Translating the Oulipo texts implies a double bind: on the one hand, a translator must respect some contraintes; on the other hand, he or she has to comply with the writer’s stylistic and expressive features. I decided to follow two different paths. Investigating the period when these works were translated, I found encouraging data, also supported by the fact that the translations were due to the interest publishers or translators showed in such a difficult task. La vie mode d’emploi by Perec has been translated in 22 languages, but this isn’t impressive considering the importance of the author. But also recent works, like those by Roubaud or Hervé Le Tellier, have re-awakened the publishers’ interest. For example, Assez parlé d’amour (2009) by Hervé Le Tellier was immediately translated into Greek, English, Italian, German and Spanish, and translations into Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese have come out in 2012. But these apparently encouraging data must be compared with the presence of Oulipo in the mass-media. These authors have received little attention in national newspapers, which shows that Oulipo has remained a marginal phenomenon. In fact, Oulipo works are meant for an even more restricted audience; however, some of these works have reached other countries. Later, I focussed on the actions undertaken by the Oulipo group to make their works known to their readers. I first examined the collective actions that show their desire to open themselves up to the reading public at large. After that, I analysed some texts in order to identify the influence that the global literary scene exerted on these authors. The Oulipo’s meant to be an international project from the beginning because of its interdisciplinary, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural features. Its members have been very prolific in the field of translation and, most importantly, foreign writers have joined the group from the very beginning. In recent times Oulipo members have been invited to speak in universities in India, Brasil and Canada, in addition to Europe and the United States. Since January 1996, once a month there is a group reading called “Les jeudis de l’Oulipo”, which offers a mixture of intellectual and recreational events to an initiate audience. Whoever has approached the Oulipo knows how contagious its recreational and cultural activities are. In 1990, during the Caprienigma festival, two scholars of French literature and an engineer founded Oplepo, the Italian counterpart to the French group. Oulipo is present also in the United States, with more and more poetic events, especially since 2001. This global popularity has not passed unnoticed. Vittorio Coletti talked about global literary works as works whose language can be translated easily. But this is not the case with Oulipo authors, for whom wordplay is a central technique. Nevertheless, they are interested in the opportunities offered by interlingual exchanges and they try to use different languages, like deunglish, that is, sentences that can be read in two languages, as in this example: “Jean put dire comment on tape”. But this group activities - short texts presented in public readings - should not be mixed with other, more complex works. In both cases we have individual creations, but the difference lies in their potential: even if the passages read during social meetings are sometimes brilliant, in general they are only exercises, while the works published outside these readings are far more sophisticated. It is this latter type of work which is influenced by globalization. The difference between the early and the later works of Oulipo authors can be found right there. Novels like those of Queneau and Perec, entirely based on verbal acrobatics on the signifier, have become outdated. Working in line with literary trends, as they always did, doesn’t necessarily mean following a fashion passively. They still use calembours, but now they also employ structures based on complex mathematical architectures instead of merely playing on meaning. This is Hervé Le Tellier’s choice in the novel Assez parlé d’amour. This work is set in the contemporary, intellectual Parisian milieu and tells about four forty-year-old characters whose jobs, in one way or another, have to do with words. But the most relevant feature is that the main characters and their co-protagonists follow one another according to the rules of the “abcasio” dominoes, a variety of the game that allow participants to pick up and replace a domino which has already been used. The novel’s structure is based on a match of this unusual game, and that’s why the author doesn’t make use of calembours and doesn’t play on the signifier, which would pose greater translation problems. It is likely that Le Tellier made this choice thinking about the future translations of his work. In any case, he has always liked complex structures, as his first work, Le Voleur de Nostalgie, shows. We can see the same development towards structural complexity in Marcel Benabou. He switches from an extensive use of puns in Porquoi je n’ai écrit aucun de mes livres (1986) to a novel built on multiple levels. Ecrire sur Tamara (2002) is at the same time a love story of two adolescents in Paris during the fifties, a handbook of courtly literature and an “autofictionelle” story about the reasons that led the author to abandon literary studies for history. This investigation should be extended to the works of other authors but these two examples indicate a very clear trend: the perspective of an international audience persuaded some of the authors to choose mathematical structures because they are part of a universal language. In this context playing on the signifier is an additional element, useful though not essential to the comprehension of the text. From the global literary context Oulipo authors have taken the centrality of their novels’ structure, the use of non-geographical spaces, the disintegration of the character, or the construction of the character through language rather than vice versa. However, none of these authors shows that flattening tendency that Stefano Calabrese has noted in novelists who write in weaker novelistic traditions. This depends not only on the fact that they come from France, the centre, according to Pascale Casanova, of the world republic of letters, but also on the use these authors have made of their literary tradition. Some of the things we mentioned above as global are actually not global: the almost obsessive reference to the Western literary tradition that on one hand changes the geographic perspective, while on the other anchors them even more strongly to the idea Western culture, however in an extensive sense. But the West, in spite of its self-styled universality, is only one of the world’s regions.
Lo sperimentalismo di tipo oulipiano nell'epoca della globalizzazione, 2013-06.
