Form Has Its Reasons: Translation and Copia

Abstract

Form Has Its Reasons: Translation and Copia Rachel Galvin (bio) The Oulipo has always had a special relationship to translation. A form of translation is embedded in its fundaments, as Oulipians seek to translate elements from the sphere of mathematics into potential literary structures. Raymond Queneau investigated the permutative potential of translation in his Exercises in Style, which tells the same brief, banal tale in ninety-nine distinct fashions. Modeled on a progymnysmata, or handbook of classical rhetoric, the book resembles a translators’ guide to modulating form, from the most subtle to the most radical of phonetic, lexical, syntactical, and tonal gradations. Queneau’s book illustrates Jorge Luis Borges’ assertion that an original, just like its multiple translations, are all simply drafts, and that “Presuponer que toda recombinación de elementos es obligatoriamente inferior a su original, es presuponer que el borrador 9 es obligatoriamente inferior al borrador H—ya que no puede haber sino borradores. El concepto de texto definitivo no corresponde sino a la religión o al cansancio” (“To assume that every recombination of elements is necessarily inferior to its original form is to assume that draft 9 is necessarily inferior to draft H—for there can only be drafts. The concept of the ‘definitive text’ corresponds only to religion or exhaustion”; Borges 69). Exercices de style is composed solely of drafts, with no definitive version of the narrative.2 [End Page 846] We might also say that translation is fundamentally more Oulipian than has been recognized. Borges helps us see that translation is a form of literary production rather than reproduction. This is particularly palpable in the case of constrained literature, since translating constrained texts requires not only following the original constraint to produce a new text in a different language, but also applying the constraints of translation to the preexisting text. Multilingual Oulipians regularly engage in this process. Hervé Le Tellier has made the remarkable declaration that “toute traduction d’une œuvre oulipienne est un exploit et une œuvre oulipienne en soi” (Le Tellier 247). This fascinating claim is worth lingering over, for it proposes a rather radical philosophy of composition. Le Tellier munificently suggests that constrained translation should be honored as an act of origination. The translator is symbolically absorbed back into the very collective she is attempting to ferry across into another linguistic space. The Oulipo thus gathers its translators under its ample skirts, in a conceptual move similar to that of anticipatory plagiarism (plagiat par anticipation). Not only do Oulipians look back to authors who lived long before the Oulipo was founded and name them anticipatory plagiarists of Oulipian methods, but they also look forward to future translators and proleptically adopt them into the Oulipian endeavor. We may detect a potentially aggressive note in this adoption. It allows the Oulipo to spread out, like the Borg, and assimilate its translators into the collective. (Which raises the question: does the translator need to bite back against this subsumption?) Le Tellier’s idea also reconfigures translation, à la Borges, as a draft equal in stature to the original. Primacy loses its meaning and the metaphysics of origin is drained of its power. (By “metaphysics of origin” I refer to the theology of “the new, the creative, the true” that leads to myths about literary originality [Meltzer 6]). The more we examine it, the more radical a theory of translation Le Tellier’s assertion shows itself to be. The claims I make in this essay are pitted against ideas of fidelity and originality. There is no original text to which one must be faithful, as Borges affirmed. I will be arguing that Oulipian constraints often resemble translation techniques; that translation itself is a kind of constraint; and that both entail copia in Jacques Roubaud’s sense (a concept I will detail in a moment). There is a manifest family resemblance between the treatment Roubaud gives Queneau in riffing on him, the translated constrained texts such as A Void, Gilbert Adair’s version of Georges Perec’s La Disparition, and the dizzying number of Oulipian versions, responses, or translations of Perec’s Voyage d’hiver, [End Page 847] for example.3 Since I am grouping texts infrequently...