I cried the first time I read the closing passage of "The Unnameable". What a wonder to be moved again by Pinter's masterful rendition. Genius speaking genius.
It shows what a great humble man Beckett was to even think of doing such a thing,the unselfishness of it.To go searching through the streets of Paris in search of a cure for Harold Pinters heartburn.Not many people would go to those extremes even for a friend.💚
Incredible, amazing reading by Pinter, straight to the heart. Beckett's text expresses in a unique way all the devestating agony of human existnce. Just leaves you speechless!
@@ellie-tk4jy I think it is because the density and complexity of his ideas and writhing nature of his writing closely mimic my disconnected and damaged brain. Especially when I am aphasic and full of anxiety.
I watch this probably every couple of months, and i think about it more regulaly than that. Forever, but particulaly in this age, i love it, because its true and that grounds me and i feel exactly the same when i read Beckett, and that is why i continue to read him. We create lies to live by..that makes no sense. Beckett makes sense and cuts completely through all the bullshit, it does not even consider it actually. How honest is that.
I quite like the little story in the beginning, it's vividly consistent with what we know of Beckett in his older days, and adds yet another bit of detail in the imaginary layers of those fond of idealizing his ways with the world.
I am of the opinion that what Pinter is trying so aptly to convey in his oration of The Unnamable is the kind of fear & despair driven manic thought that can come upon you & plague you when you come to the end of your days feeling nothing but a sense of waste & like everything in your life that happened to you, happened for naught. It speaks to me of a man who is not being afforded the luxury of having that "Ah-Ha" moment we all hope to have somewhere in the midst of (or at the end of) all the experiences in our lives which appear, even in retrospect, to be so arbitrary & seemingly unrelated. That quintessential "Ah-Ha" moment where we say to ourselves, "Now I know why all those random & inexplicable things occurred in my life that kept me on pins & needles wondering when it was finally going to go full circle, come together & all make perfect sense." The SAD part being, some people never are afforded that moment, EVER. I fear I might very well be one of them. I think Pinter is conveying manic thought in this piece just as well as Poe conveys manic thought in Tell-Tale Heart, the only difference being The Unnamable appears to me to be about everything from A-Z, whereas with Poe's piece, it was just case specific to one thing.
I have to disagree with the term "manic", I've known to many people who actually suffer manias. I understand you are referring to the speed of words, the speed of thought, but in the Tell Tale Heart, it is anxiety and at least a touch of paranoia. And this speech too, is filled with anxious energy. That's quite different than "manic", which is more grandiose, optimistic and estatic. It can feel quite nice, although the consequences of such manic thinking can be terrible, indeed. Not that I'm giving a definitive account of bipolar mental illness, not by any means. But you shouldn't use the term for anxiety, because of the euphoric connotations.
The desperation, confusion and chaotic madness of a man on the brink beautifully expressed by Beckett's words and Pinter's performance of them. You can truly see in this clip that Harold Pinter began as an actor and trained as one, he understood how to write words, turn the flesh into words and convey the words of others, turn words into flesh.
The greatest performance of a soliloquy I have ever seen in this life, my life, the last life of any life? I don't know. Well into my bones say I! Who am I? "Who knows why?" "Who's to say?" said I to me. But the eyes don't see! You can TELL! Then what? ON!
I couldn't agree manconoo. He was one of the funniest writers alive. It's only when you hear the words read by an actor that you understand his dark and wicked humour.
Incredible reading. I didn't find it angry at all, maybe resigned would have been interesting , but panicked and anxious as this seems to me, works brilliantly. Thankyou for posting, I'll get on now.
Pinter and Beckett are both absolutely central writers for me. Add in Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Ford, Wyndham Lewis and (more recently) Will Self and you have the guys I've loved most. Listening to this I seemed to feel a hand tightening around my throat: utter panic and grim desolation. An ordeal. In other words, Pinter was pitch-perfect. 👌
I'm sure that something like the end of The Unnamable will shoot through my mind in the last instant of consciousness before I die. My own inartful version, of course. :)
This is very like what I experienced when my heart stopped during a medical procedure last year. Fortunately, I was rescusitated with CPR but I'll know that place again for sure.
