Worstward Ho
by Samuel Beckett
Performed by Lee Delong
Directed by Judy Hegarty Lovett
Premiered at Cork Public Museum, Cork 2005 European Capital of Culture.
This is Beckett's penultimate extended prose piece in English, completed in 1982 and first published the following year. He attempted to translate it into French but gave up, saying the piece was "untranslatable," an uncharacteristic admission from one of the great linguists of the twentieth century. His long-time friend Edith Fournier published a fine French translation in 1991, Cap au pire, three years after his death.
The piece runs to ninety-six paragraphs of varying length, the last one containing a sentence of a mere three words. "On" is the first word in the piece and it is also the last. The first "on" has the force of an imperative verb whereas the final has been scaled back, reined back to the adverbial or merely prepositional. It is a late text in the canon but it is also Beckett's most sustained testing of the resources of his native language, operating at the outermost margins of intelligibility. Its point of origin is surely Edgar's aside in Shakespeare's King Lear: "The worst is not/ So long as we can say, "This is the worst."" In the fourth paragraph the text announces its intention: "No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better." This it proceeds to do, coining neologisms, wrenching syntax, worsening and lessening to "the meremost minimum" where the most acute attention is needed to engage with its dark music.
