Islands have historically been perceived as objects of fascination, locations of romance and adventure, as an ‘allegory of the whole world’ or as ‘the quintessential sites for experimentation’. In real life and online, they may be ‘blank spaces’ in which an owner/occupier develops a culture – landscapes, architecture, values and social practices – that are distinctive, albeit without regard for the values or even life of that space's indigenous inhabitants. They may be edenic or dystopian. They may instead be locations that over time have been remade as reflections of the development of other spaces.

The archipelago of islands in New Horizons represent a cultural stage, shaped both by the hard and soft law discussed in the following chapter and by scope for expression on the part of players, including individuals and corporate entities that are seeking to influence the behaviour of people offline. The cultures evident across the archipelago can accordingly be understood as manifestations of personal autonomy (including performativity of attributes that might otherwise be expressed offline), a Japan-inflected aesthetic and a relief from or reinforcement of the rigours of a global market economy. The stage can also be understood as a subject for academic discontent regarding economic relationships offline, viewing a playscape as an allegory of contemporary capitalism.

Defoe's Island

On a superficial viewing each island – and Animal Crossing islands per se – are potentially blank spaces for inscription through the tastes and engagement of each user, an echo of Daniel Defoe's inf luential 1719 fantasy Robinson Crusoe in which a castaway, a dog, two cats and subservient person of colour remake a deserted island through strenuous effort, ingenuity and good fortune. They are not what Elizabeth Nyman characterised as ‘containers’ from which a player's might want to escape or instead use an opportunity for demonstrating prowess in gaining rewards through killing/disabling hostile characters.

Players enter the game by choosing attributes for their avatar, discussed below, and fictively purchasing the ‘Deserted Island Getaway Package’ from the virtual world's Nook Inc development company. Purchase from a company rather than from a state can be seen as friendlier and less ‘colonial’ than acquiring a licence from a government for occupation and economic development.

Abstract

Dante, and particularly the Commedia, best represents the ubiquity of Italy in Beckett's oeuvre, providing an intellectual scaffolding and a suite of structuring images in texts ranging from Dream of Fair to Middling Women to Worstward Ho. Italian words and literary allusions also arise at significant points in Beckett's texts, such as ‘lick chops and basta’ at the end of Ill Seen Ill Said, or the cluster of references to Giacomo Leopardi in the Watt manuscript notebooks. One significant Italian allusion is that of the Pantheon in Rome in All Strange Away as an architectural model for the confined space in which the two bodies are observed by the narrator. It is not the only reference to Roman or Italian architecture in Beckett's work – the Villa Doria Pamphili is mentioned in the Watt notebooks, and the Basilica di San Marco in Venice appears briefly in Dream. However, the Pantheon holds a special place in Beckett's architectural vision, not merely due to its exemplary design but as a focal point for Beckett's enduring preoccupation with modes of interment. The figures in All Strange Away are entombed in their suffocating space, which is likened to the ‘beehive tombs’ or Bronze Age tholoi of Greece and Western Asia, and which also recall the medieval monastic clocháns of southwestern Ireland. The Pantheon is situated between these epochal designations and connects them, casting its singular formal perfections across a history of burial, entombment and memorialization. That this particular building is tied so closely to memory and imagination – and their potential extinctions – bestows it with its own memorial function. It becomes an allusion marking a site of remembrance from which careful excavation will exhume textual relics from the living soil into the life-giving air. This essay will explore how the Pantheon, including its history and structure, anchors this terrain across Beckett's work. It will weigh up how Beckett's architecture of interment pivots on sacred places and their proneness to profanation, and how these sites constitute memorial markers that enable loss to dim into forgetting.

Keywords: Pantheon; architecture; tomb; tumulus; dome; masonry; stone

Italy and Italian culture provide some of the most prominent guides to the thematic and aesthetic formations in Beckett's work.

In Voltaire's 1759 Candide, the title character after many adventures and tribulations concludes that happiness is a matter of cultivating your garden rather than seeking fortune and glory, an echo of unheeded advice to Roman politician Cicero by his friend Atticus. Candide's erstwhile mentor Dr Pangloss, more generally known for pronouncement that we live in the best of all possible worlds, endorses that sentiment in claiming that ‘when man was put into the garden of Eden, it was with an intent to dress it: and this proves that man was not born to be idle’.

