Wishes

by Georges Perec, Mara Cologne Wythe-Hall (Translation and Introduction)

“In the beginning was the pun,” Samuel Beckett once wrote. And so it was that Georges Perec brought the good word to his friends and acquaintances on a yearly basis as an expression of his best wishes for the New Year. Wishes gathers together these ten pamphlets of homophonic wordplay that Perec sent out from 1970 until his death in 1982, originally printed at his own expense in limited quantities. This paean to the pun consists of a series of short prose pieces—alternately humorous, enigmatic, banal, and absurd—each concluding with a list of the everyday bits and pieces of language lying at their root. English proverbs, Latin phrases, the names of composers, jazz artists, filmmakers, crime novelists, and book titles are all fodder for Perec’s homophonic translations in which the meaning of words gives way to their sounds, which in turn generate new meanings (and in turn, new texts): John Coltrane turns into an anecdote about a wanderer with severe ring around the collar; Michelangelo Antonioni’s first movie transforms into a prophecy of a murderous holiday; the phrase “All’s well that ends well” becomes a pregnant cow named Alice hailed by a drunk Satan; and Maurice Ravel proves to be a warning against corpses with a predilection for root vegetables.

These texts and their marriage of sound to meaning present a fundamental challenge to any attempt at translation, and bring into stark relief the choices translators are often forced to make in their endeavors. This English edition sidesteps such choices by offering two alternate translations: a traditional one focused on the literal semantic content of Perec’s texts, and another (here termed a “transmogrification”) focused on their formal phonological play.

Wishes presents a relentlessly playful Perec, and demonstrates language’s endless urge to undermine its own meaning: a rebellious phonology where words don’t just make love in the Surrealist tradition, but actually procreate.

Genres: France, French Literature, Short Stories

240 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

Georges Perec was a highly-regarded French novelist, filmmaker, and essayist. He was a member of the Oulipo group. Many of his novels and essays abound with experimental wordplay, lists, and attempts at classification, and they are usually tinged with melancholy.

Born in a working-class district of Paris, Perec was the only son of Icek Judko and Cyrla (Schulewicz) Peretz, Polish Jews who had emigrated to France in the 1920s. He was a distant relative of the Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz.

Perec's first novel, Les Choses (Things: A Story of the Sixties) was awarded the Prix Renaudot in 1965.

In 1978, Perec won the prix Médicis for Life: A User's Manual (French title, La Vie mode d'emploi), possibly his best-known work. The 99 chapters of this 600 page piece move like a knight's tour of a chessboard around the room plan of a Paris apartment building, describing the rooms and stairwell and telling the stories of the inhabitants.

Cantatrix Sopranica L. is a spoof scientific paper detailing experiments on the "yelling reaction" provoked in sopranos by pelting them with rotten tomatoes. All the references in the paper are multi-lingual puns and jokes, e.g. "(Karybb et Scyla, 1973)".

Perec is also noted for his constrained writing: his 300-page novel La disparition (1969) is a lipogram, written without ever using the letter "e". It has been translated into English by Gilbert Adair under the title A Void (1994). The silent disappearance of the letter might be considered a metaphor for the Jewish experience during the Second World War. Since the name 'Georges Perec' is full of 'e's, the disappearance of the letter also ensures the author's own 'disappearance'.

His novella Les revenentes (1972) is a complementary univocalic piece in which the letter "e" is the only vowel used. This constraint affects even the title, which would conventionally be spelt Revenantes. An English translation by Ian Monk was published in 1996 as The Exeter Text: Jewels, Secrets, Sex in the collection Three.

It has been remarked by Jacques Roubaud that these two novels draw words from two disjoint sets of the French language, and that a third novel would be possible, made from the words not used so far (those containing both "e" and a vowel other than "e").

W ou le souvenir d'enfance, (W, or, the Memory of Childhood, 1975) is a semi-autobiographical work which is hard to classify. Two alternating narratives make up the volume: one, a fictional outline of a totalitarian island country called "W", patterned partly on life in a concentration camp; and the second, descriptions of childhood. Both merge towards the end when the common theme of the Holocaust is explained.

