... having been breathed out

An example of a decision we are presently facing may help focus the issues involved in transcribing Beckett’s handwriting. On 21 April 1969 Beckett wrote to Harold Pinter to acknowledge receipt of Pinter’s new play and to make a suggestion about it. The letter opens: “Thank you for sending me Silence. I like it greatly, the writing so precarious and [something]. Just one speech (p. 19 beginning ‘A long way’) I suggest you reconsider.” One Beckett specialist, not of our team, has transcribed the missing word as “numinous.” This would make sense, even if “numinous” doesn’t sound especially Beckettean. But it simply does not fit the letters on the page. One of our team has suggested “numerous”: a set of letters that looks plausible. But what could “precarious and numerous” possibly signify? The job of transcription requires one to commute between the evidence of the eyes and the semantic possibilities. Another suggestion was of a very Beckettean word—“umbrous”—but the first letter does not much resemble a “u.” One further reading gives “cumbrous,” a word that possibly fits with what Pinter says elsewhere of this play, that in it “There are two silences. One when no word is spoken. The other when perhaps a torrent of language is being employed.” Many possibilities, but only one can be right. The editor-jury is still out, and it may be that in the end we shall have to indicate our doubts (which we do by including a question mark before the dubious word).

There is a always a violence in “translating” handwriting into printed text, because the very particular “feel” of each letter risks being lost. The colour and quality of the paper Beckett chose, the degree of legibility of the hand—my colleague Gérard Kahn, who has been so helpful in our transcribing, believes that Beckett writes most illegibly to Barbara Bray because of an ambivalence about being read and understood by her—are just elements of the letter that are eroded when it is mined for text alone.