The Making of Samuel Beckett’s Company/ Compagnie

Company was first composed in English over two years, with Beckett breaking a 20-year-long pattern of composing primarily in French to craft this meticulously structured 59-paragraph masterpiece of his late prose. Its French companion, Compagnie, was translated in only two weeks.

The genetic critical analysis of the manuscripts of Company/Compagnie takes this schema-dependent compositional method as its core focus. It forwards a new hypothesis regarding the genetic map of both works, and considers the relationship between this uniquely entwined ‘original’ and ‘translation.’

This volume is part of the Beckett Digital Manuscript Project (BDMP), a collaboration between the Centre for Manuscript Genetics (University of Antwerp, Belgium), the Beckett International Foundation (University of Reading, UK) and the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Centre (University of Texas at Austin, USA), with the support of the Estate of Samuel Beckett.