Q: Raymond Queneau

Cleanliness

Q is the first letter that wasn’t represented at all in my bookshelves. BUT when I looked at one of the Bloodaxe anthologies I’ve got, I did see a small poem from the French Oulipo artist Raymond Queneau. I’d only known Queneau as a novelist, having been a bit baffled a while back by his book “Zazie in the Metro”. When I researched Queneau, I found that he was also a poet, and that the Carcanet had published his work, translated by the American poet Rachel Galvin. I’m not hugely knowledgeable about the Oulipo movement, but I’m aware that its proponents are interested in the randomness of language and the unreliability of representation, often playing elaborate word games in their creative process and in their work. I was intrigued by Queneau’s book of poetry “A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems”, which is a book of ten sonnets, all with the same rhyme scheme and rhyme sounds. The book is cut up so that each line of each sonnet is separate, so that any line from any sonnet can be combined with any other. This does indeed allow for 10¹⁴ different potential poems in the book. I think it’s a cool concept.

Anyway, today’s poem is Cleanliness, or Propreté. Since I’m aware of Queneau’s mischieviousness with language, I was particularly intrigued by what a translator would have to deal with in a poem, and since I’m extremely proud of my A Level in French, I’m going to do things a bit differently with this essay and consider the act of translation too. You can find Galvin’s English translation here: Queneau Poetry

Propreté/Cleanliness

Translated by Rachel Galvin

In the spirit of language games and play, I think it’s worth riffing on what happens when you put the translation next to the original. Galvin gives us the direct translation ‘Cleanliness’ from ‘Proprete’, but I’m interested in that word ‘propre’ for ‘clean’ in French – it’s an unusual word because if you put it *after* the noun, it means clean, whereas if you put it *before* the noun, it becomes an adverb denoting belonging – my own. So ‘ma chambre propre’ would mean ‘my clean room’, whereas ‘ma propre chambre’ would mean ‘my own room’ (and, presumably ‘ma propre chambre propre’ would mean ‘my own, clean room’). So what’s lost in translation from that word ‘Proprete’ is perhaps the ghost of that sense of ownership, which in a poem about pigeons being evicted from the city, does feel pertinent in terms of who ‘owns’ a city and who doesn’t. What’s also there, as an English speaker looking at the French word, is the word ‘property’, which presumably comes to us via Old French and is related to ‘ownership’. I think Queneau would enjoy some of these quirks and coincidences around the flexibility of language. (By the way, whatever I write here will *not* be a criticism of Galvin’s translation – my French is entry level and I absolutely do not feel the inclination or the authority to make value judgements. I just want to talk about what’s interesting to me.)

Les petits pigeons pleins de fientaisie 		
allaient et venaient survolant Paris 		
donnant a ses murs la couleur exquise 		
du caca aviair couleur un peu grise 		
ne se doutant pas pauvres innocents 		
qu’un piège sournois en bas les attend 		

les voila capturés! 				
ils ne sont pas contents 				

The little pigeons full of whimsicrap
used to come and go flying over Paris
giving its walls an exquisite shade
of avian poop grayish in tint
never suspecting poor innocents
that a devious plot waits for them below

now they are trapped!
they are not happy

That word ‘whimsicrap’ is a fun translation of what Queneau is doing with ‘fientaisie’, which is a kind of playful meld of the verb ‘fienter’ – to crap – with the noun ‘fantasie’ (fantasy). The pigeons are full of crap-fantasies. I think whimsicrap gets to the playfulness both of the birds and of Queneau’s silliness with words. Were there other silly options open? Ingen-poo-ity? I-merde-gination? Probably not as good.

So it’s a poem about celebrating pigeon shit, at length, which feels to me very on-brand for a certain type of mid-20^th century French intellectual avant-garde humour. (Is that ok to say? It’s not necessarily a criticism, I myself am as puerile as the next man.) But it also immediately feels that it’s a poem about Paris, and about how a city can be a place for the ugly and disregarded, and that there can be something beautiful in that ugliness, too. The pigeon-shit is *part* of Paris’ walls and gives them its ‘exquisite shade’.

