aaah Perec, the OuLiPo man!! :) >>Perec cannot say the words père ["father"], >mère ["mother"], parents ["parents"], famille ["family"] in his novel, >nor can he write the name Georges Perec. In short, each "void" in the >novel is abundantly furnished with meaning, and each points toward the >existential void that Perec [who lost his parents in WW2] grappled with >throughout his youth and early adulthood".
this bit reminded me of Sack's famous musician - the namesake in "The Man who mistook his Wife for a Hat". the musician had a huge difficulty in naming things though he could describe the formal properties of an object in great sophisticated detail. for example when offered a glove, he would describe it as a "continuous surface, infolded on itself with five outpouchings" but just could not name this object as a 'glove'. though interestingly enough when it came to platonic solids, even complex ones like eikosihedron, he had no difficulty at all in naming the object. On Fri, Jun 20, 2008 at 2:57 PM, Rishab Aiyer Ghosh <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Mon, 2008-06-16 at 23:24 +0530, Nishant Shah wrote: > > marvu che" - literally - take a stick and beat you up / beat you to hell. > I > > am hoping that Rushdie actually knew that what he was reporting was a > > corruption and still retained it. > > the narrator is a young boy at that time, and is asked by a marathi mob > if he's marathi, he says no, is he gujju, no, not really, but he > stammers out the bit of gujju he knows... so perfect language is not > assumed :-) > > > P.S. I have no idea why "Betty bought some butter" never occured to me as > a > > vowel oriented 'mouth twister'... probably because it is the tongue that > > stutters over the overlapping sounds of 'b' and 't'. Maybe there is no > such > > thing as a 'mouth twister' :) > > if you just string together vowels, you get a tarzan yell... some > languages (polynesian and related - e.g. hawaiian) have few consonants, > but still don't really use vowels without them! > > on this topic, is anyone else a fan of george perec[1]? now HE must pose > quite a challenge for translators - while english and french both use > 'e' a lot, translating A Void [2] and retaining the meaning while > avoiding words containing the vowel throughout the novel, would have > been tough. no wonder the translator got a prize for it. my favourite > though is life: a users manual [3]. > > pace the previous discussion of post-modernish, perec is an author who > brilliantly, humorously, entertainingly (and often movingly) illustrates > the notion of communicating meaning through form. the literary critic > quoted in wikipedia says about the e-less book: > > "The absence of a sign is always the sign of an absence, and the absence > of the E in A Void announces a broader, cannily coded discourse on loss, > catastrophe, and mourning. Perec cannot say the words père ["father"], > mère ["mother"], parents ["parents"], famille ["family"] in his novel, > nor can he write the name Georges Perec. In short, each "void" in the > novel is abundantly furnished with meaning, and each points toward the > existential void that Perec [who lost his parents in WW2] grappled with > throughout his youth and early adulthood". > > -rishab > > 1. http://www.themodernword.com/scriptorium/perec.html > 2. > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void_(novel)<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void_%28novel%29> > > > -- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - does the frog know it has a latin name? - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
