Book Review | The most significant translation book of the spring follows a special rule

Novel

Georges Perec: Disappearance (La Disparition). Finnish Ville Keynäs. Work. 295 pp.

Oh no worries to say without fear of exaggeration that the most remarkable and significant translation book of the spring has been published. French by Georges Perec (1936–1982) novel published in 1969 La Disparition is in Finnish Disappearance.

Its most distinctive feature is its extraordinary way of making: in France, the work lacks the most common vowel e in the French language, and the Finnish work naturally lacks the letter a.

Why the hell, many may ask. The question is quite relevant and needs to be opened.

Perec belongs to a group of writers called OuLiPo, founded in 1960. It is short for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, which means Society of Potential Literature.

The group was born Raymond Queneau (1903–1976) as a result of the sonnet generator and the resulting discussion. An important plot here was the combination of literature and mathematics.

The group is known for its experimental approach to literature. Besides Perec, the group’s most famous members include, for example Marcel Duchamp (1887–1968) and Italo Calvino (1923–1985). The group still exists and its newer members include, for example Daniel Levin Becker (b. 1984) and Anne Garréta (b. 1961).

Oulipo’s membership is forever. According to the rules of the group, you cannot leave it even when you die.

There was a limit the most central concept and effective means of Oulipol’s writing. Writing in Oulipola always requires compliance with one or more rules. At Perec, the most important rule Losing was to write without the most used vowel in the language.

The roots of methodism in the arts can be traced back hundreds of years, but in its current form it became common in the modernist movements of the 20th century. The method of limitation has been used, for example, on the music side in dodecaphony, which was based on Arnold Schoenberg to invent a compositional technique in which all 12 notes of the chromatic scale are used equally.

Methodology divides a lot of opinion. Some cannot understand setting boundaries. Setting boundaries for some creates freedom. On the other hand, not everyone can understand why so many people want to go to the icy rink with cumbersome equipment and even more people want to watch it.

Keyword to understand the limitations and methodology is the potential found in the name of the group of writers. Limitations are used to try to create something new and reach beyond conventions.

Losing the remedy is already so famous that unfortunately it is almost impossible to read the book while blissfully unaware of what is missing. If anyone reading this review can pass that experience on to someone – please do.

Losing methodical and plot patterns have been interpreted in relation to the disappearance of ethnic groups from the cityscape caused by the Holocaust. Perec’s mother was murdered in a concentration camp. Father died earlier in the war. At the time of his mother’s death, Perec was only 6 years old, so the absence marked his life. In addition, mother is mére in French, while father is pére, meaning the words only contain e-vowels.

Losing is rich and colorful character gallery. The character Otto Vokl is introduced first, whose disappearance the other characters begin to figure out. Each one dies and disappears one at a time.

It also turns out that they are related to each other. They each have their own eccentric ways of settling into the world. Here, I see, is the essence of Perec’s prose and what he wants to say.

Perec is a very humane writer. The Holocaust was about hatred and not seeing people as equal. Perec writes against this.

Perec’s too in what is considered the main job Life: In the user manual – which Keynäs has also translated into Finnish – he is interested in the relationship between language and death. He writes about tribes that removed words from their language after members died.

The gallery of characters in that book is also wide and eccentric. The book deals with the lives of the residents of an apartment building. An apartment building is an extremely functional and fascinating metaphor for life and its events.

There are hierarchies in an apartment building; who has lived the longest and where or who has the biggest apartment. At the same time, people often end up living in the same apartment building completely by chance, and their backgrounds can differ significantly.

Experimentalism is not self-serving in Perec’s books and there is no need to focus on it. Gotta see past that. As far as I can see, Perec writes in his books about life’s craziness, coincidences and idiosyncrasies, which none of us, even in an apartment building, are above or below.

The language of Perec is often very humorous and carnivalesque, but the undertone in the text is serious. He also deliberately avoids the use of the most common vowel, which Keynäs repeats successfully in his translation. Passages can be found in the translation along the way.

For example, “easy nakki” is “easy chorizo”, which of course doesn’t work at all as a statement, and that’s exactly why it works and makes me laugh. The word world view is used to talk about world-view. Kidnapping is kidnapping, in Moby Dick, oalso Ähäb instead of Ahab.

Keynäs has undoubtedly had a huge job in the translation, but the Finnish language has also made all the fun possible. You can come up with wonderful equivalents for money in Finnish, like pätäk, and why does anyone even talk about smoking or smoking, when you can say burp.

Losing translation is a natural dialogue in the field of domestic contemporary literature in this millennium. Oulipoliness and experimentalism have resonated strongly in the Finnish literary field in the 21st century, both in art and research.

For example Juri to Joensuu dissertation Methods, experiments, machines – Proceduralism in poetics, literary history and Finnish experimental literature (Poesia, 2012) is a powerful overview of international experimentalism in literature and Finland in relation to it.

In general, in recent years, first-class and international-level experimental literature research has been conducted in Finland. Also for example Laura Piipon and Give it to Helte articles have been part of this dialogue. Disappearance complements this discussion and opens up new streams of potential.

Artistically, there have even been two post-Oulipo groups operating in Finland: Post-Oulipo ry and the Possible Literary Society (MKS). The latter of these published a work of more than 4,000 pages in 2016 Human experiments. A procedural collective novel and Post-Oulipo ry a couple of years after that Teemu Ikonen delivered by An anthology of methodical literature. Ville Keynäs also wrote in that anthology specifically about the challenges of translating Perec.

Disappearance it is worth reading in almost one sitting. The book contains so much surrealism and unintuitive and illogical structures at the sentence and paragraph level that the reading experience must be as uninterrupted as possible.

Although Losing determines a lot of the related methodology, the text is on a completely different level of readability than, for example, the work’s counterpart Les Revenantes (1972), in which Perec allowed only the most common vowel to occur.

Keynäs translated a fragment of the work into Finnish in the cultural magazine Nuoreen Voimaa in 1996 under the title Returnerswhose sentences sound like palindrome prose composed too late at the corner table of a bar in Tampere, where there aren’t even any palindromes in the end.

It would be wrong to say that it doesn’t Losing attraction would also have a lot to do with the charm caused by curiosity. As linguistic novel art, for example Life: Instructions for use is more functional. But Disappearance is the most powerful evidence of the potential of literature in contemporary literature and of what kind of imagination can be realized with language and what kind of thematics can be opened with method instead of plot.