Il "primo quarto di sorriso" di Dante. Beckett, Belacqua, Estragon

The contribution seeks – benefiting above all from the new insights offered by the recently concluded publication of the correspondence – to bring into focus some recurring motifs in Samuel Beckett’s “long loyalty” to Dante, particularly in relation to the character of Belacqua and his pose, the one in which “men beset by listlessness will rest”, which would have brought to Dante’s face, according to a note, the “first quarter-smile” of the Comedy. The essay – containing some bio-graphical references, from Dublin to Paris and Florence, spanning the 1920s and 1930s, and in the works from those years until the 1970s – goes on to suggest the presence of some Dantean motifs, in particular purgatorial ones, in the barren landscape and in the way the characters of En attendant Godot relate to it.