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![]() Cover of the English translation of La Disparition | |
Author | Georges Perec |
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Original title | La Disparition |
Translator | Gilbert Adair |
Language | French |
Publisher |
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Publication date | 1969 |
Publication place | France |
Published in English | 1995 |
Media type | Print (Hardcover, Paperback) |
Pages | 290 pp (Eng. trans. Hardcover) |
ISBN | 0-00-271119-2 (Eng. trans. Hardcover) |
OCLC | 31434932 |
A Void, translated from the original French La Disparition (lit. "The Disappearance"), is a 300-page French lipogrammatic novel, written in 1969 by Georges Perec, entirely without using the letter e , following Oulipo constraints. Perec would go on to write with the inverse constraint in Les Revenentes, with only the vowel “e” present in the work. Ian Monk would later translate Les Revenentes into English under the title The Exeter Text.
It was translated into English by Gilbert Adair, with the title A Void, for which he won the Scott Moncrieff Prize in 1995. [1] The Adair translation of the book also won the 1996 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Fiction. [2]
Three other English translations are titled A Vanishing by Ian Monk, [3] Vanish'd! by John Lee, [4] and Omissions by Julian West. [5]
All translators have imposed upon themselves a similar lipogrammatic constraint to the original, avoiding the most commonly used letter of the alphabet. This precludes the use of words normally considered essential such as je ("I"), et ("and"), and le (masculine "the") in French, as well as "me", "be", and "the" in English. The Spanish version contains no a , which is the second most commonly used letter in the Spanish language (first being e), while the Russian version contains no о. The Japanese version does not use syllables containing the sound "i" ( い , き , し , etc.) at all.
Language | Author | Title | Year |
---|---|---|---|
German | Eugen Helmlé | Anton Voyls Fortgang | 1986 |
Italian | Piero Falchetta | La scomparsa | 1995 |
Spanish | Hermes Salceda | El secuestro | 1997 |
Swedish | Sture Pyk | Försvinna | 2000 |
Russian | Ales Astashonok-Zhgirovsky | Исчезновение [Ischeznovenie] | 2001 |
Russian | Valeriy Kislov | Исчезание [Ischezanie] | 2005 |
Turkish | Cemal Yardımcı | Kayboluş | 2006 |
Dutch | Guido van de Wiel | 't Manco | 2009 |
Romanian | Serban Foarta | Disparitia | 2010 |
Japanese | Shuichiro Shiotsuka | 煙滅 [Emmetsu] | 2010 |
Croatian | Vanda Mikšić | Ispario | 2012 |
Portuguese | José Roberto "Zéfere" Andrades Féres | O Sumiço | 2016 |
Catalan | Adrià Pujol Cruells | L'eclipsi | 2017 |
Polish | René Koelblen and Stanisław Waszak | Zniknięcia | 2022 |
Finnish | Ville Keynäs | Häviäminen | 2023 |
A Void's plot follows a group of individuals looking for a missing companion, Anton Vowl. It is in part a parody of noir and horror fiction, with many stylistic tricks, gags, plot twists, and a grim conclusion. On many occasions it implicitly talks about its own lipogrammatic limitation, highlighting its unusual syntax. A Void's protagonists finally work out which symbol is missing, but find it a hazardous topic to discuss, as any who try to bypass this story's constraint risk fatal injury. Philip Howard, writing a lipogrammatic appraisal of A Void in his column Lost Words, said: "This is a story chock-full of plots and sub-plots, of loops within loops, of trails in pursuit of trails, all of which allow its author an opportunity to display his customary virtuosity as an avant-gardist magician, acrobat and clown."
