“One hundred thousand million poems”, the book that is impossible to finish reading

There is a book that no one has ever finished reading. Its author is Raymond Queneau. Its title, which says it all, “One hundred thousand million poems” (One hundred thousand billion poems).

Queneau suggested that it would take a person over a million centuries to finish reading his book. It is that the object contains 100,000,000,000,000 potential poems.

“One hundred billion poems”, published in 1961 as an introductory letter to oulipo group, is made up of 10 sonnets of 14 lines each. Until then, all normal. The peculiar thing is that each of the lines coexists with the rest on different cardboard lines that can be moved and recombined almost indefinitely.

“This little job allows everyone to compose a hundred thousand billion sonnets at will, all regular, of course. After all, it is a kind of poetry making machine, but in limited quantities; it is true that this number, albeit limited, provides a reading for almost two hundred million years (reading twenty-four hours a day) ”, Queneau specifies in the preface of the book.

Each of the sonnets has the same rhyming scheme and the same rhyming sound. For this reason all the cardboard “strips” containing the verses are recombinable.

The publication is a literary experiment promoted by Queneau and the mathematician François Le Lionnais and designed by Roberto Massin. After its launch, the Oulipo group was born, whose goal was the search for new literary forms.

After being translated into other languages, the work arrived on the Internet in 1997. This caused some problems, but set precedents.

Failing to secure the agreement of the rights holders, a summary judgment helped establish French jurisprudence in the field of Internet copyright by keeping copyrighted poems posted on a site as an infringement.

The relevance of “One Hundred Billion Poems” hasn’t diminished over the years. On the contrary: it has intensified over time. There were translations, musical adaptations and even a tribute book with verses by several renowned sonnetists in which the reader can also create his own sonnet by filling in white stripes.

In Mercado Libre, the book “One hundred thousand million poems” is on sale in Spanish for 6,500 Argentine pesos.

Oulipo

Born in 1960, Oulipo’s experimentation group, made up of French writers and mathematicians, followed the lines of Dadaism and Surrealism, both avant-gardes of the turn of the century. and they differed from them in some respects.

In exploring new literary structures, he moves away from surrealism by addressing the conscious instead of the unconscious and from Dadaism leaving aside the casual and focusing on reason.

In this way, the process of “oulipism” has combined two disciplines, mathematics and literature, with words as the main material.

The most recognized members of the group around the world were Georges Perec, Marcel Duchamp And Italo Calvino.