Samuel Beckett derived the title Le Dépeupleur from a line in Alphonse de Lamartine's 1820 poem "L'Isolement": "Un seul être vous manque, et tout est dépeuplé" (You miss a single being, and everything is depopulated).
The periphery is also where the sedentary and vanquished lost ones prefer to lean against the wall, uninterested in searching or climbing anymore.
[8] Reviewing the translation a year later, the Times saw Beckett as the dépeupleur of his own works, thinning out the language to create a style that presented "one of the signal modern ventures in concentrated attention".
While comparing passages in translation, Ricks notes how Beckett flattens the Romanticism of French into sparse English.
Even when Beckett alludes to Shakespeare, Milton, or Keats in his translations, their invocation is sardonic, such as when "un petit nombre du privilégiés" becomes "a happy few".
The unmistakable reference to Henry V's St Crispin's Day Speech is cruelly applied to the happy few who have snapped off rungs of the ladder in order to "brain themselves".
[10] Beckett gave permission to Mabou Mines to stage The Lost Ones on the condition that it was only a "straight reading".
David Warrilow performed the text in a dark foam rubber cylindrical space with tiny HO scale plastic figures and ladders.
Beckett confessed the original height dimension of eighteen meters was an error, "After all, you can't play fast and loose with pi.
"[13]: 326 In 2008, Sarah Kenderdine and Jeffrey Shaw created an art installation based on The Lost Ones, which they called Unmakeablelove.