Contents: Waiting for Godot, Endgame, Happy Days, All That Fall, Acts Without Words, Krapp's Last Tape, Roughs for the Theatre, Embers, Roughs for the Radio, Words and Music, Cascando, Play, Film, The Old Tune, Come and Go, Eh Joe, Breath, Not I, That Time, Footfalls, Ghost Trio, . . . but the clouds . . ., A Piece of Monologue, Rockaby, Ohio Impromptu, Quad, Catastrophe, Nacht und Traume, What Where.

Mrs Rooney, old and unwieldy, is dragging herself towards the railway station on a Saturday lunchtime to meet her blind husband on his way back from the office, and guide him home. She passes the time of day with a man with a dung cart, and a man with a bicycle. A third man with a motor car offers her a lift. A church-struck spinster helps her up the station steps . . . All That Fall, specially commissioned by the BBC and first broadcast on the Third Programme in 1957, was immediately and universally acclaimed for its comic and linguistic exuberance.

Ce recueil réunit tous les poèmes que Samuel Beckett a écrits en français depuis 1937. Il reprend des poèmes écrits entre 1937 et 1939 et entre 1947 et 1949 qui avaient fait l'objet en 1968 d'une édition sur grand papier au tirage limité à 762 exemplaires. Cette édition a été reprise en 1978, augmentée, d'une part, d'un poème écrit en 1976, « Hors crâne seul dedans » publié en 1976 dans la revue Minuit et, d'autre part, d'une série de poèmes inédits, écrits entre 1976 et 1978, que Samuel Beckett appelle des mirlitonnades. En 1979, elle a été augmentée de deux mirlitonnades, "Le nain nonagénaire" et "A bout de songe" et en 1992 d'un poème "Comment dire".

The Unnamable - so named because he knows not who he may be - is from a nameless place. He speaks of previous selves ('all these Murphys, Molloys, and Malones...') as diversions from the need to stop speaking altogether. But, as with the other novels in the trilogy, the prose is full of marvellous precisions, full of its own reasons for keeping going.

...perhaps the words have carried me to the threshold of my story, before the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, will be the silence, where I am, I don't know, I'll never know, in the silence you don't know, you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on.

'Dante and the Lobster' is the first of the linked short stories in Samuel Beckett's first book, More Pricks Than Kicks. Published in 1934, its style was recognisably indebted to that of his mentor, James Joyce, and crammed with linguistic texture and allusion that Beckett later shed. The book baffled many critics and sold so few copies that several batches were pulped.
Decades later, this story was hailed as the Nobel Prize-winner's earliest important work.

I don't know why I told this story. I could just as well have told another. Perhaps some other time I'll be able to tell another. Living souls, you will see how alike they are.' Remorseless and unnerving, but leavened with black humour and the brilliance of his writing, Beckett's work is some of the most important and distinctive of the last century. In these two stories, a vicious and pitiable vagrant narrator contends (without resolve or reliability) with all the aches of memory and companionship. This book contains "The Expelled" and "First Love".

'They didn't seem to take much interest in my private parts which to tell the truth were nothing to write home about, I didn't take much interest in them myself.'
From the master of the absurd, these two stories of an unnamed vagrant contending with decay and death combine bleakness with the blackest of humour.

　　人生最大的否定莫過於荒謬和不定，迪迪和果果歷經漫長的等待仍等不到果陀。假如果陀是自我，他們互相依存的關係，把他們推向一個永遠難以獨立的處境，他們等待的是永恆失落的自我。假如果陀是個空缺，他們的生命是個永遠無法填滿的空隙。假如果陀是上帝，也許就如波赫士所言：「他的上帝早已經棄他而去。」——《等待果陀》
 
　　哈姆和克羅夫在狹窄的空間裡做最後的生死鬥，他們面臨的是一再被延宕的終局。一位是腿殘必須依賴僕人卻掌握語言權力的冷酷主人，一位是可以自由行動卻缺乏想像力的奴僕；因此他們的決鬥像空中揮舞的拳頭，永遠碰不到對方，勝負也就難以分曉。然而只要一息尚存，他們仍將繼續參與鬥爭，直到……——《終局》
 
　　《等待果陀》和《終局》被英國學者John Pilling視為現代西方劇場演變中從現代主義轉入後現代主義極重要的過渡作品。此兩齣作品摒棄契訶夫、易卜生和史特林堡的心理寫實主義，也異於亞陶側重身體符號的劇場特色。和傳統戲劇一樣，這兩齣作品被當作純文本閱讀，讀者仍可讀出興味，但是劇中缺乏故事、反高潮的劇情、扁平式的人物、片斷式和即興式的對話皆成為後現代戲劇的濫觴。《等待果陀》於2000年被英國人票選為20世紀最具代表性的劇作。
 
本書特色
 
　　◎國科會經典譯注計畫
　　◎荒謬劇《等待果陀》享譽全球
 
　　本書初版於2008年01月出版。

A seminal work of twentieth century drama, Waiting for Godot was Samuel Beckett's first professionally produced play. It opened in Paris in 1953 at the tiny Left Bank Theatre de Babylone, and has since become a cornerstone of twentieth-century theater. The story line revolves around two seemingly homeless men waiting for someone or something named Godot. Vladimir and Estragon wait near a tree on a barren stretch of road, inhabiting a drama spun from their own consciousness. The result is a comical wordplay of poetry, dreamscapes, and nonsense, which has been interpreted as a somber summation of mankind's inexhaustible search for meaning. Beckett's language pioneered an expressionistic minimalism that captured the existentialism of post-World War II Europe. His play remains one of the most magical and beautiful allegories of our time.

スピノザ、ニーチェ、カフカ、ゴダール…の系列にベケットがつらなる時〈消尽したもの〉という新しい哲学概念が形づくられる。ベケットのTV放送用シナリオ4作品とドゥルーズ待望のベケット論を紹介。

Samuel Beckett, one of the great avant-garde Irish dramatists and writers of the second half of the 20th century, was born on 13 April 1906. His centenary will be celebrated throughout 2006 with performances of his major plays, including Waiting for Godot. Here are the two most famous plays for a single actor. Krapp's Last Tape finds an old man, with his tape recorder, musing over the past and future. Not I is a remarkable tour de force for a single actress, as a woman emits memories and fears. It follows the highly acclaimed recordings of Beckett's Trilogy, Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable published by Naxos AudioBooks. Directed by John Tydeman.

Running time: 1 hour and 27 minutes.

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed) The first novel of Samuel Beckett's mordant and exhilarating midcentury trilogy introduces us to Molloy, who has been mysteriously incarcerated, and who subsequently escapes to go discover the whereabouts of his mother. In the latter part of this curious masterwork, a certain Jacques Moran is deputized by anonymous authorities to search for the aforementioned Molloy. In the trilogy's second novel, Malone, who might or might not be Molloy himself, addresses us with his ruminations while in the act of dying. The third novel consists of the fragmented monologue-delivered, like the monologues of the previous novels, in a mournful rhetoric that possesses the utmost splendor and beauty-of what might or might not be an armless and legless creature living in an urn outside an eating house. Taken together, these three novels represent the high-water mark of the literary movement we call Modernism. Within their linguistic terrain, where stories are taken up, broken off, and taken up again, where voices rise and crumble and are resurrected, we can discern the essential lineaments of our modern condition, and encounter an awesome vision, tragic yet always compelling and always mysteriously invigorating, of consciousness trapped and struggling inside the boundaries of nature.