EyeSeas: Selected Poems (Les Ziaux)
In the United States, Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) is known mainly for his novel Zazie dans le metro, which was made into a film by Louis Malle, for Excercises in Style, and for being the founder and one of the most important members of the literary movement known as Oulipo. In France and much of Europe Queneau is known for his prolific and wide ranging writings. During his lifetime some eighteen novels, ten volumes of poetry, seven volumes of essays, and countless other published essays and...
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In the United States, Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) is known mainly for his novel Zazie dans le métro, which was made into a film by Louis Malle; for Exercises in Style; and for being the founder and one of the most important members of the literary movement known as Oulipo. In France and much of Europe, Queneau is known for his prolific and wide-ranging writings. During his lifetime some 18 novels, 10 volumes of poetry, 7 volumes of essays, and countless published writings, commentaries, and reviews kept him in public view (and continue to do so today, as much of his writing is still in print in France) and his reputation as a writer continues to grow with new biographies, critical writings, and anthologies appearing every year. An explorer of linguistics as well as a mathematician, he often combined his love of both subjects such that the essence of his writings resides not in its "content" but in the sounds and the form of the text. He often argued that the real subject of his work is language itself. Because of this many of his novels, and especially his poems, are very difficult to translate into English as they are based upon spoken versus literary French, puns, street slang, and complex variations of wordplay and spelling.Les Ziaux (Eyseas) presents a survey of his poems as written from his early Surrealist days of the 1920s through to 1943 and is representative of Queneau's range of poetic voices. As so little of Queneau's poetry has been published in English we hope this translation will not only fill a serious void but may also help to inspire interest in the poetry of one of the most important French writers of the twentieth century. Bilingual edition.
