''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 Raymond Queneau (; 21 February 1903 – 25 October 1976) was a French novelist, poet, critic, editor and co-founder and president of Oulipo ('' Ouvroir de littérature potentielle''), notable for his wit and cynical humour. Biography Queneau w ...

, 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 A rhyme scheme is the pattern of rhymes at the end of each line of a poem or song. It is usually referred to by using letters to indicate which lines rhyme; lines designated with the same letter all rhyme with each other. An example of the ABAB r ...

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 A mathematician is someone who uses an extensive knowledge of mathematics in their work, typically to solve mathematical problems. Mathematicians are concerned with numbers, data, quantity, structure, space, models, and change. History On ...

Francois Le Lionnais, and in the process they initiated

Oulipo Oulipo (, short for french: Ouvroir de littérature potentielle; roughly translated: ''"workshop of potential literature"'', stylized ''OuLiPo'') is a loose gathering of (mainly) French-speaking writers and mathematicians who seek to create works ...

. 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. Beverley Charles Rowe's translation, one that uses the same rhyme sounds, has been published online. 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. 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 Moral rights are rights of creators of copyrighted works generally recognized in civil law jurisdictions and, to a lesser extent, in some common law jurisdictions. The moral rights include the right of attribution, the right to have a work pu ...

.Luce Libera
12 268 millions de poèmes et quelques... De l’immoralité des droits moraux
''

Multitudes ''Multitudes'' is a French philosophical, political and artistic monthly journal founded in 2000 by Yann Moulier-Boutang. It is thematically situated in the theoretical framework of the seminal work ''Empire'' by Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt. ...

'' n°5, May 2001

References

External links

An interactive version, web based, in English and French

{{Webarchive, url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130113105538/http://math.child.ru/otdohni/chitalka/TBO/Queneau.htm , date=2013-01-13 1961 poetry books Copyright infringement Intellectual property activism French poetry collections Éditions Gallimard books Oulipian works

See also

References

External links