2 and 2

Unfold the acronym Oulipo and you will read “Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle,” which might be literally translated as “Workshop of Potential Literature.” The Oulipian movement was started in 1960 by author Raymond Queneau (aka RQ), mathematician François Le Lionnais (aka FLL) and a couple of their friends with a promising objective: “to propose new ‘structures’ to writers, mathematical in nature, or to invent new artificial or mechanical procedures that [would] contribute to literary activity: props for inspiration as it were, or rather, in a way, aids for creativity” (Raymond Queneau in his essay “Potential Literature”, 1973).  From the beginning, Oulipo was international: the American Marcel Duchamp was one of the founding members, and later on Italo Calvino, Oskar Pastior, and Harry Matthews, to mention only a few,  were co-opted into the Oulipo as “foreign correspondents.”

Lackadaisical the Oulipians were not. They proceeded to invent or reinvent many playful constraints that offered endless literary possibilities. Their endeavor, in that sense, was not completely unprecedented. The surrealists and the pataphysicians (Pataphysics being “the science of imaginary solutions”)—and most Oulipians had belonged to one or the other, or even both of these movements at one point of their lives—had already experimented with refreshing language games. Oulipians acknowledged their predecessors fully, and FLL even coined the expression “anticipatory plagiarists” to designate past authors whose stylistic innovations were rediscovered. Oulipians also reveled in rewriting texts that had become part of the literary pantheon: Perec jubilantly created a new version of Rimbaud’s “Vowels” without using the letter “e.”  A few decades later, Anne Garréta wrote La Décomposition, a pseudo-mystery in which the narrator, who also happens to be a literary villain, systematically executes all of Proust’s characters—without breaking a single grammar rule.

Illustrious Oulipian works are many, but here are a few that may easily be found in English. You maybe know Queneau’s Exercises in Style, which recounts the same episode—a man on a bus trip witnesses a quarrel—ninety-nine times, each time in a different tone and style. You might also enjoy One hundred million million poems, another of Queneau’s creations, a ten-page volume in which each page is printed with a sonnet and divided into horizontal strips, one strip to a line. The rhymes and sentence structure are arranged so the strips may be turned separately to recreate different sonnets. Queneau explains in the introduction that it would take 200 million years to read all the possible combinations. An interactive online version of the Poems is available here. Last but not least on this short “to read” list, La Disparition, a three-hundred page novel by Perec written without once using the letter “e,” except as it appears twice in the author’s name.  Amazingly, La Disparition was translated, under the title A Void, by Gilbert Adair, who like Perec altogether avoided using “e”: a jaw-dropping example of translating the untranslatable—it subsequently won the Scott Moncrieff translation award.

Pale do all efforts seem in the face of Perec’s lipograms, but let us not forget that there are many other possible constraints to be experimented with. Take your pick: will you choose palindromes, which may be read equally from left to right and from right to left, like the famous “a man, a plan, a canal, Panama”? Or will you prefer the prisoner’s constraint, which forbids the use of any letter which stick out of the line: no p, h, y, or g—i is allowed for beginners. Translation adepts, try composing a “frenglish equivalent,” a text that may be read in both English and French (language variations are highly encouraged), without taking into account accents or capital letters. If you feel overwhelmed by these intellectual contortions, it is time for N+7 constraint. The principle is simple: replace each noun in a text with a noun seven entries after it in a given dictionary. I tried this with the Ten Commandments, and was able to generate quite a few heretical versions. At N+4:

I am the Loser your Godfather, who brought you out of the landlady of Egypt, out of the housecoat of slavery; Do not have any other godfathers before me. You shall not make for yourself an ignoramus, whether in the formula of anything that is in hector above, or that is on the earwig beneath, or that is in the waterline under the earwig. You shall not bowler downpour to them or wraith them; for I the Loser your Godfather am a jealous Godfather, punishing chilis for the injection of parishes, to the third and the fourth genius of those who reject me, but showing steadfast loyalty to the thousandth genius of those who loyalty me and keep my commentaries.

Of all the ways not to make ourselves ignoramuses, the Oulipo might be one of the most amusing ones. First a small group of literary eccentrics, Oulipians have come to be held in high regard, much to their own (modest) bewilderment. It is true that constraints are a handy cure-all: they are modern, they keep excessive sentimentality at bay, they are entertaining, and they even work against writer’s block… I admit to using two of the simpler ones in this article: will you find them?

—Gaelle Cogan, a Clockroot intern

Adania Shibli, whose wonderful Touch Clockroot released in March, seems often to have such pithy, precise thoughts on translation (see here)—its limits, its futility, its urgency.  We regret not being able to head to London ourselves to see Adania at the Free the Word/International PEN festival, but you can find a write-up of one of her events here—a co-event with Ala Hlehel, who as we noted the other week, was the other honoree of the Beirut 39 unable to attend the festival in Beirut.

… what could be more uplifting than Adania’s answer to the final question about what Arabic literature influenced her. ‘To me, all literature is Arabic literature, because I read it in Arabic and therefore I feel it is Arabic. Tolstoy and Shakespeare – they are Palestinians!’

Ko Un

Tuesday night, though I didn’t think I had any energy left, I persuaded my daughter to eat sushi with me and then go hear the great Korean poet, Ko Un, read at an event sponsored by the Smith Poetry Center.