Could you please put english subtitles? i agree with who said that this is pure gold, but it's good that everybody understands it. Thank you for sharing this.
I graduated with a theatre degree last year. It was a broad course that covered many areas of theatre, both practical and academic. Playwriting and acting are the two areas I want to explore. Most of the plays I've been working on lie in the absurd with a lot of influence from my countryman Beckett. I do want to start reading some of Pinter's work now too.
Yeah that's what I got from this. It's like a person in a coma, or a person right before the moment of death, of nothingness, fading away, struggling to come to terms with the experience.
Undifferentiated to many a night I have had. Very warming to my viscera nonetheless to see HP talk about his apprenticeship . I'm a Dubliner at 62 revolutions around an insignificant star, and only casually -too infrequently-discovering SB, for decades.
Same with me in 1982 in Amsterdam when I devoured marujhiana or whatever you call it contained in a bar of chocolate which was (unknown to me back then) enough for six persons.
I want you pause for a moment and reflect on the condition of a society that puts a doritos commercial before a video about samuel beckett and harold pinter...
Because he captured with language a kind of private, human reality almost prior to any actual articulation in language, shorn of any sentiment or untruth? That might be it.
harold pinter can recite the entirety of the unnameable unblinkingly, yet the cast members of SNL cant do a single sketch without their eyes glued to the cue cards
🎹 "Another long exhausting day, another thousand dollars... a matinee, a Pinter play, perhaps a piece of Mahler... I'll drink to that!" (Lyric by Stephen Sondheim)
Very interesting; however, at 1:21 'lay down' should be 'lie down', well, unless this geezer means to put duck feathers on the floor 😊. Gotta love these Herberts, hehehe 😜
It seems to me that this soliloquy is immune to an analysis as to whether the piece presents with structural, foreground and background (to borrow from musical analytic vocabulary) coherence. Too many moving parts, superimposed together - or overlapping in contrapuntal fashion. Or, perhaps, it is the mere brute force of continuous repetition of the same thing over and over and over, that is the coherence. I don't pretend to know...but poetry, it certainly is - at a minimum (whatever that is worth).....
I think it is very lucid. Think about where the thoughts in your head come from. Do you consciously pick and choose? Or are you a mere responder to where your mind wanders? The words in what you think, are you conscious of creating them sentences? I think for most the answer is a no. That's what the narrator in Unnamable is talking about. He speaks without knowing who, where and when. He is conscious of not selecting what to say but is baffled at the fact that he keeps speaking still. That's the paradox Beckett is exploring in Unnamable. All of it makes sense. Dabbling into philosophy of being and language will also make it more understandable.
Read/saw 'Waiting for Godot' before going to university, read 'Watt' as an undergraduate, and found them interesting. Doing my Master's happened upon 'The Unnamable' and it was life-changing. There followed a time when I was almost obsessed with Beckett's work, chiefly his prose, the Trilogy and later prose. Harold Pinter, however, is beyond me. Have watched a number of his plays and nothing. Nothing at all. It's a battle to watch the play to the end. Funny, since Pinter was such an admirer of Beckett.
@AndyHocvs im not set mind on the subject, i think criticism is good. perhaps you think pinter is name dropping or dragging out a mundane story, but i dont know.
Well you should have made that clear then. I don't pretend to understand Beckett but I do love listening to his work. Beckett is better heard than read imo. 'Tenious'..should that not be tenuous?
I love good old Harry & have read all of Becket & several times, you know, but Mr P's rendition here takes a tone I think a bit over the top, too passionate, breathless; I see the passage he chose as very much more banal, weary, unfussed really (thus terrifying).
