The passage that I chose to compare between “Mauve, the Horizon” and “Mauve Desert” is chapter 5 where Longman is taking a shower. This passage is about the thought process Longman/O’blongman is having while taking a shower. In Mauve the Horizon, Longman has seemingly turned himself into the strong man that he is wishing to become where as in Mauve Desert, O’blongman tends to be in more of a thought process of how he would like to be and what he would do if he were more built.
I feel like the significance of the translation is that it allows the reader to realize what O’blongman would have done in the situation of a fight where as Longman in the original passage already knows how good of a wrestler that he would be if he did have a built figure. The translation makes me reread the original because I feel like the translation is more to the point where as the original keeps you guessing. Comparing the ending of the original and the translation gives me the impression that Longman is more of a respectable character and is late for the day (hence the stubble) where as in the translation, O’blongman has a beard and it gives me the impression that O’blongman as a character is much more rough around the edges.

The passage I chose from "Mauve, The Horizon" and "Mauve Desert" comes in the respective 'Chapter Threes' of the books. This passage talks about the time Laure spent around the swimming pool, with the opening lines being "everything is so real around the swimming pool" and "reality imposes itself at the swimming pool". This slight change in syntax brings into question the idea of "reality" and whether or not something can be 'real' in and of itself or whether reality is an external force that acts as an impediment to understanding. Other linguistic changes, like the girls "bobbing their legs in the water" and the same girls "stirring them around" makes the exact same action totally different. "Stirring" implies (mutedly) some kind of purpose behind it; one stirs a pot of soup to evenly distribute the flavor. Bobbing implies a kind of laziness or inertia: an action with no specific intent behind it. What's more, a few different words placed properly can take the focal point of the novel, the desert, and make it disappear completely. In "Mauve Desert", the narrator describes the desert in terms of its shifting hues of mauve and orange and as a place the tourists go to escape the hassle of 'reality'. "Mauve, the Horizon", on the other hand, emphasizes that the desert is the place for the mauve and orange. One narrative emphasizes the color and 'aura' of the place without defining it, while the other uses the place to ground the aura into something tangible. The logical question to ask of this is "Which is more important: the place or the aura". A Zen proverb tells us not to confuse the moon with the finger pointing towards it, so perhaps it is the feeling, and not the place, that has more merit. Brossard's adjustments of the language across these two novellas tell two different stories about the same place and same entities. This is the power of language; it can make a hell of heaven or a heaven of hell.

The passage that really struck me was pgs. 22 & 178. I really loved how the narrators were talking about the preciseness of the desert. The wording of the two passages are quite different but I got a similar impact after re-reading both of them. I felt that the variety of description about the fear of the desert proved the slight difference depending on perspective but yet the characteristics and fear that exists within the desert remained fairly static. The descriptions provide examples of "illustrations" of sharp and "scary" animals and/or attributes of the desert. I found it interesting that different objects found in nature were described maybe another example of observance being dependent on perspective. The emphasis on nature is clear in both paragraphs proving as a theme of the book. I also got a vibe of perfection that comes out of these two passages, showing there is not much surprise in a desert, a kind of it is what it is feeling to it. For me, I found great similarities in these passages despite the change in word choice the impact seemed to be very much the same and for the most part equally effective.