Mots d'heures: gousses, rames: The d'Antin manuscript

by Luis D'Antin Van Rooten

Mots d'Heures : Gousses, Rames - The d'Antin Manuscript

Genres: Poetry, Humor, France, Nonfiction, Linguistics

65 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1967

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first heard of this unique collection while attending on of my linguistics courses in college when our professor recited one of the poems. It was the last class period before the final exam, so to lighten our minds and spirits after a grueling review session our professor recited one of these French poems to provide an entertaining example of what one could do with an intensive knowledge of language and linguistics.

Chacun Gille Houer ne taupe de hile
Tôt-fait, j'appelle au boiteur
Chaque fêle dans un broc, est-ce crosne?
Un Gille qu'aime tant berline à fêtard.

Hearing this read aloud, one gets the impression that they are hearing the familiar nursery rhyme Jack and Jill, just read in a thick French accent. However, the poem works as an actual poem in the original French as well. Brilliant right?

Here’s another:
Reine, reine, gueux éveille.
Gomme à gaine, en horreur, taie.

We hear the familiar ‘Rain, rain, go away…’ rhyme from our childhood, yet according to Van Rooten’s footnote, this translates as
Queen, queen, arouse the rabble
Who use their girdles, horrors, as pillow slips
Silly, but the whole thing is highly amusing and creates a very comical and curious coffee-table book.

There are endless other gems in here. ‘Papa, blague chipe’, ‘Lit-elle messe, moffette, Satan ne te fête’, or ‘ Pis-terre, pis-terre
Pomme qui n'y terre’. It is a bit of a treasure hunt through linguistics, as many of them take a few readings to realize what nursery rhyme it is, but one the rhythm and meter is figured out, many of these are an uncanny representation.

The real fun is Van Rooten’s seriousness to keep to the charade that these are ‘lost’ manuscripts of French poetry from 1788. The brief introduction tells how he received these manuscripts from a dead colleague, etc, and reminded me instantly of Nabokov’s Pale Fire. The poems are all heavily footnoted to point out all the ‘philosophical’ and ‘poetic’ genius of the writer as if he is intending to direct you to the actual French poetry instead of the nursery rhyme joke. Never once does he break character or mention that these are French poems written to sound like nursery rhymes in English. He merely encourages you to read them aloud ‘in the sonorous, measured classic style… these poems then assume a strangely familiar, almost nostalgic, homely quality.’ The footnotes, and especially the Notes on the Type, are all a bit humorous in the way this book is treated like a manuscript of major importance to French literature.

If you can find a copy, and a friend who speaks French well enough if you yourself do not, this book is a great way to kill a few hours laughing and playing with the language to discover the hidden nursery rhyme. It is also quite funny how the translated French is always quite gloomy. These poems are often of death, demons, and debauchery, but all under the cutesy wrappings of Mother Goose.

Noyé l’ami, dans tout sa lippe
Aprés d’alarmants sauts, l’équipe.
En duvet deuil beffroi évêque…
Apprête alors ma sale de teck

(Scornful of life, the friend was drowned
After alarming leaps by the clique.
In downy mourning the bishop’s tower…
Prepare then my room of teak)


4/5

Au revoir!

[Manny · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author, an eminent French scholar, has unearthed some curious, hitherto unknown poems. Their sense is obscure, but he does his best to provide helpful footnotes. Here's how the first one starts:

Un petit d'un petit (1)
S'étonne aux Halles (2)

(1) The inevitable result of a child marriage.

(2) The hero, like many provincials, is astonished by his first glimpse of Paris's famous food market.
_________________________________________

I found a cheap copy yesterday at the flea market and spent half an hour leafing through it. Now I have to see if I can do it too! It's harder than it looks, but here's my first attempt:

C'est s'il y a courbe-requin, mais art (1)
Ours, chaque un mai confit-danse d'île Y (2)
Ô c'est s'il y a amidon en ma nièce (3)
Âme-béguine, jupe-plis, toque en homme (4)

(1) Co-founders of the short-lived "requiniste" school, Professors Simon and Garfunkel argued that population growth curves of sharks and related species could be regarded as works of art. Their one and only exhibition was not, however, a critical success.

(2) The tame bears, who perform their "preserve-dance" every May 1, are one of the main tourist attractions of the Isle of Y.

(3) It is unclear why this feels to the singer as though his niece contains starchy substances.

(4) His soul-mate, a female member of a semi-monastic community, affects a pleated skirt and a man's hat.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most clever, charming, and downright curious books I've ever read -- English nursery rhymes transliterated into French, with extensive footnotes commenting on the (nonsensical) meaning of the French. Example:

Humpty Dumpty becomes...

Un petit d'un petit

and the footnote to that line says "The inevitable result of a child marriage."

I mean, it is just bizarre. Obsessive, even.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

In a life that ran from 1906 to 1973 the remarkable author of this work (Luis d’Antin Van Rooten was in fact his real name) moved in childhood from Mexico to Pennsylvania, then trained and practised as an architect before becoming an actor valued for his proficiency in several European languages. But he had a sense of humour to match his erudition: his final book for instance was entitled The Floriculturist’s Vade-mecum of Exotic and Recondite Plants, Shrubs and Grasses and One Malignant Parasite.

I mention all this because his most famous publication, Mots d’heures, Gousses, Rames (1967), displays pretty much all of his abilities – wordplay, wit, learning, and mischief, all delivered with the deadpan seriousness of a seasoned actor.

I’ve long been keen to discover its contents for myself and so leapt on a secondhand copy during a recent visit to the Hay Festival of Literature & Arts, especially as it was offered at a reasonable price. I suspect you’re curious to know why.

