From An Abandoned Work, a "meditation for radio"[1] by Samuel Beckett, was first broadcast on BBC Radio 3’s Third Programme on Saturday, 14 December 1957 together with a selection from the novel Molloy. Donald McWhinnie, who already had a great success with All That Fall, directed the Irish actor Patrick Magee.
The work began as "a short prose piece, written about 1954-55, a step towards a novel soon abandoned" and Beckett's "first text written in English since Watt."[2] Though initially published as a theater piece by the British publisher Faber and Faber following its performance on the BBC, it is now "generally anthologized with Beckett's short fiction".[3]
Translated into French by Beckett with Ludovic and Agnès Janvier, it was published as "D'un ouvrage abandonné" by Les Éditions de Minuit in 1967 and included in Têtes-mortes, a collection of short stories.[4]
- ^ The Faber Companion to Samuel Beckett, p 213
- ^ Ackerley and Gontarski (Grove Press: New York, 2004). The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett, 213.
- ^ Gontarski, S. E. (Grove Press: New York, 1995). "From Unabandoned Works: Samuel Beckett's Short Prose" in The Complete Short Prose 1929-1989, xii.
- ^ Ackerley and Gontarski (2004), The Grove Companion to Samuel Beckett (Grove Press: New York), 213.