"Waiting For Godot"
by Samuel Beckett

Read April 2007
Copy borrowed from Ramsey County Public Library, Maplewood branch
Essay written June 27th, 2007

I know it was supposed to be all post-modern and existential and stuff, but I just found "Waiting For Godot" to be a fun read. It's a play, and I've never seen the play, since I don't go to the theatre (people scare me). So I read it. And it was good.

I have a great memory of sitting out in my garage in my Adirondack chair with a few books -- including this one -- and a cup of coffee and hearing the rain fall above and around me. That's what spring is all about.

It's weird that Samuel Beckett was Irish but lived most of his life in France and so he wrote in French. So this was translated back into his native tongue by himself. I suppose Vladimir Nabokov did the same in translating his English works back into Russian. I can't imagine ever learning a foreign language so well that I could write an entire play or novel in it, only to have to translate it back into English later.

Milan Kundera also wrote in French for some of his stuff, after he had been living in France for a while. But his earlier works are in Czech. Sweet.

There was a 1990's Christian rock band called Driver 8 who had a song called "Waiting For Godot," but in that song they pronounced "Godot" "Good-day." For a long time I thought that was how it was supposed to be pronounced.

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