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Belacqua
Belacqua is a minor character in Dante Alighieri's ''Purgatorio'', Canto IV. He is considered the epitome of indolence and laziness, but he is nonetheless saved from the punishment of Hell in ''Inferno'' and often viewed as a comic element in the poem for his wit. The relevance of Belacqua is also driven by Samuel Beckett's strong interest in this character. Belacqua in the ''Divine Comedy'' Belacqua is found by Dante and Virgil in Ante-Purgatory as he sits in a fetal position under a large rock with other souls. They are condemned to wait in Ante-Purgatory as long as they waited in life to repent and turn to God. Dante recognizes Belacqua, his friend, by "his lazy movements and curt speech," which causes Dante to smile, offering a comedic moment during Dante's arduous climb up the mountain of Purgatory. The two then proceed to have a witty exchange. Belacqua's introduction eases the friction between Virgil and Dante, the former of whom just before firmly dismisses Dante's ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Echo's Bones
‘Echo's Bones’ is a short story by Samuel Beckett that was originally written in 1933. The Europa Press published a stand alone version of the story in 1935. This edition included 25 copies signed by Becket. The title is an allusion to the myth of Echo and Narcissus, in the version told in Ovid, ''Metamorphoses'', Book III. In particular, the line "Echo's bones were turned to stone" is in Beckett's ''Dream of Fair to Middling Women'' notebook. Background Beckett's collection ''More Pricks Than Kicks'', ten stories in the life and death of one Belacqua Shuah, was accepted for publication by Chatto & Windus in 1933. The editor asked Beckett for an additional story to help bulk up the physical book. Beckett agreed, and chose to place the new story after the existing ten, and did so by giving an afterlife to Belacqua. His editor, Charles Prentice, quickly rejected the story as too strange: Beckett later (1962) gave the typescript to Lawrence Harvey. The typescript and a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
More Pricks Than Kicks
''More Pricks Than Kicks'' is a collection of short prose by Samuel Beckett, first published in 1934. It contains extracts from his earlier novel, ''Dream of Fair to Middling Women'' (for which he was unable to find a publisher), as well as other short stories. The stories chart the life of the book's main character, Belacqua Shuah, from his days as a student to his accidental death. Beckett takes the name Belacqua from a figure in Dante Alighieri, Dante's ''Purgatorio'', a Florentine lute-maker famed for his laziness, who has given up on ever reaching heaven. The opening story, "Dante and the Lobster," features Belacqua's horrified reaction to the discovery that the lobster he has bought for dinner must be boiled alive. "It's a quick death, God help us all," Belacqua tells himself, before the narrator's stern interjection to the contrary: "It is not." "The Smeraldina's Billet Doux" is a love letter to Belacqua in fractured English by the German-speaking Smeraldina Rima, a char ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Dream Of Fair To Middling Women
''Dream of Fair to Middling Women'' is Samuel Beckett’s first novel. Written in English "in a matter of weeks" in 1932 when Beckett was only 26 and living in Paris, the clearly autobiographical novel was rejected by publishers and shelved by the author. The novel was eventually published in 1992, three years after the author's death. Partial publication Three fragments from the book were published during Beckett's lifetime: "Text" and "Sedendo et Quiescendo" were actually published before he started working on the book and subsequently became part of it, whilst "Jem Higgins' Love-Letter to the Alba" was published in 1965. Beckett refused to allow the entire novel to be published during his lifetime, on the grounds that it was "immature and unworthy": his biographer Deirdre Bair believes that his reluctance to make it available to the reading public was to avoid offending lifelong friends whom Beckett satirised in the book. Setting and influences The novel is set in the town of ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Molloy (novel)
''Molloy'' is a novel by Samuel Beckett first written in French and published by Paris-based Les Éditions de Minuit in 1951. The English translation, published in 1955, is by Beckett and Patrick Bowles. As part of the Trilogy ''Molloy'' is the first of three novels initially written in Paris between 1947 and 1950; this trio, which includes '' Malone Dies'' and '' The Unnamable'', is collectively referred to as ‘The Trilogy’ or ‘the Beckett Trilogy.’ Beckett wrote all three books in French and then, aside from some collaborative work on ''Molloy'' with Patrick Bowles, served entirely as his own English-language translator; he did the same for most of his plays. As Paul Auster explains, “Beckett’s renderings of his own work are never literal, word-by-word transcriptions. They are free, highly-inventive adaptations of the original text—or, perhaps more accurately, ‘repatriations’ from one language to the other, from one culture to the other. In effect, he wrote ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Purgatorio
''Purgatorio'' (; Italian for "Purgatory") is the second part of Dante's ''Divine Comedy'', following the '' Inferno'' and preceding the '' Paradiso''. The poem was written in the early 14th century. It is an allegory telling of the climb of Dante up the Mount of Purgatory, guided by the Roman poet Virgil—except for the last four cantos, at which point Beatrice takes over as Dante's guide. Allegorically, ''Purgatorio'' represents the penitent Christian life. Dorothy L. Sayers, ''Purgatory'', notes on Canto VII. In describing the climb Dante discusses the nature of sin, examples of vice and virtue, as well as moral issues in politics and in the Church. The poem posits the theory that all sins arise from love – either perverted love directed towards others' harm, or deficient love, or the disordered or excessive love of good things. Overview of Purgatory In the poem, Purgatory is depicted as an island-mountain in the Southern Hemisphere. This realm is divided into three p ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Samuel Beckett
