So why has it never before been translated into English? Perhaps it’s the lack of polish; perhaps it’s the relative lack of artifice, the vertiginous and sometimes unbecoming absence of the armor Perec so plainly sought in literature. (His biographer, David Bellos, tells us as much in citing Perec’s own reservations about publishing the dreams in French.) But perhaps it’s also because La Boutique Obscure doesn’t fit with certain ideas we’ve come to have about how to read its author. When we speak of constraint around Perec’s work, that is, we tend to imagine sturdy, tangible rules applied at the level of the word or sentence or chapter; we imagine the one-sentence directive of A Void or the 300-page cahier des charges of Life A User’s Manual, but we expect something we can verify. Here, the cahier des charges is no less than Perec’s life; the constraints, such as they are, are perpetually sublimated, subterranean, sometimes literally subliminal.
Take dream no. 84, in which Perec acts in a play attended by a senile maire, a word that translates to “mayor” but sounds like “mother.” This is a pregnant verbal double entendre—as even the crudest biographical sketch will tell you, Perec’s mother disappeared in the early 1940s, most likely at Auschwitz—but is it the product of pure chance, or a canny bit of authorial artifice, or the work of a dreaming brain so attuned to the slippery play of word and sound that it manufactured an entire character out of a homophone? Likewise, in dream no. 28 Perec misattributes a line from La Fontaine, calling it a “Shakespearean proverb.” Human error? Conscious misdirection? Trick of the accomplished trickster’s own mind?
There is no shortage of such puzzles throughout the book, and it seems worth noting here a sampling of the formulations whose cleverness, intentional or otherwise, resisted my attempts to carry the full nuance over into English. There are elegant phraselets such as M. m’aime in no. 58, which I have left as the literal “M. loves me” without hoping to maintain the echo of the M. sound; there are double meanings such as that of the word coupure in no. 83 (and elsewhere), which can gloss as both “press clipping” and “banknote.” There is the quicksand trap of Perec’s crossword clues, which mercifully manifests only twice, both times in dream no. 89. (A serviceable equivalent of the second clue might have been “A Gay who isn’t,” for TALESE.) I should also confess that the lexical trespass of “shellevator” for coquilleobus is mine and mine alone.
A few more procedural notes. Typographical irregularities—errant periods, open parentheses that never close, other such sources of dull anguish—are present in Perec’s original (and if it seems strange to you that a punctuation mark should have as much emotional weight as the word “mother,” I’m frankly not sure what you’re doing reading Perec.) Titles of Perec’s works are given in their English translations, though this should not be construed as a claim that any Perec text in translation is truly equivalent to its original counterpart. For more on those originals, and much more on the circumstances that inspired many of these dreams, I commend to the curious reader Bellos’s Georges Perec: A Life in Words. Finally, I would be remiss in not thanking E.R., N.R., I.M., F.F., and R.D. for their various forms of help in making the preceding just slightly less obscure.
La Boutique Obscure is not a harder book for a translator than A Void, certainly, but neither is it altogether easier: intellectually, at least, it’s much more straightforward to recreate a novel without the letter E than it is to intuit the subconscious logic and illogic of a man who at one point in his life chose to write a novel without the letter E, and was even known to spend an evening here or there eliding it from conversation. But, again, Perec’s value isn’t about straightforwardness: it’s about the work he did to put his self into writing, and the work that we as readers get to do to extract it. In the best of his books, that work goes on well after the translation stops. I hope that’s the case here, and that it’s as much a labor of love for you as it was for me.
Georges Perec, La Boutique Obscure: 124 Dreams
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