that each character expresses (or imagines) a different one. So if he wants to describe something abstract and inapprehensible by the senses, like the relation between the human individual and the species, or the individual human being's dependence on ideas created by historical man, he will choose French, a language from which he is distanced: it is ‘external’ to him and therefore ‘objective’ and emotionally transparent.