As someone who has a long interest in the Oulipo, and who must admit has read & enjoyed Queneau "exclusively within the frame of the Oulipo", specifically Queneau's "more obviously constraint-driven works (Exercises, A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems)", I really appreciated this guide to Queneau's other works! Thank you.
A major reason I have hesitated to dip into Queneau's other books is the issue of linguistic play: in particular Zazie in the Metro (his most famous novel apart from Exercises) always sounded too bound up in the specifics of French for a translation to be worth it. From your description, I might have the same fear of the Sally Mara books. One answer to this your piece suggests is to first read others—you make a number of them sound quite worthwhile and I will probably start there. Another answer is to trust the translators, which it sounds like you would agree with—referring to "a 4-D chess level of wordplay that took James Patrick Gosling years to wrestle into English" implies that Gosling succeeded! But if you could say more about this—whether, in the end, Queneau's more linguistically-bound books really do carry over in translation—I'd love to hear it.
"A major reason I have hesitated to dip into Queneau's other books is the issue of linguistic play: in particular Zazie in the Metro (his most famous novel apart from Exercises) always sounded too bound up in the specifics of French for a translation to be worth it."
I'm an embarrassed lifelong monolinguist & testify that inventive linguistic play does somehow come across at least as much as Exercises & An Umpty-Zumpty Poems do, unless the translator insists on airbrushing the work into mush. Back in 1989 when I read the Penguin Parallel Texts Italian Short Stories, the piece I instantly fell in love with was Gadda's, despite the editor's warning that it was for advanced students only. It probably does help to know a little teensy background of the original tongue, though -- Wright's ingenious solution to the Icarus-crux improves if you know that French has almost nothing in the way of word-specific stress accent whereas English is a battleground of word, semantic, & metric stresses, thus letting us mentally-undo the mismatch.
(Less forgivably, the first of innumerable disappointments with Francis Ford Coppola came when I realized that he'd taken on The Conversation's script via eye-reading alone & didn't understand until an expensive production was well underway that its central plot point-&-twist could not actually be spoken in American English.)
As someone who has a long interest in the Oulipo, and who must admit has read & enjoyed Queneau "exclusively within the frame of the Oulipo", specifically Queneau's "more obviously constraint-driven works (Exercises, A Hundred Thousand Billion Poems)", I really appreciated this guide to Queneau's other works! Thank you.
A major reason I have hesitated to dip into Queneau's other books is the issue of linguistic play: in particular Zazie in the Metro (his most famous novel apart from Exercises) always sounded too bound up in the specifics of French for a translation to be worth it. From your description, I might have the same fear of the Sally Mara books. One answer to this your piece suggests is to first read others—you make a number of them sound quite worthwhile and I will probably start there. Another answer is to trust the translators, which it sounds like you would agree with—referring to "a 4-D chess level of wordplay that took James Patrick Gosling years to wrestle into English" implies that Gosling succeeded! But if you could say more about this—whether, in the end, Queneau's more linguistically-bound books really do carry over in translation—I'd love to hear it.
"A major reason I have hesitated to dip into Queneau's other books is the issue of linguistic play: in particular Zazie in the Metro (his most famous novel apart from Exercises) always sounded too bound up in the specifics of French for a translation to be worth it."
I'm an embarrassed lifelong monolinguist & testify that inventive linguistic play does somehow come across at least as much as Exercises & An Umpty-Zumpty Poems do, unless the translator insists on airbrushing the work into mush. Back in 1989 when I read the Penguin Parallel Texts Italian Short Stories, the piece I instantly fell in love with was Gadda's, despite the editor's warning that it was for advanced students only. It probably does help to know a little teensy background of the original tongue, though -- Wright's ingenious solution to the Icarus-crux improves if you know that French has almost nothing in the way of word-specific stress accent whereas English is a battleground of word, semantic, & metric stresses, thus letting us mentally-undo the mismatch.
(Less forgivably, the first of innumerable disappointments with Francis Ford Coppola came when I realized that he'd taken on The Conversation's script via eye-reading alone & didn't understand until an expensive production was well underway that its central plot point-&-twist could not actually be spoken in American English.)