Writing Beckett's Letters

Book excerpt: For fifteen years George Craig has been translating into English the thousands of letters that Samuel Beckett wrote in French. In this cahier he opens that experience, describing the challenges as well as the rewards, which can go from the difficulty of deciphering Beckett s notoriously difficult handwriting to finding an English equivalent for one of Beckett s numerous verbal jokes. This cahier offers an insight into the task of the translator when the writer being translated was himself a master translator."