Did you know: A French literary classic contains no ‘e’s

La Disparition (Gallimard, 1969) is one of the most famous novels written by Georges Perec, a French author and member of the Oulipo literary movement, a group of French writers using constrained writing techniques. 

It was translated into around 15 different languages.

The twist is that the 300-page long book does not contain the letter ‘e’, hence its title – translated into English as ‘A Void’. The absence of one or several letters in a text is called a lipogram and translators were eager to follow the same guidelines.

The Spanish version does not contain the letter ‘a’ and the Russian does not contain an ‘o’.

Four English translations have been carried out by authors, all avoiding the use of the letter ‘e’ as well. The most famous translation was done by Gilbert Adair (A Void, The Harvill Press, 1995) for which he won the 1996 Firecracker Alternative Book Award for Fiction.

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Pipped to the press

“I started reading La Disparition and wondered whether it was possible. I tried ten to 20 pages to see if it was and got excited and did it in two months,” said Ian Monk, one of the three other British authors who translated the novel. 

Mr Monk sent his copy to The Harvill Press. They declined to publish it, explaining they had already received Mr Adair’s version weeks before.

Mr Monk’s version of La Disparition, called ‘A Vanishing’, was never published but he later went on to publish some of his French poetry works for the company.

'Disappointing'

He wrote a critique of Adair’s translation following the same rules of omitting the letter ‘e’, calling it ‘disappointing’. It was transcribed in his book Writings for the Oulipo (Make Now Press, 2005).

Monk’s major disappointment with Adair’s translation was that it was a third longer than the original French version.

“Going through A Void, I found so many additions, omissions and just plain mistranslations that I soon had to stop counting,” he wrote.

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Difficulties

Monk gave The Connexion a few examples of some of the things that are easier or more difficult when translating a piece in a different language while respecting the same rules.

“The book is written mostly in the passé simple (past preterite) with a lot of very common verbs with no ‘e’, finishing in ‘a’ or ‘i’. Now, in English of course, the past tense ends with -ed. This makes it difficult,” he said.

Another example was that many of La Disparition’s characters were male because it allows Perec to use the word ‘il’ while ‘elle’ is not allowed.

“In English, you cannot use both ‘he’ and ‘she’,” said Monk.

Monk later translated Les Revenentes, another of Perec’s novels published in 1972, and that only allows the use of the vowel ‘e’. 

This writing constraint is called a monovocalisme, or a univocalic. The title makes a deliberate mistake, a hint at the contents of the book, by writing Revenentes instead of the correct Revenantes.

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The English version is called The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex (Harvill Press; 1996).

This Did you know? story was not written following the same rule though it was briefly considered.