A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems
1961 book by Raymond Queneau
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A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems or One hundred million million poems (original French title: Cent mille milliards de poèmes) is a book by Raymond Queneau, published in 1961. The book is a set of ten sonnets printed on card with each line on a separate strip. 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, allowing for 1014 (= 100,000,000,000,000) different poems. When Queneau ran into trouble creating the book, he solicited the help of mathematician Francois Le Lionnais, and in the process they initiated Oulipo.[1][2][better source needed]
| |
| Author | Raymond Queneau |
|---|---|
| Original title | Cent mille milliards de poèmes |
| Language | French |
| Genre | Experimental literature, Poetry |
| Published | 1961 |
| Publisher | Gallimard |
| Publication place | France |
| Media type | Print (paper) |
The original French version of the book was designed by Robert Massin. Two full translations into English have been published, those by John Crombie and Stanley Chapman.[3][better source needed] Beverley Charles Rowe's translation, one that uses the same rhyme sounds, has been published online.[4][better source needed] In 1984, Edition Zweitausendeins in Frankfurt published a German translation by Ludwig Harig. In 2002, Moscow ГрантЪ published a Russian translation by Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya.[5]
In 1997, a French court decision outlawed the publication of the original poem on the Internet, citing the Queneau estate and Gallimard publishing house's exclusive moral right.[6]