La Disparition (A Void) Chinese translation?

[kudra]

Here is an entry from wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Void

***

La Disparition (literally, "The Disappearance") is a 300 page French lipogrammatic novel, written in 1969 by Georges Perec, entirely without the letter e, following Oulipo constraints. Its translation into English by Gilbert Adair is entitled A Void.

...

Translations

It was translated into English by Gilbert Adair, with the title A Void, for which he won the Scott Moncrieff Prize in 1995. Another English translation by Ian Monk is titled A Vanishing. The book has also been translated into German (by Eugen Helmés as Anton Voyls Fortgang, 1986), Spanish (El secuestro, 1997), Turkish (by Cemal Yardımcı as Kayboluş) and Swedish (by Sture Pyk as Försvinna, 2000).

All translators have imposed upon themselves a similar lipogrammatic constraint to the original, avoiding the most commonly used letter of the alphabet. This precludes the use of words normally considered essential such as je ("I") and le (masculine "the") in French, and "me" and "the" in English. The Spanish version contains no a, which is the most commonly used letter in that language.

***

What would be the corresponding constraint in a Chinese translation? I can think of a few possible ways to look at this.

1. no use of the most common vowel when transcribed in pinyin

or

2. no use of the most common radical

or

3. no use of the most common sub-symbol (not sure how to express this) in a phonetic part of the characters.

Keep in mind that the frequency of "e" in English text is about 12%-13%. So a corresponding constraint on say radicals, would no use of the most common radical, or most common n radicals whose combined usage totals around 12%. Similarly for the other possible constraints above.

Has this already been done? A chance for some hungry translator to leverage the fame of A Void.

In the book Mr. China, I read about an essay written to show that Mandarin will never go over completely to pinyin. The pinyin read something like "shi shi shi ....shi".

Also amusing is to read some of the amazon.com reviews. The reviewers play similar games.

[zhwj]

Another alternative would be to translate the novel without worrying about the orthographic games - it's a fun mystery in its own right even without the gimmick, although one of the great things that Perec does is to work the absence of the 'e' into the mystery in increasingly self-referential ways. Poetry translations, for example, often drop elements of the original that don't fit well in the target language.

I don't think there are any elements in written Chinese that occupy quite the same position as vowels, relative to frequency and the barrier they prevent to work-arounds. Since it's an orthographic joke, any translation referencing pinyin spelling would have to be written in Pinyin, not character, I'd think.

Of course, it's not impossible to imagine a translator attempting it - Finnegans Wake has been put into Japanese (and there's an unpublished Chinese translation in the hands of a scholar, I've been told).

Also, Zhao Yuanren's 《施氏食狮史》 wasn't aimed at modern Chinese at all - since the story, if read aloud, would be incomprehensible regardless of what writing system it used.