Janusz Pyda OP: Let's start from the title. One word: it should be simple, on the face of it. Not a phrase, not an idiom, just one word. And yet it's different in every translation: Play in English, Comédie in French, Spiel in German (the language in which it was first published and performed in 1963). Translators variously opt for the English/German or the French model. Is there any significance to this difference? Which of the two versions do you think more fundamental?

Antoni Libera: Both are important; they broaden the range of meaning and enrich the play. But the difference is not due to any uncertainty on the part of the author; it arises in each case from certain features of the language of translation.

Beckett basically has two kinds of title. One views the play from outside, as it were, and refers to its subject; this is the case with Waiting for Godot or Krapp's Last Tape. The other takes the form of a key word or phrase from the text. The word can be one that occurs only once, as in Endgame or Catastrophe, or repeatedly, like a leitmotif, as in Eh Joe or That Time. But since these words can have connotations which will vary from language to language (‘Comédie’ and ‘Play’ conjure up different things), and the phrases are sometimes idioms or colloquialisms, with different equivalents in different languages, the criterion is linguistic. For instance, Eh Joe becomes Dis Joe in French, which corresponds exactly to the meaning of ‘Eh Joe’. Similarly with the phrase ‘that time’ which occurs in the play of that title. The French version is cette fois, which corresponds to only one of the English meanings of the phrase; since there is no equally ambiguous phrase in French, a choice had to be made between a phrase referring to a specific occasion in the past and one referring to an undefined period in the past, and this former was clearly the better choice – even though we lose the word ‘time’, which is a pity, since the problem of time and the mechanisms of memory is important in that play.

Similarly, too, in the case of Play. There are only two occurrences of the word itself in the play, close to each other and in the same context, but they are decisive in determining its meaning.