In his foreword to this fully-annotated study of what he calls ‘curious verses’ Van Rooten tells us how he was bequeathed the 18th-century Mots d’heures, what their contents and form suggest as to their ultimate origins, and why one should declaim them “in the sonorous, measured classic style made famous by the Comédie Française” (because they then assume “a strangely familiar, almost nostalgic, homely quality”). And this proves the best way to appreciate the forty fragmentary epigrams published here.

The most renowned of these mots d’heures is the first. It begins Un petit d’un petit | S’étonne aux Halles; the author explains these references as to the offspring of a child marriage marvelling at the famous Parisian market. Adopting a Comédie Française speaking style the reader would soon find the sounds redolent of the Mother Goose nursery rhyme 'Humpty Dumpty'. Similarly with the second – Eh! dites-le, dites-le, | De quatre et méfie de le – which tortured lines oddly reach the Anglophone ear as ‘Hey diddle diddle, the cat and the fiddle.’

And so it proves with the remaining verses: whether one is reasonably fluent in French or not they have a haunting quality, of childhood dreams dredged from one’s fading memories. One of my favourites and, as it turns out, one of the shortest, concerns a queen who’s advised to arouse the rabble who use their girdles –horrors! – as pillow slips:

'Reine, reine, gueux éveille. | Gomme à gaine, en horreur, taie.' — No. 16

This 1977 edition of the 1967 original is touted as a de luxe version. As well as the foreword and the forty fragments it’s embellished with historic engravings, many from Das Narrenschiff (‘The Ship of Fools’), a long satiric poem by Sebastian Brant published in 1494 with woodcuts by Albrecht Dürer, and others from 18th- and 19th-century chapbooks mostly aimed at young readers. It’s a handsome enough production using an early 18th-century Dutch type called Janson which gives it an appropriately archival air.

As for the scholarly annotations, anyone fond of the footnotes found in Pratchett’s Discworld novels, Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell or Rebecca Kuang’s Babel will relish Van Rooten’s appended elucidations to Chacun Gille, to Et qui rit des curés d’Oc, Lille beau pipe or Papa blague chipe.

Ma Mère l’Oye, whoever she was, would doubtless have approved.

[Kest Schwartzman · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's a funny joke, but really only a funny enough joke for the length of, say, a blog entry at McSweeny's, and not near enough to hold up for a while book. I was hoping that the footnotes would fill in, but really this is just tiresome once you've gotten the punchline.

[Rory Fox · Rating 5 out of 5]

A clever set of rhymes which are portrayed with the deceptive simplicity of being children’s rhymes. But actually under the surface the book presses some serious philosophical questions about the concept of meaning, and how meaning is communicated.

People are familiar with the idea that words and sentences have a (semantic) meaning. And that meaning can be translated between languages.

Here, we have a set of what seems on the surface to be French rhymes. But in reality they are sets of French-looking-words, which convey a meaning in English homophonically, rather than conveying a semantic meaning in French.

It’s a fascinating book which will be of interest to anyone studying concepts of meaning in English or French, and also anyone interested in the deeper questions about the nature of words and meaning.

[Jérôme Bougeault · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am French. I discovered this book in Ireland. My Irish friends told me that they had a book of old French poems and asked me to read them. I started reading these rhymes which, although written in French, did not seem very clear to me. But hey, it was old French, so ... I understood the trickery when my anglophone friends began laughing. De bouque hisse saut un crédit bulle(Hook raises a bubble loan).

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant fun with language

[Cynthia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant and so much fun!

[Marcelo · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most delightful, clever and language-loving books I've read in ages. The author presents a collection of "found" French poems, then writes as if he were a scholar analyzing these bizarre poems, complete with seriously overwrought footnotes. But in reality, they are Mother Goose rhymes transliterated phonetically into French words so that the resulting phrases resemble arcane French poetry.

Ba, ba, black sheep,
Have you any wool

becomes...

Papa, blague chipe
À vieux iniuî houle*

*(Stealing, even in fun, my father, can disturb mature man to unheard-of depths. Note how houle, the swell and stir of the sea, is used in a highly poetic smile.)

Half the fun is figuring out which of the rhymes each "poem" represents. The multilingual play on words is unparalleled. For the linguaphile, a perfect gift!

[Ed Smiley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reine, reine, gueux iveille. Gomme ` gaine, en horreur, taie.
(Queen, queen, arouse the rabble
Who use their girdles, horrors, as
pillow slips.)

This is a parody of "Rain rain go away" from "Mots D'Heures", Gousses: Rames, a book of nonsensical French verse that phonetically sounds like Mother Goose rhymes. So don't try too hard to make sense of it, pillowslips or no.

The book is copiously annotated to provide ersatz-scholarly explanations of these ridiculous parodies. It is pretty funny even if your French abilities, like mine, are limited to 'cafe French'.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love this book. Purporting to be a collection of 40 undiscovered old French verses, this work is actually something else completely. But making the discovery is half the fun, so I won’t give it away here (though the title might). Best read out loud, you don’t have to know French, but it helps if you are familiar with the pronunciation. Each poem is annotated, and it is here that Mots d’Heures becomes a none too subtle dig at the pretentiousness of literary criticism.
Sentus Libri 100 word reviews of overlooked books.

[Linda · Rating 4 out of 5]

A tiny little volume full of silly fun -- and a subtle poke at the scholarly tendency toward stuffiness and overblown style -- for language nerds, readers of serious academic texts, and other pointy-headed types. I stumbled on it in a bookstore many moons ago and found it hysterical.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mother Goose Rhymes, or meaningful French poetry? You decide......

[Clare · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very clever, when you read it aloud it really does sound French!

[Aaron · Rating 3 out of 5]

For those that speak French, this is an absolute riot. For those that don't, it wouldn't make much sense...

[Pam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very clever!