SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The process by which a literary text comes to be is among the understudied domains of translation studies. This article draws on my experience of translating Samuel Beckett’s late prose works into Persian to explore how a convergence of translation studies and genetic criticism can affect and broaden the literary translator’s choices. I outline a new way for literary translation to approach unstable source texts which consist of a set of drafts. I demonstrate how my translation of Beckett's late prose works into Persian consists of translating the differential space between the English and the French versions of Beckett’s work, on the one hand, and between the variants of each version according to the variorum editions of his works, on the other.