Fourteen years after Sphinx’s publication, Garréta became the first female member of Oulipo, a French literary collective whose members are known for imposing constraints on their own writing to prompt creativity (the name is a portmanteau of Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, or the Workshop for Potential Literature). Oulipian antics include writing an entire novel without the letter ‘e’; describing the same happening in 99 different ways; and recasting a poem by replacing each noun with another, seven nouns away in the dictionary. A member once described Oulipians as rats who build themselves labyrinths from which to escape, but Garréta’s work feels more political, more intentional, than many other Oulipian works. Instead of creating a constraint and working around it, Sphinx highlights the already limiting nature of language when it comes to matters of gender, and of love.

I talked with Emma Ramadan about the possibilities and limitations of writing without gender.

Stephanie Hayes: So, how did you happen upon and begin translating Sphinx, almost 30 years after it was first published?

Emma Ramadan: A couple of years ago, I read this book written by the youngest (at the time) Oulipo member, Daniel Levin Becker [Many Subtle Channels: In Praise of Potential Literature]. Having just been inducted into the collective, he’d written about its history and its members—and he’d mentioned Sphinx and Anne Garréta. The constraint of Sphinx was so fascinating to me that I was curious to see how it had been put into English. I was searching and searching and finally realized nobody had translated it—which seemed very weird to me, because, at the time, conversations about gender were starting to become more and more prevalent, and the ways we think about gender were starting to loosen up in really interesting ways. Anne had written something so ahead of her time and maybe people weren’t quite ready to talk about what’s in this book 30 years ago, but they’re ready now. People have caught up to her.

Hayes: Reading Sphinx, I found myself constantly searching for clues as to the lovers’ genders, somehow thinking that might help me better understand or, even just picture, them. A*** was particularly slippery and ambivalent, described at having hips “narrow and broad at the same time,” and a “cat-like or divine” body with “musculature seemingly sculpted by Michelangelo.” This made me wonder if Garréta had certain genders in mind when she wrote the characters or not.

Ramadan: I remember asking Anne this once and she kind of gave me this look like, Are you kidding me? She said she wrote these characters to be genderless—and she certainly does things on the page to mess with perceptions of gender. Like, you know how nouns of body parts have genders that match the nouns themselves and not the person they’re attached to? Well, there are two specific scenes I’m thinking of where Garréta has written the description of A*** so that the body parts alternate masculine, feminine, masculine, feminine. Or, she mentions the head, which is feminine in French—la tête—and the rest of the body parts she chooses to mention are all masculine. The way she crafted Sphinx was very purposeful.