David Bellos
Princeton University
Perec and Translation
Résumé
Abstract
Mots-clés
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In the page of acknowledgments at the end of Is That A Fish in Your Ear?
Translation and the Meaning of Everything, I list all the people who provided me with
ideas, information, suggestions, and corrections. Among those names I include that of
Georges Perec. Now it is no secret that I never met Georges Perec, and he certainly never
knew me. What business did I have to put him into a list of colleagues and acquaintances,
as if he were one of my friends? It must seem pretentious, or worse. But I did not include
Perec to make myself seem better connected than I was or ever will be. I did so in order
to thank Georges Perec for the immense service he rendered me, which was no less than
this: he taught me how to write.
Whatever else Oulipo is or may be, it is a fantastic pedagogical tool. It teaches
what writing is, in an indissoluble bond with the means to do it. I don’t mean to refer only
to its celebrated Ateliers d’écriture, nor to the now widespread practice in French schools
of using Oulipian devices to amuse and instruct young people. What I mean is that
Oulipo asks you and invites you to write, as part of the process and product of reading. If
you happen to be a translator, and more specifically a translator of works with Oulipian
features, Oulipo actually teaches you how to do it. Writing A User’s Manual could be the
title of every anthology of Oulipo. It would not be a bad name for Perec’s masterpiece
either.
However, there is a misunderstanding about translation in the Oulipian field that
needs to be laid bare and cleared up. Some of Oulipo’s most famous and fundamental
procedures are frequently labeled or categorized as “translation devices”: the designation
goes back to the early years of Oulipo. But they are not, and I would like to explain why.
The standard example of a “translation device”, exploited by commentators to
such an extent that it has come to irritate many of the Oulipians themselves, is S+7. This
method of transforming a poem or a text into another one that may be even better
presents itself as a mechanical substitution: once you’ve specified the dictionary, laid
down the count, decided which part of speech is to be used in the S role, the procedure is
supposed to involve zero discretion on the part of its practitioner. What it requires is a
slave-like submission to the constraint, which by its own force (and with luck) leads you
to exhilarating, mind-bending or utterly unforeseen results. That’s the official story. We
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know it’s not completely true, because Mathews among others has revealed that the best
part of S+7 is the cheating. Queneau’s La Cimaise et la fraction, to take the most famous
example, must have involved a very flexible notion of “7” or else a concertina-style
dictionary that no one has yet nailed down. However that may be, calling S+7 a
translation procedure necessarily also says something about translation. What it says is
hardly new, but in my view it is profoundly wrong. What is brought into play when you
call S+7 a translation device is not the creative practice of translation, but precisely its
opposite—that idea that translation is a mechanical substitution of the words of one
language by matching terms in some other. It may be your Latin master who was
responsible for giving you that kind of understanding of translation; but elementary
language pedagogy (for which I have the utmost respect, having been a language teacher
for more than forty years) uses thème et version for a specific purpose—as aids to
language acquisition. In reality, word-substitution does not have anything to do with
translation itself, or with writing.
Georges Perec taught me to write in a different sense, and he taught me through
translation. Translation interested him greatly. Not only did he try his hand at it with two
of Harry Mathews’s novels, he also reflected on what kind of an enterprise it was. Let me
quote his words on the subject, made in the last year of his life, on Australian radio, and
in English:
Translating is to impose oneself to produce a text through a constraint which is
represented by the original text. And for me, in a utopian way of thinking, there is
no difference between languages. I would like to know a lot of languages, but
unfortunately it takes too long to practice so I am just able to balbutiate in
English. But it’s very interesting to try to produce the same text when you start
from a different one.1
In the mid-1980s, when I set out to create a readable English companion-piece to
La Vie mode d’emploi, that is how I understood my task too. I knew not a lot about
Georges Perec. But with the help of many people in Paris and elsewhere, I quickly
learned about some of the constraints involved and especially about the wonderful,
dreadful, fearful Chapter 51 with its Great Compendium. I decided that I would not be
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able to translate it in the running order of the book, as if it was just another chapter. So I
set up a special routine. I had to, and I’m very glad I did.
