User:Nadiners/ Typographical Hallucinations
Cybernetics and Ghosts
One Thousand Billion Poems
One Thousand Billion poems is a set of 10 sonnets published in 1961 by Raymond Queneau. Each sonnet has the same rhyme scheme and each scheme is grammatically correct, any line can be combined with any from the 9 others. So that makes; 1014 which equals to a hundred thousand billion different poems. It could take roughly a hundred and forty million years to read, if read 24 hours a day consecutively.
The printed version’s design of lines slit into thin strips, is not easy to manipulate. So the reader is more inclined to read the sonnets that are naturally paired and that do in fact follow the same subject and make sense. A digital version pushes the idea of giving true randomness to these poems. The first digital version was programmed in 1975 by Paul Braffort, making the work more easily accessible.
This poem led to the founding of the OULIPO (ouvroir de literature potentielle/workshop of potential literature) in 1960 with François Le Lionnais, a mathematician, there they experimented with mathematics’ role within literature.
There have been 3 attempts to translate this to English: John Crombie, Stanley Chapman and Beverley Charles Rowe.