In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• Paul Griffiths's let me tell you, Hamlet, and the Intertextual Mode of Literary Adaptation
• Hannibal Hamlin (bio)

Paul Griffths's let me tell you (2008) is a novel written in the first person, in the voice of Ophelia, using only those words assigned to her in Shakespeare's Hamlet. This formal conceit qualifies the work as Oulipian, as most reviewers have noted, though Griffiths has no specific connection with "OuLiPo" (Ouvroir de litérature potentielle), the group founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau and François Le Lionnais to promote bravura experiments in constricting literary forms.¹ Among the most famous works produced by the group are Georges Perec's A Void (La disparation), a 300-page novel that does not use the letter e, and Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (Le città invisibili), a collection of descriptions of fifty-five cities in eleven thematic categories that follows a complex mathematical pattern. Although Queneau described the group sardonically as "rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape," its founding principle is no different than that of any artist who chooses to work in a fixed or constraining form. It is the challenge of creating within constraints that stimulates the imagination (the rat) and, perhaps, results in an enhanced work of art (the escape). Poets writing sestinas or numerological poems, and composers fashioning music based on the golden ratio or the ragas of Indian classical music, have for centuries been Oulipians avant la lettre.

What distinguishes Griffiths's novel from many Oulipian experiments, however, is that his conceit is not arbitrarily self-imposed but essential to [End Page 57] what he is trying to tell us. Some Oulipian forms result in almost Dadaist nonsense, like those following the pattern "N + 7," taking an existing piece of writing and replacing every noun in it with the seventh noun following it in a dictionary. In let me tell you, while Griffiths struggles to make meaning with a vocabulary of only 483 words, his struggle mirrors Ophelia's to find the words to tell her story; she is aware, on some level, that the words she speaks are not her own, and that finding the right words is a challenge that may be beyond her. In some ways, her dilemma is a peculiar version of David Copperfield's, who wonders at the beginning of his narrative "whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by another."² Like Tom Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, moreover, Ophelia is already, as everyone knows, a supporting player in the story of Hamlet. Stoppard's characters cannot finally escape the parts that have been written for them (either by Shakespeare or Stoppard), but Griffiths's Ophelia, remarkably, may end up choosing a different path than was set down for her. The mind-bending irony is that if she does achieve this, she is still doing it in Shakespeare's language, which is perhaps itself a commentary on the intricate interrelationship of formal constraint and imaginative originality at the heart of Oulipo.³

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let me tell you is in some sense a prequel to Hamlet, in that the events Ophelia describes seem to take place before the beginning of Shakespeare's plot. She describes her childhood with her father, mother, brother, and a maid to whom she is especially close. Polonius and Laertes are familiar from Hamlet, though neither can be named, since Ophelia does not speak their names in the play. She doesn't speak her own name either, so Griffiths gives her a family nickname, "O."⁴ Shakespeare makes no mention of her mother, so Griffiths could have given her a name (Rosemary?), but to maintain the same sense of distance and abstraction, perhaps, O usually calls her "she" or "her" (her brother calls her May-May at one point, but this sounds like a childhood nickname). O's narrative also includes [King Hamlet] and [Queen Gertrude], their son [Hamlet], and the King's brother [Claudius], who becomes king and marries [Gertrude] after his brother's death, as we know from Hamlet.⁵ The cast of characters is filled out...

