Waiting for Godot - Bilingual: A Bilingual Edition [Paperback]

From an inauspicious beginning at the tiny Left Bank Théâtre de Babylone in 1953, followed by bewilderment among American and British audiences,Waiting for Godothas become one of the most important and enigmatic plays of the past fifty years and a cornerstone of twentieth-century drama. As Clive Barnes wrote, “Time catches up with genius. . . .Waiting for Godotis one of the masterpieces of the century.” Beckett wrote the play in French and then translated it into English himself. In doing so he chose to revise and eliminate various passages. With side-by-side text, the reader can experience the mastery of Beckett’s language and explore its nuances. Upon being asked who Godot is, Samuel Beckett told director Alan Schneider, “If I knew, I would have said so in the play.” Although we may never know who we are waiting for, in this special edition we can rediscover one of the most poignant and humorous allegories of our time.

“One of the true masterpieces of the century.” —Clive Barnes,The New York Times

“One of the most noble and moving plays of our generation, a threnody of hope deceived and deferred but never extinguished; a play suffused with tenderness for the whole human perplexity; with phrases that come like a sharp stab of beauty and pain.”
—The Times(London)

“Beckett is an incomparable spellbinder. He writes with rhetoric and music that . . . make a poet green with envy.” —Stephen Spender

“Reading Beckett for the first time is an experience like no other in modern literature.”
—Paul Auster

“[Godot is ] among the most studied, monographed, celebrated and sent-up works of modern art, and perhaps as influential as any from the last century. The nonstory of two tramps at loose ends in a landscape barren of all but a single tree, amusing or distracting themselves from oppressivlƒ]