Matthews and Perec

While reading through Matthew's piece,"The Case of the Persevering Maltese: Translation and the Oulipo," I could not help but them back to when I was in France myself and dealing with the translation of the English and French. There was a time when we were eating cotton candy and a french girl said to me, "Do you find your happiness?" I was confused until we had to discuss more what she was asking me. What she was really trying to ask was if I like the cotton candy. There were so many other times when they would try to speak English with me and through their efforts in translation I would just be lost as to what they were saying, and it was quite comical. To think that Perec's piece was not only written in French without the letter E, but then to have it translated, bringing home the same meaning as the french version, all still without using the letter E seems almost impossible to me.