中文翻译：

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保罗·格里菲斯的《让我告诉你，哈姆雷特》和文学改编的互文模式

以下是内容的简短摘录，以代替摘要：

• 保罗·格里菲斯的《让我告诉你，哈姆雷特》和文学改编的互文模式
• 汉尼拔·哈姆林（简介）

保罗·格里夫斯的《让我告诉你》（2008）是一部以第一人称写成的小说，由奥菲莉亚配音，只使用了莎士比亚的《哈姆雷特》中为她指定的词语。正如大多数评论家所指出的那样，这种形式上的自负使这部作品符合 Oulipian 的标准，尽管格里菲斯与“OuLiPo”（ Ouvroir de litérature potentielle ）没有具体联系，该组织由Raymond Queneau 和 François Le Lionnais 于 1960 年创立，旨在促进限制性的勇敢实验。文学形式。¹该团体最著名的作品包括乔治·佩雷克 (Georges Perec) 的《A Void》（《La disparation》），这是一本不使用字母e 的300 页小说，以及伊塔洛·卡尔维诺 (Italo Calvino) 的《看不见的城市》（Le città invisibili）是对 11 个主题类别的 55 个城市的描述的集合，遵循复杂的数学模式。尽管格诺讽刺地将该团体描述为“建造迷宫并计划逃离的老鼠”，但其创立原则与任何选择以固定或受约束的形式进行创作的艺术家的原则没有什么不同。正是在限制条件下进行创作的挑战激发了想象力（老鼠），并且也许会产生增强的艺术作品（逃脱）。几个世纪以来，写诗句或数字诗的诗人，以及根据黄金比例或印度古典音乐的拉格创作音乐的作曲家，一直都是 Oulipians avant la lettertre。

然而，格里菲斯的小说与许多欧利皮斯实验的区别在于，他的自负不是任意强加的，而是对他试图告诉我们的内容至关重要[结束第57页] 。一些 Oulipian 形式几乎导致了达达主义的废话，例如那些遵循“N + 7”模式的形式，采用现有的文章并用字典中紧随其后的第七个名词替换其中的每个名词。让我告诉你格里菲斯 (Griffiths) 努力用仅有 483 个单词的词汇来表达意义，而他的努力也反映了奥菲莉亚 (Ophelia) 寻找词语来讲述她的故事的努力；在某种程度上，她意识到她所说的话不是她自己的，找到正确的话语是一个可能超出她能力范围的挑战。在某些方面，她的困境是大卫·科波菲尔的困境的一个特殊版本，大卫·科波菲尔在叙述的开头就想知道“我是否会成为自己生命中的英雄，或者这个位置是否会由另一个人占据。” ²而且，正如汤姆·斯托帕德饰演的罗森克兰兹和吉尔登斯特恩一样，众所周知，奥菲莉亚已经是哈姆雷特故事中的配角了。斯托帕德的角色最终无法逃脱为他们写的角色（无论是莎士比亚还是斯托帕德），但值得注意的是，格里菲斯的奥菲莉亚最终可能会选择一条与为她设定的不同的道路。令人费解的讽刺是，即使她确实实现了这一点，她仍然用莎士比亚的语言来做这件事，这也许本身就是对欧利波核心的形式约束和富有想象力的原创性之间错综复杂的相互关系的评论。³

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让我告诉你，从某种意义上说，这是《哈姆雷特》的前传，因为奥菲莉亚描述的事件似乎发生在莎士比亚情节开始之前。她描述了自己与父亲、母亲、兄弟以及与她关系特别亲密的女仆的童年。波洛尼尔斯和莱尔提斯在《哈姆雷特》中很熟悉，但两人的名字都不能透露，因为奥菲莉亚在剧中没有说出他们的名字。她也不会说出自己的名字，所以格里菲斯给了她一个家族昵称“O”。⁴莎士比亚没有提到她的母亲，所以格里菲斯可以给她起一个名字（罗斯玛丽？），但为了保持同样的距离感和抽象感，也许，O通常称她为“她”或“她的”（她的兄弟称她为“她”）五月-五月，但这听起来像是童年的昵称）。O 的叙述还包括[哈姆雷特国王]和[格特鲁德王后]、他们的儿子[哈姆雷特]以及国王的兄弟[克劳狄斯]，正如我们从《哈姆雷特》中得知的那样，克劳狄斯在他兄弟死后成为国王并与[格特鲁德]结婚。⁵角色阵容已确定...