Lo sperimentalismo di tipo oulipiano nell'epoca della globalizzazione
Brignoli, Laura
2013-06-01
Abstract
Translating the Oulipo texts implies a double bind: on the one hand, a translator must respect some contraintes; on the other hand, he or she has to comply with the writer’s stylistic and expressive features. I decided to follow two different paths. Investigating the period when these works were translated, I found encouraging data, also supported by the fact that the translations were due to the interest publishers or translators showed in such a difficult task. La vie mode d’emploi by Perec has been translated in 22 languages, but this isn’t impressive considering the importance of the author. But also recent works, like those by Roubaud or Hervé Le Tellier, have re-awakened the publishers’ interest. For example, Assez parlé d’amour (2009) by Hervé Le Tellier was immediately translated into Greek, English, Italian, German and Spanish, and translations into Portuguese, Japanese and Chinese have come out in 2012. But these apparently encouraging data must be compared with the presence of Oulipo in the mass-media. These authors have received little attention in national newspapers, which shows that Oulipo has remained a marginal phenomenon. In fact, Oulipo works are meant for an even more restricted audience; however, some of these works have reached other countries. Later, I focussed on the actions undertaken by the Oulipo group to make their works known to their readers. I first examined the collective actions that show their desire to open themselves up to the reading public at large. After that, I analysed some texts in order to identify the influence that the global literary scene exerted on these authors. The Oulipo’s meant to be an international project from the beginning because of its interdisciplinary, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural features. Its members have been very prolific in the field of translation and, most importantly, foreign writers have joined the group from the very beginning. In recent times Oulipo members have been invited to speak in universities in India, Brasil and Canada, in addition to Europe and the United States. Since January 1996, once a month there is a group reading called “Les jeudis de l’Oulipo”, which offers a mixture of intellectual and recreational events to an initiate audience. Whoever has approached the Oulipo knows how contagious its recreational and cultural activities are. In 1990, during the Caprienigma festival, two scholars of French literature and an engineer founded Oplepo, the Italian counterpart to the French group. Oulipo is present also in the United States, with more and more poetic events, especially since 2001. This global popularity has not passed unnoticed. Vittorio Coletti talked about global literary works as works whose language can be translated easily. But this is not the case with Oulipo authors, for whom wordplay is a central technique. Nevertheless, they are interested in the opportunities offered by interlingual exchanges and they try to use different languages, like deunglish, that is, sentences that can be read in two languages, as in this example: “Jean put dire comment on tape”. But this group activities - short texts presented in public readings - should not be mixed with other, more complex works. In both cases we have individual creations, but the difference lies in their potential: even if the passages read during social meetings are sometimes brilliant, in general they are only exercises, while the works published outside these readings are far more sophisticated. It is this latter type of work which is influenced by globalization. The difference between the early and the later works of Oulipo authors can be found right there. Novels like those of Queneau and Perec, entirely based on verbal acrobatics on the signifier, have become outdated. Working in line with literary trends, as they always did, doesn’t necessarily mean following a fashion passively. They still use calembours, but now they also employ structures based on complex mathematical architectures instead of merely playing on meaning. This is Hervé Le Tellier’s choice in the novel Assez parlé d’amour. This work is set in the contemporary, intellectual Parisian milieu and tells about four forty-year-old characters whose jobs, in one way or another, have to do with words. But the most relevant feature is that the main characters and their co-protagonists follow one another according to the rules of the “abcasio” dominoes, a variety of the game that allow participants to pick up and replace a domino which has already been used. The novel’s structure is based on a match of this unusual game, and that’s why the author doesn’t make use of calembours and doesn’t play on the signifier, which would pose greater translation problems. It is likely that Le Tellier made this choice thinking about the future translations of his work. In any case, he has always liked complex structures, as his first work, Le Voleur de Nostalgie, shows. We can see the same development towards structural complexity in Marcel Benabou. He switches from an extensive use of puns in Porquoi je n’ai écrit aucun de mes livres (1986) to a novel built on multiple levels. Ecrire sur Tamara (2002) is at the same time a love story of two adolescents in Paris during the fifties, a handbook of courtly literature and an “autofictionelle” story about the reasons that led the author to abandon literary studies for history. This investigation should be extended to the works of other authors but these two examples indicate a very clear trend: the perspective of an international audience persuaded some of the authors to choose mathematical structures because they are part of a universal language. In this context playing on the signifier is an additional element, useful though not essential to the comprehension of the text. From the global literary context Oulipo authors have taken the centrality of their novels’ structure, the use of non-geographical spaces, the disintegration of the character, or the construction of the character through language rather than vice versa. However, none of these authors shows that flattening tendency that Stefano Calabrese has noted in novelists who write in weaker novelistic traditions. This depends not only on the fact that they come from France, the centre, according to Pascale Casanova, of the world republic of letters, but also on the use these authors have made of their literary tradition. Some of the things we mentioned above as global are actually not global: the almost obsessive reference to the Western literary tradition that on one hand changes the geographic perspective, while on the other anchors them even more strongly to the idea Western culture, however in an extensive sense. But the West, in spite of its self-styled universality, is only one of the world’s regions.
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