Preceding chapters have suggested that Animal Crossing as a virtual garden and a small virtual world (an archipelago of private islands in cyberspace where there are rules, social interaction, a simulated natural environment and a built environment) rewards those players who in rejecting idleness engage in what might be characterised as cultivation: selection, placement, display, harvesting and enhancement for pleasure or as the basis for greater capability in world making.

The activity of players might instead be characterised as a matter of curation. Critic Jens Hoffmann comments that:

Hoffmann's characterisation offers several perspectives for understanding the game as a source of pleasure and New Horizons as a simulation of an economy: sufficiently real to be engaging but not so real as to generate the inequalities, exploitation, aggression, unhappiness and contestation evident in all real-life economies.

Animal Crossing is a commercial product from a corporation with global scale, intended to provide Nintendo with a superior return on investment, one greater than the returns from savings accounts during periods when Japanese interest (and national growth) rates were very low following the collapse of the property bubble. As preceding paragraphs have suggested, the New Horizons business model is a matter of persuading people to recurrently engage in curation. Buy the game, play the game, pay subscription fees and buy amiibo or other collectables.

All cultural production – whether a matter of manufacturing (artisanal or industrial) or performance – is grounded. It might be attractive to people across the world and across time, whether for innate qualities or because it is recognised as a valued commodity. However, it has a physical and institutional basis: a location within one or more jurisdictions (national and/ or provincial legal systems) with social norms and enforceable rules about activity, irrespective of whether it is perceived as ‘disembodiment’ in a globally networked virtual world. It also has a genealogy – a point of origin, adaptation and reception over time – and may have an aura, perceptions that it is unique or otherwise valuable rather than so omnipresent and so functional as to be unrecognised.

Animal Crossing is a virtual world in which the interaction between live humans and digital characters is online but, like all virtual worlds, the game is tethered to the real world of capital, national/international law and past practice. That world can be considered simply and persuasively as a matter of delight or entertainment, without reference to the scholarship noted in preceding pages of this book. It can however be contextualised by considering its owners – how it came about – and its users and observers, in other words its audiences and critics, theorists or financial analysts who write about it. In understanding Animal Crossing as a large-scale commercial game, an artificial paradise that is a manifestation of corporate decisionmaking rather than a freak of nature, we can start by looking at that world's creator: Nintendo.

That consideration is analogous to exploring paintings, novels, operas and symphonies by looking at the creators (some market oriented, others not; some self-consciously avant-garde, others more conservative), intermediaries and consumers (some of whom, for example, sought visual aids for religious devotion and others, centuries later, engaged in status competition through purchase and gifting to museums or sought to satisfy a deep-seated hunger through amassing objects).

This chapter accordingly considers Animal Crossing as a matter of genealogies and materiality: where the virtual world came from, where does it fit in the spectrum of immersive online games, who are the gamers and why do they play.

This chapter brings together the concepts, philosophies, and case examples throughout the book to consider a working set of best practices and new theoretical directions for wildlife corridor and connectivity projects. As we consider the theories and illustrative examples that this book has outlined, it is clear that connectivity projects are highly context-dependent in terms of the landscapes, communities, and stakeholders involved. Even so, as I hope the explorations in this book have shown, it is possible to identify a productive path forward for corridor projects—namely, one that privileges coexistence and engages more directly with theories and practices that involve compassionate conservation, empathy, and traditional ecological knowledge (TEK).

In the Introduction, I acknowledged that wildlife corridors can be defined in different ways depending on the context, may occur naturally or be human-made, and can happen at different levels of scale. On the whole, wildlife corridors “provide continuous habitat for species to move on their own, [and] are a reasonable and effective means for ensuring connectivity in the landscape.” I acknowledged that this book does not necessarily advocate for perfect, tidy corridor projects; rather, by being mindful of approaches informed by compassionate conservation, empathy, and TEK, we can conceptualize and implement corridor projects that engage more holistically with landscapes, wildlife, and people and better foster coexistence and connectivity.

An approach informed by compassionate conservation understands that the lives of all beings, human and nonhuman, matter in decisions about wildlife conservation and policy; moreover, when it comes to humans making decisions about the lives of nonhuman animals, a compassionate conservation approach would advocate for an approach to corridors that values all nonhuman animals—not just more well-known megafauna or keystone species; finally, it advocates that, whenever feasible, corridor and conservation projects employ solutions that proceed with as minimal disturbance to the natural landscape as possible. Ideas about empathy and TEK are implicitly aligned with such an approach and understand living beings, including humans, as needing to coexist with one another and with their environment. Entangled empathy similarly focuses on another's experiential well-being in the world and tends to be action-oriented and interested in what seems to be the best, or most compassionate choice, in helping to pursue or participate in another's well-being.

