ivH: An Alphamath Serial

by Victor Coleman

An Alphamath Serial is a book-length poem composed in the tradition of such precursors as Pythagoras, who taught that number was the essence of all things; Plato, who argued that geometry was the foundation of all knowledge; Leonardo, whose work clearly follows the Renaissance aesthetics of mathematics and the mathematics of aesthetics; Descartes, Pascal, and d'Alembert, who were all both writers and mathematicians; Schopenhauer and Lewis Carroll, and then moderns such as ValŽry and Ezra Pound, who, in his Spirit of Romance, declared that "poetry is a sort of inspired mathematics." And now, in 2012, as the present moment in this literary trajectory, An Alphamath Serial has arrived in the form of a faux transtranslation of Raymond Queneau's 1939 novel Un Rude Hiver!

As Warren Motte points out in his introduction to A Primer of Potential "Oulipian systems of formal constraint are often based on the alphabet. But in many cases, as the reader has undoubtedly begun to suspect, the nature of these constraints is mathematical. At the center is the idea of the essential analogy of mathematics and literature." Thus, apart from the initial constraint of an Internet translation, which provided him with a vocabulary, Coleman further constrains ivH by constructing each poem as eight stanzas of eight lines each (H is the eighth letter of the alphabet) with each line limited to four syllables.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published October 21, 2012

Reviews

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure I understand how this is a "faux translation" of Raymond Queneau's Un rude hiver (translated A Hard Winter)... Is the text derived from Queneau? I suspect I would have enjoyed ivH: An Alphamath Serial more had I known more about the poet's process. As is, I know that the poet took a numerical approach to the poem's composition, "in the tradition of Pythagoras", and I suspect that the text was somehow derived from Queneau's novel. That is all.