Hundred Thousand Billion Poems

Raymond Queneau’s A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems or One hundred million million poems (original French title: Cent mille milliards de poèmes), published in 1961 (see 1961 in poetry), is a set of ten sonnets. They are printed on card with each line on a separated strip, like a heads-bodies-and-legs book, a type of children's book with which Queneau was familiar. As all ten sonnets have not just the same rhyme scheme but the same rhyme sounds, any lines from a sonnet can be combined with any from the nine others, so that there are 1014 (= 100,000,000,000,000) different poems. It would take some 200,000,000 years to read them all, even reading twenty-four hours a day. When Queneau ran into trouble while writing the poem(s), he solicited the help of mathematician Francois Le Lionnais, and in the process they initiated Oulipo.[1] The original French version of the book was designed by Robert Massin

Two full translations into English have been published, those by John Crombie and Stanley Chapman.[2] There is also a full translation on the internet by Beverley Charles Rowe that uses the same rhyme sounds.[3]

In 1984 Edition Zweitausendeins in Frankfurt a.M. published a German translation by Ludwig Harig.

In 1997, a French court decision outlawed the publication of the original poem on the Internet, citing the Queneau estate and Gallimard publishing house's exclusive moral right.[4]

See also

References

  1. ↑ "Spineless Books". Spineless Books. Retrieved 2015-11-10.
  2. ↑ "Cent mille milliards de počmes". X42.com. Retrieved 2015-11-10.
  3. ↑ "Queneau Home". Bevrowe.info. Retrieved 2015-11-10.
  4. ↑ Luce Libera, 12 268 millions de poèmes et quelques... De l’immoralité des droits moraux, Multitudes n°5, May 2001 (French)

External links

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