Both of Georges Perec's parents perished in World War II: his father as a soldier and his mother in the Holocaust. He was brought up by his aunt and uncle after surviving the war. Warren Motte interprets the absence of the letter e in the book as a metaphor for Perec's own sense of loss and incompleteness: [6]
The absence of a sign is always the sign of an absence, and the absence of the E in A Void announces a broader, cannily coded discourse on loss, catastrophe, and mourning. Perec cannot say the words père ["father"], mère ["mother"], parents ["parents"], famille ["family"] in his novel, nor can he write the name Georges Perec. In short, each "void" in the novel is abundantly furnished with meaning, and each points toward the existential void that Perec grappled with throughout his youth and early adulthood. A strange and compelling parable of survival becomes apparent in the novel, too, if one is willing to reflect on the struggles of a Holocaust orphan trying to make sense out of absence, and those of a young writer who has chosen to do without the letter that is the beginning and end of écriture ["writing"].
Georges Perec was a French novelist, filmmaker, documentalist, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. His father died as a soldier early in the Second World War and his mother was killed in the Holocaust. Many of his works deal with absence, loss, and identity, often through word play.
A lipogram is a kind of constrained writing or word game consisting of writing paragraphs or longer works in which a particular letter or group of letters is avoided. Extended Ancient Greek texts avoiding the letter sigma are the earliest examples of lipograms.
Constrained writing is a literary technique in which the writer is bound by some condition that forbids certain things or imposes a pattern.
Oulipo is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works using constrained writing techniques. It was founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais. Other notable members have included novelists Georges Perec and Italo Calvino, poets Oskar Pastior and Jean Lescure, and poet/mathematician Jacques Roubaud.
Life: A User's Manual is Georges Perec's most famous novel, published in 1978, first translated into English by David Bellos in 1987. Its title page describes it as "novels", in the plural, the reasons for which become apparent on reading. Some critics have cited the work as an example of postmodern fiction, but Perec preferred to avoid labels and his only long-term affiliation with any movement was with the Oulipo or OUvroir de LIttérature POtentielle.
Gadsby is a 1939 novel by Ernest Vincent Wright, written without words that contain the letter E, the most common letter in English. A work that deliberately avoids certain letters is known as a lipogram. The plot revolves around the dying fictional city of Branton Hills, which is revitalized as a result of the efforts of protagonist John Gadsby and a youth organizer.
Harry Mathews was an American writer, the author of various novels, volumes of poetry and short fiction, and essays. Mathews was also a translator of the French language.
Gilbert Adair was a Scottish novelist, poet, film critic, and journalist. He was critically most famous for the "fiendish" translation of Georges Perec's postmodern novel A Void, in which the letter e is not used, but was more widely known for the films adapted from his novels, including Love and Death on Long Island (1997) and The Dreamers (2003).
David Bellos is a British academic, translator and biographer. He is the Meredith Howland Pyne professor of French and comparative literature at Princeton University in the United States, and was director of its translation and intercultural communication programme from 2007 to 2019.
Hervé Le Tellier is a French writer and linguist, and a member of the international literary group Oulipo. He is its fourth president. Other notable members have included Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Jacques Roubaud, Jean Lescure and Harry Mathews. He won the 2020 Prix Goncourt for The Anomaly.
The Scott Moncrieff Prize, established in 1965, and named after the translator C. K. Scott Moncrieff, is an annual £2,000 literary prize for French to English translation, awarded to one or more translators every year for a full-length work deemed by the Translators Association to have "literary merit". The Prizes is currently sponsored by the Institut Français du Royaume Uni. Only translations first published in the United Kingdom are considered for the accolade.
Ian Monk is a British writer and translator, based somewhere in France.
The Czar's Madman is a 1978 novel by Estonian writer Jaan Kross.
Piero Falchetta is an Italian cartographer, writer and translator. He is head of the department of ancient maps at the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice and a specialist of medieval travel writing, history of cartography and history of navigation. He currently lives in his native Venice. One of his most recent contributions to medieval cartography is a critical edition of Fra Mauro's World Map, published in 2006. Recent contributions to the history of navigation are the essays on Michael of Rhodes' nautical writings, and the edition of Benedetto Cotrugli's treatise De navigatione (1464–65). He is also the author of literary essays and translations. His most notable translation is La scomparsa (1995) Italian translation on Georges Perec's lipogrammatic novel La disparition (1969), which was awarded the 1996 Leone Traverso debut prize in the Monselice Literary Prize.
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