In the mornings, I translated prose. At lunchtime my typist came round to collect
my handwritten pages—for those were days before PCs. She for her part delivered the
previous day’s clean copy, and I spent the early afternoon correcting my mistakes, or at
least some of them. Then I had tea. And between 5 and 7 every day for many weeks, I
prepared myself to translate, and then did effectively translate, 179 lines of French of 60
characters each by 179 lines of English also of 60 characters each.2
To begin with, I thought I would never manage. But I had to. I had a contract and
a schedule, but also, because I had already absorbed, rather hazily but increasingly
profoundly, the real lesson of La Vie mode d’emploi—that nothing is completely
impossible. I squared off a ream of lined paper into 60 blocks, and invented a training
routine. I decided to write about anything at all, as long as I could fit into a line of 60
typographical characters (including spaces). I allowed myself to compose shopping lists,
memos to colleagues and course descriptions in that special form. I wrote in pencil, and
of course I kept rubbing things out. I began to learn a few tricks—contractions,
punctuation marks, ampersands and apostrophes give you some flexibility with the
number of characters in any English expression. Little by little, I got a feel for what could
and could not be said in roughly 60 spaces, and given the malleability of written English,
roughly was good enough, because there are usually ways of stretching or squeezing by a
character or two.
My next task brought me closer to the real task. I sought to identify the 179
passages of Perec’s novel to which the lines of the Compendium refer. That could have
been a very time-consuming task, because Perec has Valène recall some anecdotes that
are told in only half a sentence, and others that are much easier to find because they
summarize a whole chapter or a character that by then I knew well. But my task was
speeded up immensely by what was the very first doctoral dissertation to be completed in
the UK (and probably anywhere in the world), by Michel Guillaume, for it contained a
“map” of all the links from the Compendium to their sources in the other chapters. It then
struck me that if I could write in 60-character lines, and if I knew the story that was being
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encapsulated in a given line of the Compendium, I did not actually need to translate it. I
needed to invent my own capsule of the anecdote, then massage it into the required form,
and then see if it could be massaged further into something closer to Perec’s own version.
The job I was doing every day between tea and the television news was beginning to
seem like fun. I started believing I would get it done.
But then there was the acrostic itself, the “magic letters” that march solemnly
down the page from right to left in three sequences of 60 lines —the last of the third set
which would have begun with an E is of course missing, in the most understated and
elegant self-reference imaginable. In what manner could I represent that in English? The
French key letters, as you know, spell out AME, a word of three letters. There’s no
obvious English word of three letters with a meaning close to it. To translate it in itself I
would have had to invent not 179 but 239 lines encapsulating stories told somewhere in
the novel so that the four letters of SOUL could be made to walk the same walk.
I thought about it quite seriously. By now I was quite adept at writing 60-
character lines. I could have done 60 more. But would that have been a translation? I
think so, myself, now: but I didn’t expect publishers or readers to grant me the right to
expand Perec’s strange poem, especially because I was not going to tell them—certainly
not straight away—what justified the expansion. So you may call me a coward. But good
sense also dictated the cowardice, for the kind of response that critics for the TLS would
most likely have given a 239-line catalogue in lieu of Perec’s 179 could have ditched not
only my reputation but Perec’s too. My intuition was well-founded: the TLS turned out to
be harsh critic of my translation as a whole, without even guessing what had gone on in
Chapter 51.
At this point, scratching my head, I set off for Saarbrücken to get to know Perec’s
German translator, Eugen Helmle. He was the only person to have translated La Vie mode
d’emploi in Perec’s lifetime, and as he was also a good friend of the writer, he had had
privileged information for his work. In fact, Perec had annotated a copy of the novel for
Helmle to use, pointing out various constraints that needed to be respected and others, as
he wrote in the margin, that didn’t matter at all for the German version. Eugen explained
that Perec’s method in composing the acrostic had been not to work through the lines one
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by one, but to write his 60-character capsules first, then shuffle them around until he
could make the order produce the diagonal letter-order he wanted. That was a tactic I
made my own on the spot: to move my own lines into any order if it helped to make the
acrostic work. But that still didn’t solve the problem of a 3-letter AME and a 4-letter soul.
In German it’s even worse—Seele has five letters. What had Helmle done?
He’d used the German word for “I”, namely ICH. It’s only got one letter in
English—but in Latin, as in German, it has exactly three! What’s more, that Latin word
was used by a famous translator, James Strachey, to translate ICH in the works of Freud,
and it had come to have the sense of “selfhood” in ordinary English speech. EGO it
would be! I hopped on the train back to Sheffield with an immense feeling of relief, and
renewed determination.