By composing a narrative intertwining evolution, the emerging of the human brain, the quest for power, the development of religion from prehistoric to historical time, and the striving for empowerment—a will to power—Homo sapiens have assisted in writing the human story, a work of fiction. It is a work of fiction because it could not have happened this way. By employing their imagination, Homo sapiens could not have created a narrative so unbelievable and so fantastic that it cannot possibly be true. But the narrative, beginning with archaic beings, is either true or points in the direction of the truth. Along with the author of this narrative and readers of this ineluctable tale, we have been on an adventure that is fictive in its supernatural reaches and reflects elements of reality for us to ponder the following types of questions: How did Homo sapiens pull off such a change? Are we that clever and creative that we can create gods and goddesses? Can we turn ordinary humans into divine beings? Can we collect solid social support for our creations? Can we communicate with these created supernatural beings through ritualized actions? We, or our very ancient ancestors, did it all. Are we not special? Are we not powerful? Thus, if we worked more arduously, could we not deify ourselves? The answer is that we have the will to power to accomplish our self-deification. This selfdeification might, however, cause us to pause before attempting such an audacious enterprise. We might want to pause to consider at least one major problem for us. We might want to think about the following question: If we deify ourselves, who would we blame for the world's problems? We need God, the goddesses, or androgynous divine beings to have a refuge for our failures, errors, and shortcomings. Without supernatural beings to blame, we would be radically free and left to our own devices. This possibility could render us insecure and vulnerable and put us back to where we began struggling to survive in a hostile world. But as we have witnessed on our evolutionary adventure, the origin and development of religion made it possible to survive. The human discovery or creation of religion within the process of evolution—a physical, mental, and spiritual adventure—enabled Homo sapiens to survive and thrive.

Abstract

This paper deals with the issue of translating a self-translated text, focusing on the Italian version of Waiting for Godot by Carlo Fruttero published by Einaudi. In the 1950s, the status of self-translator was still unclear both for the author, who was developing the habit after the success of his first play, and for Fruttero. This produced a situation somewhat confusing: Fruttero translated originally the French play, but several modifications were later introduced starting from the English version in new issues in collected volumes. This was never disclosed in the paratext. The result is that two different Einaudi versions of the Italian Godot are available in the market today, one strictly from the very first French edition by Minuit, the other occasionally integrating or modifying from the English version by Beckett, which had in the meantime come out.

Keywords: Beckett drama translation; self-translation; Italian translations; Waiting for Godot Italian translations

The aim of this chapter is to draw a picture of the translation of Beckett's drama into Italian. The working hypothesis is: is it time for new translations?

Before delving into the subject matter, it may be useful to mention that Beckett's studies in Italy are, so far, still quite fanned out in three relatively independent branches: English Studies since the late 1960s, French Studies and Comparative Literature Studies. In this maze of independent and largely self-referring scholarly debate was Beckett made known to the Italian public. It is relevant to keep this in mind because it bears on the kind of approach scholars, editors and publishers have had towards the epiphenomenon of Beckett's bilingual and self-translated drama.

This contribution will consider the translation of Beckett's drama in Italy, focusing in particular on En attendant Godot/Waiting for Godot, but before attempting any description of the situation in its context, it is perhaps useful to outline a minimal theoretical framework in which to place the observation of the actual facts.

Although several scholars, among which myself, have written on the topic of Beckett's bilingualism and self-translation, and from multiple approaches, in relatively recent years, Chiara Montini has very effectively posed the problem of how to translate a self-translator. She deals with this in several studies, but I refer here to one article that appeared in Italy in 2013: ‘Tradurre un testo autotradotto: Mercier et/and/e Camier’.

Monkton Road is an approximately 10-mile stretch of road in Northwest Vermont, about 20 miles south of Burlington. For decades, it was a lightly traveled, local road, and traffic was not much of a concern for people or wildlife. In fact, Monkton Road was actually a rural dirt road for over a century until increased development prompted the need to pave the road. As Vermont's population grew, so did the number of vehicles on this road, also in part because GPS devices offered the route as a shortcut to Burlington. Soon, the rate of annual average daily traffic on the road reached between 2,000 and 3,000 vehicles, which became a threat to local amphibian populations who must cross this road every spring in order to breed.