Samuel Barclay Beckett (; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish novelist, dramatist, short story writer, theatre director, poet, and literary translator. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal and Tragicomedy, tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and Literary nonsense, nonsense. It became increasingly Minimalism, minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of repetition and self-reference. He is considered one of the last Modernism, modernist writers, and one of the key figures in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd. A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English. During the Second World War, Beckett was a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH (Réseau Gloria). Beckett was awarded the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for the novel and drama—in the de ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
How It Is
''How It Is'' is a novel by Samuel Beckett first published in French as ''Comment c'est'' by Les Editions de Minuit in 1961. The Grove Press (New York) published Beckett's English translation in 1964. An advance text of his English translation of the third part appeared in the 1962 issue of the Australian literary journal, '' Arna''. ''L'Image'', an early variant version of ''Comment c'est'', was published in the British arts review, ''X: A Quarterly Review'' (1959), and is the first appearance of the novel in any form. The novel is a monologue by the narrator as he crawls through endless mud, recalling his life separated into three distinct periods. Synopsis The title is Beckett's literal translation of the French phrase, ''comment c'est'' (how it is), a pun on the French verb ''commencer'' or 'to begin'. The text is divided into three parts: "before Pim" - the solitary narrator journeys in the mud-dark until he encounters another creature like himself thereby forming ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Ante-Purgatory
''Purgatorio'' (; Italian for "Purgatory") is the second part of Dante's ''Divine Comedy'', following the ''Inferno'' and preceding the '' Paradiso''. The poem was written in the early 14th century. It is an allegory telling of the climb of Dante up the Mount of Purgatory, guided by the Roman poet Virgil—except for the last four cantos, at which point Beatrice takes over as Dante's guide. Allegorically, ''Purgatorio'' represents the penitent Christian life.Dorothy L. Sayers, ''Purgatory'', notes on Canto VII. In describing the climb Dante discusses the nature of sin, examples of vice and virtue, as well as moral issues in politics and in the Church. The poem posits the theory that all sins arise from love – either perverted love directed towards others' harm, or deficient love, or the disordered or excessive love of good things. Overview of Purgatory In the poem, Purgatory is depicted as an island-mountain in the Southern Hemisphere. This realm is divided into three pa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Company (short Story)
''Company'' is a novella by Samuel Beckett, written in English and published by Calder Publishing in 1979. It was translated into French by the author and published by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1980. Together with ''Ill Seen Ill Said'' and ''Worstward Ho'', it was collected in the volume ''Nohow On'' in 1989. It is one of Beckett's "closed space" stories. In it, a man lies on his back in the dark, musing about the nature of existence and in particular, his own life. While there are several reminiscences about the narrator's own life (and these seem to have an autobiographical air about them), the main concern seems to be that of the paradox of consciousness itself and the nature of reality. If one is conscious about oneself and comments on the self from within the self, then where is the true location of the self? Is the mind that examines the self the true "self" or is the "self" that is the subject of mind the true self. The mind can set itself aside from and examine the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Murphy (novel)
''Murphy'', first published in 1938, is an avant-garde novel as well as the third work of prose fiction by the Irish author and dramatist Samuel Beckett. The book was Beckett's second published prose work after the short-story collection ''More Pricks than Kicks'' (published in 1934) and his unpublished first novel ''Dream of Fair to Middling Women'' (published posthumously in 1992). It was written in English, rather than the French of much of Beckett's later writing. After many rejections, it was published by Routledge on the recommendation of Beckett's painter friend Jack Butler Yeats. The University of Reading bought the six notebooks which made up the manuscript for ''Murphy'' in July 2013. Plot summary The plot of ''Murphy'' follows an eponymous "seedy solipsist" who lives in a soon-to-be-condemned apartment in West Brompton. The novel opens with the protagonist having tied himself naked to a rocking chair in his apartment, rocking back and forth in the dark. This seems to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Contrapasso
In Dante's ''Inferno'', contrapasso (or, in modern Italian,''Encyclopedia Dantesca'', Biblioteca Treccani, 2005, vol. 7, article ''Contrapasso''. ''contrappasso'', from Latin and , meaning "suffer the opposite") is the punishment of souls "by a process either resembling or contrasting with the sin itself."Mark Musa, commentary notes in The Divine Comedy. Volume 1: Inferno. Penguin Classics: 1984, pp. 37-38. A similar process occurs in the ''Purgatorio''. One of the examples of contrapasso occurs in the fourth ''Bolgia'' of the eighth circle of Hell, where the sorcerers, astrologers, and false prophets have their heads turned back on their bodies such that it is "necessary to walk backward because they could not see ahead of them." This alludes to the consequences of predicting the future by evil means and displays the twisted nature of magic in general.Dorothy L. Sayers, ''Hell'', notes on Canto XX. This example of contrapasso "functions not merely as a form of divine revenge ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