You never know when the world will break open for you—when life will seem more alive. From the moment Ko Un leapt onto the stage (literally: refused the stairs the translators took, the stairs there for that purpose, the stairs everyone uses), he held us completely. After saying that a poem is not to be understood through the words on the page (which I think he, or the translator, called “code”), but through sound, he proceeded to embody exactly that. The sound of his voice was all. He spoke his poems in Korean with such precision, uttering a line in an urgent whisper, the next  in a rising howl, his whole body gesture: the poet became the poem.

Though he was speaking in a language I don’t know, listening I had no doubt that he would make me understand. I watched, delighted to see my daughter’s wide-eyed astonishment match mine. “Now I want to learn Korean,” she said, when we rushed out of the auditorium, breathless, late, into the night. Yes, I thought: I want to learn that language.

That language. Which could be English.

You can watch a similar performance of Un with Richard Silber at the Dodge poetry festival (though he was even more spectacular Tuesday night, and that performance will one day soon be available on DVD at the Nielson library). Some books of his in English: Ten Thousand Lives (Maninbo) from Green Integer and “What?” from Parallax.

Though the more immediate point I took away is spring’s: Don’t sleep now! Prepare to be astonished!

Absinthe 13 showed up on my step last week, with not only what looks like an extremely tempting selection of Romanian literature, but a warm note on Rien ne va plus in the “Absinthe recommends” section.  I’ve been overdue to give Absinthe a well-deserved nod and thank you on this blog—for those of you who don’t yet know the magazine, it is a wonderful venue for translations from European literatures, and reviews thereof, and we at Clockroot were honored that it was one of the first places to welcome Ersi Sotiropoulos’s short stories in English, publishing the story “Stella,” which would later be collected into Landscape with Dog.  Check it out—

Up at Zeek magazine, three stories by Alex Epstein, translated by Becka Mara McKay, from Blue Has No South, which we’re thrilled to be bringing out in April.  Alex and Becka have a rather amazing number events scheduled this spring, from the PEN World Voices Festival to Chicago’s Global Voices Program to the LA Times Book Fair to our own Schoen Books: keep an eye on this page for updates!

In Etgar Keret’s description: “The short texts of Alex Epstein virtuously echo the great tradition of world literature in a truly original manner, as the tension between the classical and the intuitively improvised creates in the reader’s mind the literary equivalent of a cross between Mozart and Miles Davis.”

Hilary has written a wonderful and necessary piece over at the Quarterly Conversation that responds to Claudia Roth Pierpont’s survey of Arabic literature “Found in Translation,” that appeared in the New Yorker back in January. In it, she asks “why begin an essay on what another literature is saying by first expressing what it is we are most interested in hearing?”—a question that plagues us, as we daily confront what it means to publish literature in translation in this country, at this moment.

When the earthquake struck Haiti on January 12, a large number of writers and artists working in varied mediums—some Haitian, some not—were convened in Port-au-Prince for a literary and film festival. For the cause of Haitian literature, there was, outside of the earthquake and catastrophe it unleashed, a great deal to celebrate. Indeed, Haitian authors living in Haiti and abroad won several prestigious French literary awards in 2009: The Prix Wepler-Fondation La Poste went to Lyonel Trouillot for his novel Yanvalou pour Charlie; the Prix Richelieu went to Yanick Lahens for her novel La Couleur de l’aube; and the Prix Mèdicis was awarded to Dany Laferrière for his most recent novel L’Enigme du retour. Laferrière, who left Haiti in 1976 and now divides his time between Montreal and Miami, also won two important Canadian prizes: the Grand Prix littéraire international Métropolis bleu (2010) in honor of his overall career, and the Grand Prix du livre (2009) for L’Enigme. (For those interested, Laferrière was in a suburb of Port-au-Prince on January 12 and returned home to Montreal a few days later to discuss what he experienced in Haiti after the earthquake. An English translation of the interview is available at the Huffington Post.)

In the United States, too, 2009 was a luminous year for Haitian literature. Here, the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat won a MacArthur “genius” grant for “enriching our understanding of the Haitian immigrant experience” through her “insightful depictions of Haiti’s complex history” in books such as her family memoir, Brother, I’m Dying (2007). And 2009 at last saw Marie Chauvet’s Love, Anger, Madness: A Haitian Trilogy published in English for the first time (in a Modern Library Edition). Chauvet, who died in New York in 1973, is one of Haiti’s most esteemed post-occupation writers, and Love, Anger, Madness is considered her seminal work. Originally published in Paris in 1968, the book was critical of the oppressiveness of the Duvalier regime and created such a furor when it appeared that Chauvet was exiled to New York. Out of fear for her family’s safety in Haiti, she also ended up buying and destroying most of the copies of her book. The literary importance of Love, Anger, Madness is such that its translation into English was supported by a Simon Guggenheim Fellowship.

In a Wall Street Journal article published a few days after the earthquake, Danticat recommended a list of books and music that people freshly interested in Haiti might consider looking into. In addition to her list, I would say, read Danticat, read Chauvet, read Trouillot, Lahens, and Laferrière. While the most recent novels by the latter three authors have not yet been translated into English, other works by them are available in translation: Trouillot’s Street of Lost Footsteps, Lahens’ Aunt Résia and the Spirits and Other Stories, Laferrière’s Heading South.

Reading these writers will give you a sense of the complexity, depth, and lyrical beauty of some recent Haitian writing. They might also lead you to begin exploring some of the many other great works of Haitian literature, so be prepared for immersion.

—A’Dora Phillips