The firstelected member of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle, or Workshop for Potential Literature), Paul Braffort is a poet, computer scientist,and songwriter. He has published five books in the BibliothèqueOulipienne, as well as numerous textbooks on artificial intelligence andprogramming. Braffort published Mes hypertropes: Vingt-et-un moinsun poèmes a programme in theBibliothèque Oulipienne in 1979. The book pays homage to the other writers who were members of Oulipo at the time throughtwenty interlinked “programmed poems,” which operate according to themathematical theorem (Zeckendorf’s) that any number can be expressed as the sumof two or more Fibonacci numbers. Part of the content in each poem is thus “programmed”by the poems containing those numbers that can be added to make it (forinstance, the 20th poem contains words that appeared in 13, 5, and 2). Thenumbers and arrows on the left-hand side of the page indicate places wherelanguage from a previous poem enters the current one.

With Braffort’sapproval, our project takes a twofold approach to the work, providing directEnglish translations alongside poems of our own: "transversions" thatintersect, re-create, and occasionally subvert the source text, attempting toprovide a window into the somewhat untranslatable nature of such intricate andinventive constraint-based work while also pointing to our own concerns (andinfluences) as contemporary writers. 

Hypertrope 15is dedicated to Michèle Métail (b. 1951), who joined the Oulipo in1975. A scholar of German and Chinese language and literature, her texts drawon the visual and sonic qualities of words, particularly through alliterationand assonance. Métail pioneered the practice of “oral publication,”incorporating slideshows, collages, and images into her readings, for which thetext serves as a score that only takes shape in performance. Although shedistanced herself from the Oulipo after 1998, she continues to explorepermutation and linguistic play. In 2003 she published a series of Huiwenshipoems in the journal Action Poétique. Huiwenshi is an ancient formthat uses the polysemous quality of the Chinese language to create palindromepoems that can be read in any direction. Her highly visual works utilize a gridof Chinese characters that may be read up, down, across, diagonally, andbackwards. Our transversion provides a visual performance score in homage toboth Métail and to Yoko Ono, whose work we admire.

15

Trois Fablettes à croquer

 A Michèle MéTAIL

2  →    Cléopâtre charme Pompée

d’un tube qu’Antoinea pompé

Mais brusque il écarte d’un geste

Ce refrain qu’il déteste

Moralité:

mité

le moral «hit », hait.

13→    Desanglais en automobile

avaient un five-o’clocken ville

ils voulaient sans en avoir l’air

boire un vocabulaire

Moralité:

citez

Le mot « rallye-thé »

2  →    Jen’ai pour tirer ma voiture

qu’une œuvre écrite sans rature

Or pour mes Odes mesAtrides

il faudrait une bride

Moralité:

Mettez

         lemors á Litté.

13→    Unautochtone de Rabat

toussait courbé sur son grabat

tant qu’il était par trop facile

d’attraper ses bacilles

Moralité:

Quittez

          Le Maure alité.

15

 

Three crunchable Little Fables

 

 

Translated by Amaranth Borsuk and Gabriela Jauregui

 

 

For MichèleMETAIL

 

 

Cleopatra had charmed Pompey

with a tube Antony pumped

But brusque he removed with a geste

This refrain he detests

Morality:

                         mothy

    the moral “hit” hehates.

 

Englishmen in automobile

had a five o’clock at the ville

They wanted surreptitiously

to drink vocabulary

Morality:

quothhe

    The mode “Rally-tea”

 

To tow my car I only have

a work written without a scratch

But for my Odes my Atreidae

I would need reins

Morality:

                       Apply

     the ’more on Litty.

 

A sickly native of Rabat

coughed hunched over on his cot

so excessively that with ease

one could catch hisdisease

Morality:

Leave

     The Moor’s reality.

 

 

 

 

 

Tranversion No. 15

 

 by Amaranth Borsuk and Gabriela Jauregui