Or, as Chris Slesar, environmental resources coordinator at the Vermont Agency of Transportation (VTrans), put it more empathetically, 2,000–3,000 vehicles a day “is not a terribly busy road by US standards. However, it is unquestionably and significantly busy if your lifecycle requires you to crawl slowly across the road on your belly in the dark, sans reflective apparel, at least twice a year.” That is, this relatively short section of Monkton Road, just under a mile long, bisects two important pieces of amphibian habitat. Monkton Road runs directly between upland and wetland habitats, which means amphibians must cross this road to breed during their spring migration.

For many years, a greater number of amphibians were being reproduced than were being killed on this stretch of road. More recently, however, increased traffic was claiming the lives of about 50 percent of amphibians who tried to cross this section of the road during their spring migration. Groups of concerned citizens and local researchers would gather at night to help move these amphibians across the road, attempting “nocturnal bucket-brigade rescues for the amphibians,” which was limited in its success and also put people at risk. In 2005, it became clear that this grassroots method, in which citizens manually carried these amphibians across the road, was not sustainable in the long term.

The Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (PMNM) is located in the northwestern part of the Hawaiian Archipelago and is one of the world's largest marine protected areas. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands (NWHI) consist of a group of small, remote islands and atolls northwest of the Kauai and Niihau islands and include one of the most pristine coral reef ecosystems in the world. This ecosystem supports a large number of apex predators and other endemic species and is a critical habitat for many threatened and endangered species. In June 2006, almost 140,000 square miles of this marine environment were designated as the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands MNM; one year later, the area was renamed Papahānaumokuākea.

The PMNM also encompasses the Midway Atoll, which has been in the media in recent years due to the vast quantities of marine plastic debris that litter its shores and threaten the Laysan Albatross that nests in the NWHI region (Figure 9.1). In addition to the more well-known Laysan Albatross, however, the national monument is also a transit corridor that is used by approximately 14 million seabirds of different species for breeding, foraging, and stopping over during migrations. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands also provide an important stopover habitat for shorebirds as they migrate through the central Pacific and are home to the Laysan Finch, Nihoa Finch, and Nihoa Millerbird, which are all endangered and found only on “one or a few islands, putting their populations at risk from predators, storms, and other catastrophic events.” Finally, “at least six species of terrestrial plants found only in the region are listed under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, some so rare that because of the difficulty of surveying these remote islands, they have not been documented for many years.”

The Creation of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument (PMNM)

At the time that PMNM was created in 2006, it already “covered 140,000 square miles of ocean around the uninhabited northwestern islands of Hawaii.” Then, in 2016, former president Barack Obama expanded the boundaries of the national monument, which “more than quadrupled Papahānaumokuākea's size, to 582,578 square miles, an area larger than all the national parks combined.”

Suppose we seriously reflect on life within the context of the Big Bang origin of the universe and the operation of evolution and its natural selection. In that case, it is reasonable for us to conclude that it is the result of an impossible process. It disrupts our minds to think that this is how we came to be. It is less stressful and more comforting to think that we were created by a beneficial divine being along with the universe. It surely beats coping with the possibility that we evolved from more primitive life forms like chimpanzees or a lineage of beings closer to us in bodily and mental characteristics. Regrettably, we will never know how precisely life originated, although this fact has not stopped scientific scholars from offering possible scenarios. It is possible, for instance, that life began by a sequence of chemical reactions. However, such a succession of chemical steps cannot be duplicated yet in a lab experiment. Instead, researchers adopt the philosophical view that life is a cosmic imperative: it had to happen given all the evidence in our possession.

According to Darwin, life's origins depend on three essential resources: all terrestrial life depends on liquid water because it is needed by all living cells; life needs a reliable energy source like that provided by the Sun; life depends on various chemicals elements. It is the case that all living organisms incorporate atoms of carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, and some other elements, which combine to form essential biomolecules. This process suggests the following steps of life: a synthesis of simple molecules; the assembling of macromolecules; finally, these macromolecules create an evolving, self-replicating, and autonomous collection of chemical elements. With the unfolding of each step, what is developed becomes more complex. In short, this chemical system becomes capable of Darwinian evolution, a scientific revolution.

As it develops, life manifests three distinct characteristics: a chemical system, metabolism, and variation. These features mean that all life forms must be chemical systems. It also means that life develops and sustains itself by gathering energy and atoms from its environment, which is essentially metabolism. Moreover, all living forms need to display variation.