In 1969, Georges Perec published a three hundred and nineteen-page novel in Paris written entirely without the letter e, which is the most frequent letter in French. It is titled La Disparition, and the plot follows the restriction: the characters search for something that is missing and cannot name it. Perec belonged to Oulipo, the group that explored literature under formal rules, and he had joined two years before publishing it.
Writing like this in French forces you to give up almost the whole basic vocabulary. You cannot use the article le, or les, or verbs in many of their forms, or a legion of ordinary words. Perec pulled off three hundred pages of novel inside that cage. And the trouble starts when someone decides to translate it.
Gilbert Adair did so in English, and his version was published in 1994. The same rule was imposed: not a single e in the entire book. In English, that means being without the, without he, without she, without me, without we, without here, without there, without where, without one, without three, and, with an irony that escaped no one, without the word letter.
The first thing he had to sacrifice was the title. The Disappearance, the natural translation, is full of e's. Adair called it A Void, a void, which keeps the idea of absence and of a gap but does not translate the French word. The protagonist could not keep his name either: in the original he is called Anton Voyl, a surname that sounds like voyelle, French for vowel. Adair renamed him Anton Vowl, which sounds like vowel in English. He did not preserve the form of the name; he preserved its joke.
But the greatest sacrifice, and the one that makes this case more than a mere curiosity, lies in the poems. Perec had included in his novel several recreations of famous French poems, deformed to eliminate the forbidden letter: one by Mallarmé, one by Victor Hugo, three by Baudelaire. Adair did not translate them. He replaced them with English poems: an e-less version of a passage from Shakespeare, another of Shelley's Ozymandias, another by Milton, another by Thomas Hood, and one of Poe's The Raven renamed Black Bird. He changed the entire canon. Where Perec disfigured the poets that any French reader recognises by heart, Adair disfigured those recognised by an English reader. He only kept the recreation of Rimbaud, and for a practical reason: the novel discusses it for pages and he could not replace it without breaking the thread.
Consider what that implies. A translator changed the poems in a novel. He did not translate them badly, he did not adapt them: he put in others, by other authors, from another language, from another tradition. And he did it in order to be faithful. Because what that section of the novel was doing was not saying particular lines, it was showing familiar poems mutilated by the absence of a letter, and that effect only works if the reader recognises what has been mutilated. Translating Baudelaire literally would have preserved the words and destroyed the operation. Swapping him for Shelley preserves the operation and destroys the words.
The Spanish version goes further still, and its decision is the most revealing of all. It was published in 1997 as El secuestro, translated by a team of five, and it does not suppress the e. It suppresses the a, because a is the most frequent letter in Spanish. That is: to be faithful to Perec they gave up the letter Perec eliminated. What they took to be essential was not which letter was missing, but that the missing one should be the commonest in the language being written. And they are right: the point of the restriction does not lie in the e as a sign, it lies in writing without what is most necessary.
There is an anecdote often repeated about this novel, according to which a French critic reviewed it without noticing that the e was missing. I recount it because it circulates, not because I can substantiate it: I have searched for the critic's name, the publication and the date, and there is no way to verify it. It remains a literary legend, of the kind told because they ought to be true.
What this case reveals is what one chooses to preserve when it is impossible to preserve everything. An old formulation in translation studies states that everything that can be said in one language can be said in another, except when the form is an essential part of the message. Here, the form is the entire message. And thus, fidelity is inverted: to be faithful to the text requires betraying its words, because the words were the result of the rule, not the work. The work was the rule.
Adair and the Spanish translators did the same as a musician transposing a score to another key. Not a single note coincides with those of the original, and yet it is the same piece. What is transferred is not the sounds, but the relationships between them. The same occurs with Perec: one does not translate the sentences, one translates the impossibility.
On the open conversation
This text starts from a verified case: Georges Perec's La Disparition (1969), a 319-page novel written without the letter e, and its translations, above all Gilbert Adair's A Void (1994), which kept the restriction in English, and El secuestro (1997), which in Spanish suppressed the a as the most frequent letter in the language. What one chooses to preserve when not everything can be preserved: Adair changed the title and the protagonist's name, and replaced five French poems with five from the English canon, saving the effect at the cost of the words. I distinguish what is verified from what is not: there is no record that he altered the plot, and I have not been able to confirm the much-repeated anecdote about the critic who did not notice the missing letter. If anyone wants to weigh in from translation studies, experimental literature or publishing, the notebook stays open.
Sources
Georges Perec, La disparition, Denoël (col. Les Lettres nouvelles), Paris, 1969, 319 pages (catalogue record of the Bibliothèque nationale de France, which describes it as «un long roman dont la lettre e est totalement absente»). Perec joined Oulipo in 1967.
Gilbert Adair, A Void, Harvill, 1994 (Scott Moncrieff Prize, 1995). Documented changes: the title; Anton Voyl becomes Anton Vowl; and the substitution of five recreations of French poems (Mallarmé, Hugo, and three by Baudelaire) with lipogrammatic versions of Shakespeare, Shelley, Milton, Thomas Hood, and Poe, while retaining the one by Rimbaud, which the novel comments on extensively (study by Samuel B. Garren).
El secuestro, Anagrama, 1997, translation by Marisol Arbués, Mercè Burrel, Marc Parayre, Hermes Salceda, and Regina Vega, which suppresses the a. Esther Morillas, "Traducción y lipograma: Georges Perec y La Disparition" (Centro Virtual Cervantes).
Other versions: German (Anton Voyls Fortgang, Eugen Helmlé, 1986), Italian (La scomparsa, Piero Falchetta, 1995) and Japanese (Emmetsu, Shūichirō Shiotsuka, 2010), the latter with a restriction that cannot be formulated as «without e», because Japanese does not use the Latin alphabet.
The anecdote of the critic who failed to notice the absence of the letter circulates widely, but it has not been possible to locate the original review.