These short, meditative, playful poems by the Oulipo’s Frédéric Forte are from his chapbook
Petite morale élémentaire portative, which was published in the Bibliothèque Oulipienne series in 2008 (#167). Forte’s title winks with both eyes (blinks?) at his Oulipian predecessor, the group’s cofounder Raymond Queneau, who employed a form of his own invention for the first section of his book
Moral élémentaire (Elementary Morality; Gallimard, 1975) and had also published a book-length work of science poetry in 1950, the
Petite Cosmogonie Portative (Small Portable Cosmogony; Gallimard, 1950).
Queneau devised the form in 1973, writing the fifty-one examples that would make up the first section of his
Moral Élémentaire. The original form was constructed thus:
| A |
B |
C |
|
D |
|
| E |
F |
G |
| |
H |
|
| I |
J |
K |
| |
L |
|
| |
* |
|
| A’ |
B’ |
C’ |
| |
D’ |
|
Here, each lettered term is made up of an “S-A” pair (“
substantif-adjectif”), which naturally becomes an adjective-noun pair in English. The * interlude is made up of five or six lines of no more than five syllables. The final set is typically derived in some way from the initial set. As per Queneau, who was going through a bit of a spiritual crisis at the time, each pair was to be declaimed aloud, followed by a pause during which a gong would sound. This would be Queneau’s final book, as he would ring his final gong the following year.
Queneau’s colleagues in the Oulipo returned to this form repeatedly in subsequent years, exploring and experimenting with its subtle possibilities. As early as 1978, Paul Fournel published
Élémentaire Moral, a tribute containing twenty-one examples, each of them drawing their S-A pairs and central interludes from one of Queneau’s twenty-one books.
Frédéric Forte’s abbreviated version of the form originated in a misunderstanding of this system. As Fred tells it, at one of the Oulipo’s writing workshops, a Japanese student misunderstood the constraint and submitted a series of minimalist “haikued” examples. This happenstance, coupled with another abbreviated version of the form developed by Forte’s Oulipian colleague François Caradec, led him to this minimalist version, which eliminates the third set and replaces the lone S-A pairs with a single word, often ambiguous in its grammatical category. The interlude is also reduced to four lines. Throughout the slim volume, Forte playfully pokes and prods at these grammatical limitations, at times deliberately inversing the pairs, emphasizing graphic or sonorous ambiguities, or playing with other grammatical features like gender.
Translating these short pieces was a real pleasure; some were more difficult than others. Teaching myself to read them was the first step, as the semantic connections between the S-A pairs and their lone words are often mysterious, a vagueness exacerbated by the ambiguity of terms in isolation. Tracking Forte’s playful explorations of the constraint, both those he told me about and those I noticed on my own, was fascinating, and recreating them called for some creative thinking and a few language-specific solutions.
With that, I will leave you to explore this precise but productive little form for yourselves. Fire up those gongs.