How can you interrupt this monlogue with a fucking netflix ad? Fucking unbelievable..the free internet of knowledge...if you pay for it.....oh the irony of air
Unsettling and ultimately pointless. Everything is ultimately pointless, so I wonder why do I spend any time being unsettled by Beckett and his grim, existential ravings.
@calabiyou Certainly Pinter. I have no idea if Beckett was. It's hard to tell from stories about a person, and near impossible to tell from their work. If one can't see why Pinter's recollection of "one time I had heartburn, oh, and I know Samuel Beckett!" is pretentious, than explaining it in such a limited medium would be futile anways. So why can agree with me or not, because one can't change any set minds through a comments section on youtube.
Μεταφράζουν από τα αγγλικά στα ελληνικά ένα σωρό ανοησίες και δε βρίσκεται κανείς να μεταφράσει στα ελληνικά αυτό το σπάνιο ντοκουμέντο όπου συνυπάρχουν δύο από τα σπουδαιότερα νόμπελ της λογοτεχνίας.
Beckett's work is overwhelmingly beautiful; Pinter's is repulsive. I hated Pinter's rendition "The Unnamable"; it wasn't at all how it sounded in my head.
i agree he does sound urgent and angry, although i hear a touch of despair and resignation behind the urgency, like maybe the urgent anger is supposed to act as a mask for the characters true despair? either way i do wish he would slow down a bit, especially in some key points
Neither Beckett or Pinter pulled their artistic punches. Totally amazing.
Magical.. Human nature... Explored.
I cried the first time I read the closing passage of "The Unnameable". What a wonder to be moved again by Pinter's masterful rendition. Genius speaking genius.
It shows what a great humble man Beckett was to even think of doing such a thing,the unselfishness of it.To go searching through the streets of Paris in search of a cure for Harold Pinters heartburn.Not many people would go to those extremes even for a friend.💚
Brilliant Beckett!Thank god for people who appreciated his genius.Well done Mr. Pintor!
Incredible, amazing reading by Pinter, straight to the heart. Beckett's text expresses in a unique way all the devestating agony of human existnce. Just leaves you speechless!
Where are the words? What words? ...
'What's that door doing here ?'
Classic.
A Prince Among Writers. A whirlpool of concetrated knowledge, flourished. Utterly missed.
pinter's delivery was rather powerful.. you could almost feel the weight of Beckett's words..
Speech too fast, I'm not intellectual ,but if I could listen perhaps could decide; interesting..... or bollocks
@@alanevans7527 it depends on your interpretation
@@alanevans7527 I think it was brilliant.
takes one to that place where few artists venture... sublime
id say the craic was had in paris 1961
Pinter's anecdote is great. I love this broadcast.
Beckett is the only writer who overwhelms and scares me.
Gabiotta he makes me laugh, mostly
Is that you Harold?
Gabiotta why?
Why?
@@ellie-tk4jy I think it is because the density and complexity of his ideas and writhing nature of his writing closely mimic my disconnected and damaged brain. Especially when I am aphasic and full of anxiety.
Many thanks for this. I hope more and more Beckett videos come onto youtube.
Seems pretty apt that UA-cam was incapable of refraining from interspersing this 12’52 video with three (THREE!) ads when I watched it...
I watch this probably every couple of months, and i think about it more regulaly than that. Forever, but particulaly in this age, i love it, because its true and that grounds me and i feel exactly the same when i read Beckett, and that is why i continue to read him. We create lies to live by..that makes no sense. Beckett makes sense and cuts completely through all the bullshit, it does not even consider it actually. How honest is that.
Pinter makes this sound urgent and angry. I wonder how it would sound if it had the voice of despair and resignation.
I quite like the little story in the beginning, it's vividly consistent with what we know of Beckett in his older days, and adds yet another bit of detail in the imaginary layers of those fond of idealizing his ways with the world.
has it been staged? is it supposed to be some day?
