The original edition of Life A User’s Manual published in 1987 was a translation of the text of La Vie mode d’emploi (Hachette/P.O.L, 1978) as it appeared in the French paperback edition (Le Livre de poche, 1980 printing), the last state of the text which was seen by Georges Perec before his untimely death in 1982. Over the last twenty years both the original and the English translation have been read, studied, analyzed and picked over by specialists of many different kinds. This twentieth anniversary edition seeks to take account of the corresponding and cumulative effect of these re-readings without making any fundamental stylistic change to the original translation. This is still the same book; my only aim in revising has been to make it less imperfect than it was on first appearance.
New editions of the French text, meticulously prepared by Bernard Magné, corrected minor muffs and misprints in the text and some confusions in the headwords and page references of Perec’s magnificent index. Close readings of the English translation picked up numerous spelling mistakes, particularly in botanical, zoological and mathematical terminology, as well as inverted colophons, erroneous points in Hebrew script, misspelt Greek, incorrect page references in the index, and, most damaging of all, the omission of a whole paragraph in Chapter Ninety-Nine. In British reprintings published in the course of the 1990s some of these errors were corrected (no two UK editions of this book are identical) but American printings have remained unaltered until now. This new edition incorporates all the changes made over the years and brought together in the Twentieth Anniversary edition published by Vintage Classics in London in January 2008. Unlike the British printing, however, this revised American edition has been entirely reset and repaginated; and thanks to meticulous editing by Susan Barba and design and composition by Carl W. Scarbrough, it incorporates many further and probably final improvements.
Two specific issues need to be mentioned. Close study of the French original of Chapter Fifty-One has revealed two irregular lines in the rigidly structured 179-line Compendium that lists the contents of the painting of 11, Rue Simon-Crubellier envisaged by Serge Valène. Nobody was aware of these glitches when I translated the work twenty years ago, and the English version of this Oulipian tour-de-force with its secret message mimics what we all took to be the complete regularity of the French. The status and significance of the anomalous lines in the Compendium have been much discussed, but I am still not convinced that I know what meaning to attach to them. I have therefore not sought to introduce any glitches of my own to what was for me the most exhilarating translation exercise in the whole book.
On the other hand, when doing the original translation I was well aware that Perec had written “left” for “right” (and the reverse) in several places. It was also known then that Perec had a more general difficulty with laterality (he had written about it explicitly in W or The Memory of Childhood, p. 135–36), and along with French specialists I was hesitant to correct mistakes that may have been part of broader patterns of more or less intentional meaning in Perec’s œuvre as a whole. But at that time Perec was entirely unknown in the English-speaking world; there was no guarantee that W or The Memory of Childhood – or any other book of Perec’s – would ever be translated. I therefore yielded to the wise advice of my copy-editor, and sought to avoid provoking new readers into thinking her work or my own had been sloppy: “left” was put “right”, and vice versa, where common sense required it. Now that almost the entirety of Perec’s work is available in English translation, now that Perec is studied with as much care and attention in English as in French, it seems appropriate to restore the original inversions, and to allow readers to make their own sense of Perec’s curious “laterality problem”. Only one of the original corrections has been left in place, in perhaps unconscious allegiance to an original translation to which I remain very attached.
As many readers have noticed, my translation of La Vie mode d’emploi makes liberal use of the principle of compensation: jokes and allusions that lose their point when shifted across the language divide have been replaced by nods and winks of my own; and some almost secret transitions in the text have been enhanced by additional allusions that close readers of the English text might be able to decode. Denounced as exhibitionism in translation (see Méta, 38–3, p. 397–402), these personal decorations of Perec’s text – which include a minute homage to my own children – have been maintained in this new edition. I don’t claim I have achieved a perfect balance between scrupulous respect for the literal text and a proper response to Perec’s invitation to his readers to play along with the games he invents; I just don’t think I could have got the balance any better, and I am sure I never will.
DAVID BELLOS
Princeton, New Jersey
May 25, 2008