This presented certain difficulties for the translator, Emma Ramadan.
Garréta purposely omits any mention of either lover’s gender. The constraint Garréta uses in Sphinx is notable because it is rooted foremost in semantics, which has specific linguistic consequences. For example, Georges Perec’s La Disparition, a novel-length lipogram that doesn’t use the letter E, reflects on themes of loss and incompleteness. At best, they reinvigorate literature as a mode of expression through innovative formal techniques that advance themes of the work. At worst, these constraints are merely a word game, absent of any meaning. Raymond Queneau, founding member of the Oulipo, famously described the group as “Rats who build their own labyrinth from which they try to escape.” Oulipian constraints typically operate on linguistic aspects of writing and result in a kind of linguistic play.
This is a love story between DJ and dancer, between the narrator and A***.Īlthough Sphinx was written prior to Garréta joining the Oulipo, it nevertheless exhibits their approach to writing. Sphinx takes place in afterhours clubs and cabarets-the underbelly of Paris. Its setting is not the literary Paris that comes to mind: cafes filled with artists and intellectuals, evening strolls through wide boulevards. Sphinx by Anne Garréta is a slender novel that tells the tale of two lovers in Paris.
0 kommentar(er)