Magnificent. Master Interpretation ✨✨✨ of a Masterpeace
A UA-cam trip in honour of Billie Whitelaw led me here. Magnificent, and surprisingly emotional, performance from the old rep-actor.
Agree
I am of the opinion that what Pinter is trying so aptly to convey in his oration of The Unnamable is the kind of fear & despair driven manic thought that can come upon you & plague you when you come to the end of your days feeling nothing but a sense of waste & like everything in your life that happened to you, happened for naught.
It speaks to me of a man who is not being afforded the luxury of having that "Ah-Ha" moment we all hope to have somewhere in the midst of (or at the end of) all the experiences in our lives which appear, even in retrospect, to be so arbitrary & seemingly unrelated.
That quintessential "Ah-Ha" moment where we say to ourselves, "Now I know why all those random & inexplicable things occurred in my life that kept me on pins & needles wondering when it was finally going to go full circle, come together & all make perfect sense."
The SAD part being, some people never are afforded that moment, EVER. I fear I might very well be one of them. I think Pinter is conveying manic thought in this piece just as well as Poe conveys manic thought in Tell-Tale Heart, the only difference being The Unnamable appears to me to be about everything from A-Z, whereas with Poe's piece, it was just case specific to one thing.
I like this v much. Thank you.
Interesting interpretation, respect
ᗩᕓᗋᒷᓏᘙ ᘻᓮᔚᖶᔚ Do not fear, we are all in this together. There is no meaning, just life.
I have to disagree with the term "manic", I've known to many people who actually suffer manias. I understand you are referring to the speed of words, the speed of thought, but in the Tell Tale Heart, it is anxiety and at least a touch of paranoia. And this speech too, is filled with anxious energy. That's quite different than "manic", which is more grandiose, optimistic and estatic. It can feel quite nice, although the consequences of such manic thinking can be terrible, indeed. Not that I'm giving a definitive account of bipolar mental illness, not by any means. But you shouldn't use the term for anxiety, because of the euphoric connotations.
Good job finding this
'Simply wonderful, what does it pay?'
You are so awesome for posting this!
Thank you very much for posting this. Much appreciated. x
The desperation, confusion and chaotic madness of a man on the brink beautifully expressed by Beckett's words and Pinter's performance of them. You can truly see in this clip that Harold Pinter began as an actor and trained as one, he understood how to write words, turn the flesh into words and convey the words of others, turn words into flesh.
The greatest performance of a soliloquy I have ever seen in this life, my life, the last life of any life? I don't know. Well into my bones say I! Who am I? "Who knows why?" "Who's to say?" said I to me. But the eyes don't see! You can TELL! Then what? ON!
This is so funny, I hear myself thinking when I watch this.
I couldn't agree manconoo. He was one of the funniest writers alive. It's only when you hear the words read by an actor that you understand his dark and wicked humour.
my goodness! how talented can a man be!
Incredible reading. I didn't find it angry at all, maybe resigned would have been interesting , but panicked and anxious as this seems to me, works brilliantly. Thankyou for posting, I'll get on now.
thanks for this
best thing to come out of ireland that boy beckett
bensimps123 I thought he was French
The Irish were reading and writing when the rest of the world was learning to walk upright. Joyce,Becket,Wilde,P Kavanaugh,Behan O,Nolan etc etc etc.
@@karlconnolly3994 Stroll fucking on! The Chinese man!
Beautiful.
Stunning use of language!
Pinter and Beckett are both absolutely central writers for me. Add in Eliot, Joyce, Pound, Ford, Wyndham Lewis and (more recently) Will Self and you have the guys I've loved most. Listening to this I seemed to feel a hand tightening around my throat: utter panic and grim desolation. An ordeal. In other words, Pinter was pitch-perfect. 👌
I'm sure that something like the end of The Unnamable will shoot through my mind in the last instant of consciousness before I die. My own inartful version, of course. :)
This is very like what I experienced when my heart stopped during a medical procedure last year. Fortunately, I was rescusitated with CPR but I'll know that place again for sure.
