The artist has acquired his text: the artisan translates it. “The duty and the task of a writer (not an artist, a writer) are those of a translator.”In Parentheses, Beckett distinguishes between the artist and the writer; the artist seeks his text within himself, and the artisan translates it, transmits it to the world. To translate—in its more usual meaning, Dr. Johnson's “to change into another language retaining the sense”—has been Beckett's method of improving his own artisanat. In the very essay from which the quotation on translation is excerpted, Beckett rendered into English passages from Proust's texts, while waiting to “acquire” his own.

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