EyeSeas

by Raymond Queneau, Daniela Hurezanu (Translator), Stephen Kessler (Translator)

In the United States, Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) is known mainly for his novel Zazie dans le metro, which was made into a film by Louis Malle, for Exercises in Style, and for being the founder and one of the most important members of the literary movement known as Oulipo. In France and much of Europe Queneau is known for his prolific and wide ranging writings. During his lifetime some eighteen novels, ten volumes of poetry, seven volumes of essays, and countless other published essays and commentaries kept him in public view and continue to do so today as new biographies, symposiums, and critical writings on him appear with regularity. Les Ziaux (Eyeseas) present a bilingual survey of his poems as written from his early Surrealist days of the 1920's through to 1943 and is representative of Queneau's range of poetic voices. As so little of Queneau's poetry has been published in English, we hope this translation will not only fill a serious void but may also help to inspire interest in the poetry of one of the most important French writers of the twentieth-century.

175 pages, Paperback

First published June 25, 2008

About the author

Novelist, poet, and critic Raymond Queneau, was born in Le Havre in 1903, and went to Paris when he was 17. For some time he joined André Breton's Surrealist group, but after only a brief stint he dissociated himself. Now, seeing Queneau's work in retrospect, it seems inevitable. The Surrealists tried to achieve a sort of pure expression from the unconscious, without mediation of the author's self-aware "persona." Queneau's texts, on the contrary, are quite deliberate products of the author's conscious mind, of his memory, and his intentionality.

Although Queneau's novels give an impression of enormous spontaneity, they were in fact painstakingly conceived in every small detail. He even once remarked that he simply could not leave to hazard the task of determining the number of chapters of a book. Talking about his first novel, Le Chiendent (usually translated as The Bark Tree), he pointed out that it had 91 sections, because 91 was the sum of the first 13 numbers, and also the product of two numbers he was particularly fond of: 7 and 13.

Reviews

[Brent Woo · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the mood for “poetry”, this was probably not the right thing to pick up. Big fan of Queneau from his Exercises in Style and The Flight of Icarus; I already know from his other stuff and the Introduction here that a lot of his work is “”“untranslatable”””, a word I normally hate, but for once I’m going to agree that’s a real thing.

A few are earnest and “nice” poems, little reasonable scenes or impressions or ideas depicted with interesting turns of language (The Streetcar Man , The Manille Players, “Days have gone by accompanied by nights”, Robinson), which, whatever, nice. Then there’s my favorite kind—nonsense is probably not the right word—but free associative poems that are pretty much just ungrammatical strings of words and nonwords mashed together (It’s Raining, Materia Garrulans, From the Desert, ”Shadow lengthening”). I love this stuff. We might not be getting the exact impression that Queneau was after in French since these things crucially hang on French word shapes, like

averse averse averse averse..
pluie ô pluie ô pluie ô
parapluie ô parapluie ô paraverse ô

which becomes in English

shower shower shower shower
rain o rain o rain o
umbrella o umbrella o showerella o

so, I mean, you get the idea, that “[a]verse” is replacing the “rain=pluie” part of “parapluie” (cf. parasol), but… it doesn’t quite work in English, since “rain” isn’t present in “umbrella”, and “um-“ doesn’t mean anything. So the word game doesn’t work. The translators clearly lament this upfront for the whole collection in the Introduction, that Queneau presents a bind for the translator.

It gets worse with others. You can tell the main idea is that there’s some fun language game happening but it just doesn’t come through (Don Evans Margy, Loozing Wait).

Glad I had a little capital-S Surrealist poetry experience, but I probably won’t seek more out, at least not in translation.

[Donald · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant, I just wish it was longer!