Could you please put english subtitles? i agree with who said that this is pure gold, but it's good that everybody understands it. Thank you for sharing this.
Thank you
When you mean it, when you are speaking your truth, the truth, you don't blink.
I graduated with a theatre degree last year. It was a broad course that covered many areas of theatre, both practical and academic. Playwriting and acting are the two areas I want to explore. Most of the plays I've been working on lie in the absurd with a lot of influence from my countryman Beckett. I do want to start reading some of Pinter's work now too.
Yeah that's what I got from this. It's like a person in a coma, or a person right before the moment of death, of nothingness, fading away, struggling to come to terms with the experience.
But that's the eternally present moment, isn't it?
Undifferentiated to many a night I have had. Very warming to my viscera nonetheless to see HP talk about his apprenticeship . I'm a Dubliner at 62 revolutions around an insignificant star, and only casually -too infrequently-discovering SB, for decades.
sublime.
One time I took too many mushrooms and thought I was dead. Some moments of this were similar to my thought process.
Same with me in 1982 in Amsterdam when I devoured marujhiana or whatever you call it contained in a bar of chocolate which was (unknown to me back then) enough for six persons.
Funny. I had the same experience after a can of Campbell’s mushroom soup. Just contemplating the empty can.
This is merely my train of thought on any given night when I’m trying to get to sleep.
Fucking brilliant.
Seriously, xenos82. This is pure gold. :)
"your grasp isn't as tenious as it is"
So what you are saying here is that I have a strong grasp of his work.
Beckett makes me feel ridiculous to be alive.
I want you pause for a moment and reflect on the condition of a society that puts a doritos commercial before a video about samuel beckett and harold pinter...
been buying doritos lately huh?
Not enough doubt
Well, that was 12 minutes in a crumbling mind in a state of incomprehensible dread.
UA-cam interrupting with cute kitty-commercials just adds to the schizophrenia.
Whoooo eeeee! Brilliant!
excellent
I love this!!!
Because he captured with language a kind of private, human reality almost prior to any actual articulation in language, shorn of any sentiment or untruth? That might be it.
harold pinter can recite the entirety of the unnameable unblinkingly, yet the cast members of SNL cant do a single sketch without their eyes glued to the cue cards
all humans do this. becket just wrote it down.
thanks maan. I feel so honoured. just remember, I said it first. ;)
🎹 "Another long exhausting day, another thousand dollars... a matinee, a Pinter play, perhaps a piece of Mahler... I'll drink to that!"
(Lyric by Stephen Sondheim)
Very interesting; however, at 1:21 'lay down' should be 'lie down', well, unless this geezer means to put duck feathers on the floor 😊.
Gotta love these Herberts, hehehe 😜
Devastating.
Yes
Beckett's writing is incredible but what fascinates me in this video is the underlying anger in the way Pinter reads and interprets this passage.
It seems to me that this soliloquy is immune to an analysis as to whether the piece presents with structural, foreground and background (to borrow from musical analytic vocabulary) coherence. Too many moving parts, superimposed together - or overlapping in contrapuntal fashion. Or, perhaps, it is the mere brute force of continuous repetition of the same thing over and over and over, that is the coherence. I don't pretend to know...but poetry, it certainly is - at a minimum (whatever that is worth).....
I think it is very lucid. Think about where the thoughts in your head come from. Do you consciously pick and choose? Or are you a mere responder to where your mind wanders? The words in what you think, are you conscious of creating them sentences? I think for most the answer is a no. That's what the narrator in Unnamable is talking about. He speaks without knowing who, where and when. He is conscious of not selecting what to say but is baffled at the fact that he keeps speaking still. That's the paradox Beckett is exploring in Unnamable. All of it makes sense. Dabbling into philosophy of being and language will also make it more understandable.