I think it’s clear what’s going on in the poem – the pigeons are somehow being corralled and trapped so they can be evicted from the city. I looked into this and found a New York Times article from the early 1960s (this poem is from the 50s) which described how Paris had ‘deported’ 150,000 pigeons to the countryside that year using nets fired out of hand cannons. So I’m imagining that may have been a fairly common sight on the streets of Paris? And that’s what I’m imagining the ‘devious plot’ against the ‘poor innocents’ is. We have a jocular tone that seems to be pretending to care about the pigeons, but that interestingly that doesn’t necessarily stop us *from* caring about the pigeons.

adieu Paris! Adieu ma belle ville 			
dit le pigeon embarqué pour les champs 	
je ne fienterai plus sur ton Hotel de Ville 		
je ne fienterai plus sur tes fiers monuments 	
quelle tristesse, en y pensant je pleure,		
de gaspiller un si bon excrement 		
qui aurait pu beurre sur les demeures 		
de ma ville natale en ronger le ciment 		
la brique le béton le marbre la meuliere	

adieu Paris! adieu my beautiful city
says the pigeon sent off to the country
I will no longer crap on your Hotel de Ville
I will no longer crap on your proud monuments
such sadness, I weep to think of it,
to waste such fine excrement
which could have buttered the homes
of my native city eating away at the cement
brick concrete marble flint

My favourite thing in this section is the notion of the pigeon excrement ‘buttering’ the homes of Paris. I love the surprise of that metaphorical use of the verb, and it continues this playful meditation on the way in which a big city is this mixture of the high and the low. I like that the pigeon shit is again adorning the buildings, this time with the gastronomic imagery of it flavouring them, but then it reverses that image with the idea that it’s the ‘butter’ that ‘eats away’ and erodes the supposedly durable brick and rock. The pigeon knows it is an agent of ugliness but is trying to turn that ugliness into beauty.

Again, I think there’s a tension at the heart of the tone. The poem wants to be silly but it also wants to be about belonging. The ‘adieu Paris’ and the way the pigeon ‘weeps’ mixes the tone of silliness and puerility with a genuine lament, and again I suppose it’s worth considering what might be at play here. I feel that the ‘sent off to the country’ evokes wartime evacuation (no pun intended), and there is definitely some pathos in the pigeon’s childlike goodbye to the Hotel de Ville and ‘proud monuments’ of its home.

oui, s’écrie le pigeon, je n’en suis pas peu fier 	
ma chiura est de l’acide au PH virulent 		
adieu mon beau Paris adieu ma chère ville	
je pars pour mon exil dans l’auto des agents	
je garderai toujours au milieu des croquants	
du charme de tes rues l’image indélébile		

yes, cries the pigeon to himself, I am quite proud
my turds are virulent PH acid
adieu my beautiful Paris adieu my dear city
I leave for my exile in a paddy wagon
I will forever retain amidst the hicks
the indelible image of the charm of your streets

The pride in ugliness continues in the last part of the poem where the pigeon’s excrement is turned into something powerful and something to be proud of. The message here seems to be that in getting rid of the pigeons, or in the ‘cleansing’ of the ugly and unclean elements of the city, something powerful and prideworthy is being lost. The imagery of leaving moves from the evacuated child here to the criminal – he leaves in an ‘auto des agents’ which Galvin has rendered colloquially as ‘paddy wagon’. Is there something even more serious than just the pathos of the exiled pigeon, which might come across, certainly in English, in that titular notion of cleanliness and cleansing? Something in the civil removal of undesirables, whatever they might look like?

Maybe there’s a note of hope at the end too. I’m interested in that word ‘croquants’ which again Galvin has chosen to render colloquially as ‘hicks’. I didn’t know this word at all, but it’s probably guessable that its direct translation is ‘crispy’ (think croque monsieur etc). Google says it’s an old slang term for peasants – I guess you can see why the slang works and why it’s pejorative – the hicks living outside of the city who are so mucky they are ‘crispy’ compared to the nice clear sophisticated metropolitans?

So there’s an interesting final image as the pigeon accepts his fate to stay in the countryside among the other rejected elements from the city, but with an ‘indelible’ picture of Paris in his mind. There’s definitely a nostalgic lament there, the lament of the powerless exile, but in that ‘au milieu des croquants’ is there also the seed of solidarity?

Read it again here: Queneau Poetry