Is That a Fish in Your Ear?

Servile adherence to the ideology of equivalent effect can lead translators a merry dance and give rise to unforeseen effects—if they are seen at all. The investigator at the center of an unfinished “literary thriller” by Georges Perec called “53 Days” is looking into the disappearance of a thriller writer by the name of Serval. He comes across Serval’s last unfinished novel on the writer’s desk and is told by the typist that one chapter of it at least was copied out from another book. The investigator looks more closely at the two texts—Perec gives us the two-page original, which he invented—and notices that some of the words have been changed in the plagiarized version. Oddly, they are all twelve-letter words, and there are twelve of them. He writes them out in capital letters, and they naturally make two word-squares:

LAMENTATIONS RESURRECTION

CALLIGRAPHIE STENOGRAPHIE

SECHECHEVEUX TAILLECRAYON

SACHERMASOCH ROBBEGRILLET

MITRAILLEUSE KALEIDOSCOPE

READERDIGEST HEBDOMADAIRE

CARICATURALE PAROXYSTIQUE

INTEMPORELLE METAPHYSIQUE

FOOTBALLEUSE OCEANOGRAPHE

HAMPTONCOURT CHANDERNAGOR

QUELQUECHOSE JENESAISQUOI

FORTDEFRANCE SALTLAKECITY

The investigator stares at the two lists for a while, but as he can’t see any sense in them, he puts them aside. End of chapter.

One day, when I had already started translating the novel, a graduate student burst into my office in Manchester to ask if I had noticed that the diabolical Perec had actually placed a huge clue in the word list printed in the left-hand column (shown above). Reading one letter per row from top left to bottom right in a diagonal line, you get the name of a mountain massif in southeastern France that is also the first word in the title of a famous novel by Stendhal. I hope you can see. At the time, nobody—not even the editors and publishers of Perec’s posthumous novel—had seen it. Bravo! I said to the student. So what am I supposed to do?

What I did in mindless implementation of the idea of equivalent effect was this: I doctored the English translation of the pseudo-extract to make it include twelve twelve-letter words that, when written out as a list, preserve reference, self-reference, and truth value with respect to Perec’s left-hand column:

LAMENTATIONS

CALLIGRAPHER

FACUPROSETTE

SACHERMASOCH

MORTARBARREL

NEWYORKTIMES

EXORBITANTLY

CRAFTYARTFUL

HUNDREDMETRE

HAMPTONCOURT

CLEARLYGUESS

FORTDEFRANCE

But having replanted the invisible clue, and feeling rather pleased with myself, I went one further and invented a purely fictional list to stand in lieu of the twelve words that Serval had used to mask the original. These words had to fit plausibly into the same places in the plagiarized text, so my choices for List 2 had a retroactive effect on List 1 and consequently on the sentence formulations in the translation of the supposed source. Rome wasn’t built in a day. But because the task was so mind-bendingly tricky I decided to give it a personal point that is not present in the French. Here are the two lists in English:

LAMENTATIONS BENEDICTIONS

CALLIGRAPHER PENCRAFTSMAN

FACUPROSETTE KALEIDOSCOPE

SACHERMASOCH CARLOFRUGONI

MORTARBARREL DEDIONBOUTON

NEWYORKTIMES SMITHSWEEKLY

EXORBITANTLY TOOEVIDENTLY

CRAFTYARTFUL STUPIDFUTILE

HUNDREDMETRE TRAMPOLINING

HAMPTONCOURT TRIPOLITANIA

CLEARLYGUESS ALMOSTINTUIT

FORTDEFRANCE NORTHDETROIT

Is the effect “equivalent,” after all that work? I’m not aware that my simulation of the game Perec played has had any effect on readers at all. Or else the fan mail is twenty years late.

An even more obvious trouble with the idea of an equivalent effect is that there’s no scale available for measuring equivalence. “Effects,” especially holistic impressions left by extended works, can’t be extracted from people and measured against one another. Nor can any one reader give an independent measure of the effects made on her by two language versions of the same text. That’s because a reading of a text always happens in a language—not in between. The distinction between language A and language B is problematic enough, but one thing is sure: there is no linguistic no-man’s-land in the middle, just as there is no midpoint between Dover and Calais where you can stand on the water and look on French and English from the outside at the same time.