Read/saw 'Waiting for Godot' before going to university, read 'Watt' as an undergraduate, and found them interesting. Doing my Master's happened upon 'The Unnamable' and it was life-changing. There followed a time when I was almost obsessed with Beckett's work, chiefly his prose, the Trilogy and later prose. Harold Pinter, however, is beyond me. Have watched a number of his plays and nothing. Nothing at all. It's a battle to watch the play to the end. Funny, since Pinter was such an admirer of Beckett.
Personal favourite Beckett novel is MURPHY.
Rex Mundi Malone dies
And of course Pinter is a wonderful poet. I'm also very drunk.
Well, what can one say?... except that the man told truth...
claustrophobic
Harold Painter on Samuel Beckett
Herman Rowboat on Harold Pinter on Samuel Beckett.
alka seltzer for the soul
beautiful.
@AndyHocvs im interested why you find this pretentious, what part of it pinter or beckett or both? specifics would be great
I bet he's using a telepromter
😂 LMAO
@AndyHocvs im not set mind on the subject, i think criticism is good. perhaps you think pinter is name dropping or dragging out a mundane story, but i dont know.
Well you should have made that clear then. I don't pretend to understand Beckett but I do love listening to his work. Beckett is better heard than read imo. 'Tenious'..should that not be tenuous?
Will we ever understand consciousness ???
When we die...and are dead...upon our death...then might we know our own self-consciousness?
12:52 min and I've been told nothing about Samuel Beckett.
You've been told quite a lot about him.
@@ajs41 Indeed, probably everything...
the topographical and anatomical information in particular is lost on me
@MrShempenman You're welcome.
xenos82 the pleasure is ours
I love good old Harry & have read all of Becket & several times, you know, but Mr P's rendition here takes a tone I think a bit over the top, too passionate, breathless; I see the passage he chose as very much more banal, weary, unfussed really (thus terrifying).
How can you interrupt this monlogue with a fucking netflix ad? Fucking unbelievable..the free internet of knowledge...if you pay for it.....oh the irony of air
Unsettling and ultimately pointless. Everything is ultimately pointless, so I wonder why do I spend any time being unsettled by Beckett and his grim, existential ravings.
Why are you serious Harold?
demonic beauty xx
Lay of the speed.
لا حاجة الى القول ان كل هذا ،انما يحدث خلف الجفن المغلق ...بلا اي اثر للنعاس ....النعاس الظرفي والنعاس المزمن
@calabiyou Certainly Pinter. I have no idea if Beckett was. It's hard to tell from stories about a person, and near impossible to tell from their work. If one can't see why Pinter's recollection of "one time I had heartburn, oh, and I know Samuel Beckett!" is pretentious, than explaining it in such a limited medium would be futile anways. So why can agree with me or not, because one can't change any set minds through a comments section on youtube.
Μεταφράζουν από τα αγγλικά στα ελληνικά ένα σωρό ανοησίες και δε βρίσκεται κανείς να μεταφράσει στα ελληνικά αυτό το σπάνιο ντοκουμέντο όπου συνυπάρχουν δύο από τα σπουδαιότερα νόμπελ της λογοτεχνίας.
Insta headache
Samuel Beckett forsit optimus ille est, in pace quievit in Hibernia
Beckett's work is overwhelmingly beautiful; Pinter's is repulsive. I hated Pinter's rendition "The Unnamable"; it wasn't at all how it sounded in my head.
That's the joy of performance: to see possibilities in a text that you haven't discovered.
pffffftttt,
This must me the worst recitation of Beckett I have heard - notwithstanding the shaky, rushed voice.
Can you me serious?
Edgelords unite!
Fs frankie
Pretentious
The Unnamable is fucking terrible........
Fucking terrible good
...like life then
but also keep in mind that this is stream of consciousness, so this urgency does seem natural
i agree he does sound urgent and angry, although i hear a touch of despair and resignation behind the urgency, like maybe the urgent anger is supposed to act as a mask for the characters true despair? either way i do wish he would slow down a bit, especially in some key points