Читать книгу Revenge of the Translator - Brice Matthieussent - Страница 27

*

* It’s done: no more adjectives and not a single adverb. The result of these surgical strikes? A gain that is genuinely unheard of, truly serendipitous, undeniably stupefying, frankly stupendous, irrefutably spectacular—with this wearisome accumulation I make up for it and prove the efficacy of my ablations. Now, such concision, such levity! I retranscribe here for your curiosity the list of adverbs and adjectives disappeared since the beginning of the second chapter in which we find Abel Prote, “the virile man with green eyes,” who was born in the middle of the century, working alongside Doris, his idiosyncratic secretary (and maybe more):

charming, light brown, pure, shiny, suddenly, vaporous, hooked, sensually, low-cut, becoming, splendid (2 times), formfitting (3 times), tall, thin (2 times), opulent (2 times), oblong, short (4 times), curvaceous, exactly, penetrating (2 times), virile, green (after these last two deletions, we are left with the striking “the man with eyes”), elegant, suggestive, transparent (3 times), lightly, languorous (3 times), violently, catlike, hot (4 times), imperceptibly, softly, luke-warm, slowly (3 times), silky (3 times), alluring, blue, white, red, pulpy, resolute, stubborn (2 times), fat, built, pinkish, very (7 times), smooth, tumescent (3 times), black and pink (2 times), rounded, bulging, luxuriant, lowered, secret, moist (4 times), isolated, inflated (3 times), strong, massive (4 times), burning, concentric (4 times), slow (2 times), rapid (5 times), more and more, open (4 times), perfumed (2 times), marine, spicy, unfastened, smothered, wild (2 times), contained, aerial, purplish, agile (5 times), wet, hard (4 times), powerfully (3 times), frenetic, again (6 times), supple, defective, brusquely, languid, crumpled (2 times), low, tender, little by little, relaxed, dozing, restorative. (Tamperer’s Nosography)