The friendship and collaboration Helmle offered me as a fellow translator has set
the pattern of relationships between a great many translators of La Vie mode d’emploi
into many languages. Over more than 25 years I have been in fruitful contact with Perec’s
Danish, Norwegian, Swedish, Greek, Turkish and Hebrew translators, and only a few
months ago I sat down in Tartu with Anti Saar, whose Estonian translation of Life A
User’s Manual is due to appear soon. Such camaraderie, which is exceedingly rare in the
world of translators, who almost always work in isolation, is also an Oulipian gift. Oulipo
invites cooperation, because it is in its very conception a cooperative enterprise. Those of
us who only translate it are affected all just as much if not more than other readers by
Oulipo’s blithe and joyful disregard for individual ownership of literary skills. That is
part of what I mean when I say that Perec taught me to write.
In the spring months of 1986 I learned to do something quite useless—to write in
lines of 60 characters. With the help of practice, training, and a couple of key facts
supplied by Helmle, I was able to use that strange facility to produce a parallel poem in
179 lines that does well enough as a substitute for the Great Compendium of Chapter 51
of La Vie mode d’emploi.
Acquiring a useless mastery is very important to a writer: it’s not the utility, it’s
the mastery that counts. I developed mental muscles I didn’t know existed. I had been
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obliged by Georges Perec to improve my control of language by paying strict if simple
attention to its elementary written units.
I- haven’t practiced the skill for a quarter of a century. Do I still have it? My first
answer is to say that it doesn’t matter at all, because what I gained from making myself
“write like Perec” was a sense of my own power over words, and a greater daring to try
other difficult things. I doubt whether I have it any more. But as I recast what was an oral
presentation for publication in print, I can’t quite leave the question open, for myself. So
let me try to repeat one of those training exercises—make just a banal list of things that
happen to be in my mind today— and see if Bellos can still do it:
What the Greeks meant by varvaros was nothing more than dumb
The former professor coming back to Princeton for the soirée
Labrador, alsatian, pekinese or terrier? I’ll have a spaniel
I can hear Ms Sirken playing her grand piano clear as a bell
I wish that curvaceous blonde jogger would stop to say hello
The actresses who played in the two main roles in Les Bonnes
Bernard-Henri Lévy has a facial twitch I can only call a tic
They’ve asked me to give a talk in a desert city called Doha
The pizza we consumed this evening was cooked in a large pan
The therapist who helps husband & wife resolve thorny issues
Driving my girl-friend from the restaurant to a parking spot
There’s a long distance from conjugal dispute to decree nisi
A barista working shifts in Small World Café wearing a shawl
I’ll have 4 ounces of herring in cream and a Portuguese roll
I spend too long puzzle-solving, so as to beat my own record
I’ve never had an X-box or tried to play games like Nintendo
I’ve cycled over Alps and Fens, but never encountered a wadi
I’m about to buy a bright red brand-new airconditioned Smart
Well, that proves it. A lesson learned is never lost!
It’s more important than it seems. The skill that Perec obliged me to acquire now
informs and underlies everything that I write, in lines of any length. I’m convinced that
my experience is not unique: many other people have surely learned as much if not more
from working with Oulipo. That’s why I hope nobody will take exception my thanking
Georges Perec (and through him, Oulipo) as a major contributor to books that I now write
for myself.
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Works cited
David Bellos, Is That A Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything.
London, Particular Books/New York: Faber & Faber, 2011.
Michel Guillaume, A Reading of la Vie mode d’emploi by Georges Perec. Manchester
University, PhD dissertation, 1985.
Georges Perec, Anti Saar, Elu kasutusjuhend. Tallinn: Varrak, forthcoming 2012
Georges Perec, David Bellos, Life A User’s Manual. London: Collins Harvill, 1987
Georges Perec, Entretiens et conférences. Ed. Mireille Ribière et Dominique Bertelli.
Paris: Joseph K., 2005, t. 1
Georges Perec, Eugen Helmle, Das Leben. Gebrauchsanweisung. Frankfurt.a.M.,
Zweitausendeins, 1981.
Georges Perec, La Vie mode d’emploi. Paris: Hachette, 1978.
Oulipo. Créations, Récréations, Re-créations. Gallimard, 1974.
1 http://www.franceculture.com/emission-les-passagers-de-la-nuit-vendredi-hors-serie-27-
–-perec-in-english-what-a-man-2011-05-06.ht. Dernier alinéa, le segment "Hörspiel". La
citation recherchée commence à 2 min 03sec, jusqu'à la fin (app 20 secondes).
2 The writing exercises and preliminary drafts of the English translation of the
Compendium, together with other manuscript and typescript sources for Life A User’s
Manual, can be consulted at the library of the British Centre for Literary Translation at
the University of East Anglia, Norwich, Norfolk, UK. The drafts of my other translations
of works by Georges Perec and others are at the Lilly Library, Bloomington, Indiana.