Perec was a heavy smoker throughout his life, and was diagnosed with lung cancer in 1981. He died the following year in Ivry-sur-Seine at only forty-five-years old. His ashes are held at the columbarium of the Père Lachaise Cemetery.

David Bellos wrote an extensive biography of Perec: Georges Perec: A Life in Words, which won the Académie Goncourt's bourse for biography in 1994.

Reviews

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

G. Perec, that stunning colossus of French letters, was the sort of man who sent his friends privately printed volumes of ingenious homophonic puns to celebrate the fresh annum. In an age when most people can’t muster up enough apathy to send a supermarket salutation to their friends, this volume is a lasting homage to friendship. The pun is one of the hardest of the paronomasias to render, relying on individual syllabic sounds and accents to convey their tittersomeness, so the translator (Mara Cologne Wythe-Hall—a homophonic rendering of Marc Lowenthal) has reproduced Perec’s French originals alongside literal meanings, and “transmogrified” them for entertainment purposes. For the French speaker, twofold pleasures await, for the monoglot, the English material is more inclined to make mirth on one’s mouth. The homophonic topics range from alphabet primers, jazz musicians, auteur directors, Perec’s own works, Queneau’s works, and commonplace phrases, and the precision and wit of the prose setting up each pun is what pleases the most here, not always the puns themselves (although some are a hoot-and-a-half, some are laboured groaners.) Another exceptional addition to the impossible canon of tranlsated Perec. Examples:

For Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura, Lowenthal renders: “Let the cunnilungus games begin!” The crowd cheered. The homophonic version: Love-Vent Chew. Rah! For Perec’s La Disparition: She was accompanied by a man wearing a beret who was wielding a tome of Sartre in one hand, and a baguette in the other. I asked my friend who he was. My friend rolled his eyes: And the pun: Lady’s Parisian.

[Jeroen Vandenbossche · Rating 2 out of 5]

Lisant ces petits textes de circonstance que Perec écrivait chaque année à l’attention de ses proches, je me demandais si vraiment ils méritaient d’être publiés.

Certes, ils démontrent, une fois de plus, l’inégalable virtuosité linguistique de l’auteur et son sens de l’humour charmant.

En même temps, je ne les ai pas trouvés particulièrement illuminants ou mémorables. Somme toute, ce ne sont que des spielerei privées qui n’ajoutent que peu de choses à l’oeuvre publiée.

Cela dit, j’aurais évidemment été très honoré de recevoir une carte de voeux si originale pour le nouvel an. Peut-être quelqu’un d’entre vous veut tenter le coup? 🙂

[Tosh · Rating 4 out of 5]

Homophonic wordplay is language that plays with the rooted word or expression. The meaning is both what one hears of that word, as well as the spelling and presence of that word. There was no one on this planet like Georges Perec. This late author is perhaps the most playful prose artist to use language. Every year, up to his death, Perec would make and print out a little book to give out to friends, that consist of these homophonic wordplays, that in turn become little narratives or at the very least a joke. Even a bad corny joke!

"Wishes" is a compilation of these homophonic works, that are funny, profound, or just plain surrealistically silly. What I have to imagine is a hellish ride into the French language for a translator, is an enjoyable read into another culture's think pattern. Perec's work overall is always humorous, but there is also another side where he is focused on language and all of its limitations, poetry, expression, and sensuality through its textural meanings that seem endless. A perfect book for a writer, or one who loves to write - because one is thinking of language as they write, and surely Georges Perec is the master who kicked the door open for us to wander in its maze.

[☘Misericordia☘ ⚡ϟ⚡⛈⚡☁ ❇️❤❣]

A prime example of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo. Definitely worth trying!

[Lance Grabmiller · Rating 2 out of 5]

These sorts of word games don't translate well, but the "transmogrifications" are an interesting idea for getting around some of the problems.

[Kathleen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Feels a bit overly clever and forced.