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This is the translation (from French into English) of George Perec’s famous lipogrammatic novel La Disparition, which contains no letter ‘e’. This is very difficult to do in French. When I removed the e’s from my first Erewhon text, the few fragments in French were harder to de-e than the rest of the text, because so many French words require an e for syntactic or morphological reasons. (For example many verb endings use ‘e’, feminine nouns often end in ‘e’, plurals often require an ‘e’, etc.) Thus making e-less French from a source with e’s requires one to change the literal meaning.

Actually, rewriting without e’s in English also forces one to make changes although perhaps a cleverer person could make fewer changes than I have. For example I changed singulars to plurals, altered verb tenses, and made point-of-view changes (i.e., instead of saying “she thought” I just gave the protagonist’s thoughts.)

—Millie Niss