“same” possibly mean in such verbal constructions? It is, as in the case of
“interval,” the inherent difference between one same and another that makes
language so mysterious.
some thing black
An examination of Wittgenstein translations thus leads us to the under-
standing that, as David Antin has put it succinctly, Wittgenstein “is not a
poet of the German language or the English language; he is a poet of think-
ing through language,” “a poet of nearly pure cognition.”^18 As such, the
Wittgensteinian language game paves the way for some of the most interest-
ing poetic experiments of our own moment. The French Oulipo, for example,
seems to have exerted as powerful a force in translation as in the original,
even though a lipogram like Georges Perec’s La Disparition (1969), which ex-
cludes the most common of French letters, e, would seem to be entirely “un-
translatable.”^19 Interestingly, the English translation A Void (1995), rendered
brilliantly by Gilbert Adair, has proved to be almost as popular as the origi-
nal, the point being that the central motive and its working out are wholly
translatable, whatever the surface details.
In Oulipo, the essential analogy, as was the case in Wittgenstein, is be-
tween literature and mathematics, speci¤cally with respect to the concept of
con¤guration. As Warren Motte puts it:
One looks for a con¤guration each time one disposes of a ¤nite num-
ber of objects, and one wishes to dispose them according to certain
constraints postulated in advance; Latin squares and ¤nite geometries
are con¤gurations, but so is the arrangement of packages of different
sizes in a drawer that is too small, or the disposition of words or sen-
tences given in advance (on the condition that the given constraints be
suf¤ciently “crafty” for the problem to be real)....
Another way of considering the Oulipian enterprise is as a sustained
attack on the aleatory in literature, a crusade for the maximal motiva-
tion of the literary sign.^20Let us see how this works in practice. In 1986 the French Oulipo mathe-
matician/poet/novelist Jacques Roubaud published a long poetic sequence,
Quelque chose noir, prompted by the tragic death of his young wife, the pho-
tographer Alix Cléo Roubaud. The English translation, made by Rosmarie
Waldrop, was published in 1990 as some thing black.^21 Formally, the sequence
is based on the number nine: there are nine sections, each having nine po-
Wittgenstein on Translation 73