Encyclopedia > Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes

  Article Content

Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes

Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes 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. 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.

Two full translations have been published, those by John Crombie and Stanley Chapman (http://x42.com/active/queneau). There is also a full translation on the internet by Beverley Charles Rowe (http://www.bevrowe.info/poems/queneauhome.htm) that uses the same rhyme sounds.



All Wikipedia text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License

 
  Search Encyclopedia

Search over one million articles, find something about almost anything!
 
 
  
  Featured Article
French resistance

... (Companions of France) – group of ex-soldiers formed in Vichy France. Confrerie Notre-Dame[?] Défense de la France[?] - Group of students of Sorbo ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 38.4 ms