Comment by littlestymaar
5 years ago
Likewas, thirty years later George Perec wrote La disparition[1] which is also devoid of the letter "e", and was also translated to multiple languages with similar constraints (with some variants, the Spanish version for instance is written without "a").
In the Perec instance, it's what was called by the Oulipo group (of which he was a part), a Lipogram. Perec wrote a follow-up text in which the only vowel used was e. A Canadian author wrote a suite of five novellas each restricting themselves to a single vowel. In his case, he went through a dictionary by hand and created vocabulary lists for each novella.
I've read the English translation of La disparition and I'd note that (a) the act of translating a Lipogram is kind of its own special challenge (which might be also why the Spanish version chose to omit a instead of e—without e, a wide class of plurals and all third-person forms of to be are lost, although a rules out most feminine nouns) and (2) the writer/translator ends up building a vocabulary of standard circumlocution to avoid the forbidden letter, e.g., “this/that man” in place of “he.”