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
Wheatley Heights, New York

... with no husband present, and 15.9% are non-families. 13.0% of all households are made up of individuals and 5.2% have someone living alone who is 65 years of age ...

 
 
 
This page was created in 37 ms