Perec & Benabou

Like many of the other readings, Benabou's piece helped me to better understand why Perec wrote A Void. In class on Monday it was very interesting reading the mid-term paper versus the version that had been translated into other languages and back to english. There were a few sentences that were similar but many that were very different. Reading the two versions really gave a good example of how a translated work can lose it's value. This made me think of Perec's book because it too was translated into English. I thought that maybe the reason the book was hard to follow for awhile was because it was translated and there aren't always words that mean the same in two languages, not to mention the translated word had to be without the letter "e." In finishing A Void I would have to say the book ended up being better than I thought it would - there were twists and turns and in the end everything was pulled together. A point Benabou made that I found to be very interesting was when he said constraints allow for further literary expression. This is something that is hard for me to understand. How could a constraint actually free you? Hopefully we will discuss this in class on Wednesday, I'm interested in how this could be.