I’ve always believed that one should write in a clear and orderly manner; that to write is to convey a message, and that if the message is not understood the author is at fault; that therefore a courteous writer has the obligation to ensure that his writings are understood by the greatest number of readers, as effortlessly as possible. After reading Raymond Queneau’s A Pocket Cosmogony (Petite cosmogonie portative; in Italian, Piccola cosmogonia portatile [Turin: Einaudi, 1982]), I find that I am forced to reconsider these principles: I believe that I will continue writing the way I set out for myself, but I also believe that Queneau was eminently correct to write the way he did, which is diametrically opposed to my way, and that I would like to write the way he did, if only I were capable of it.
Queneau is popular in Italy chiefly for his novels, the best known of which is the delightful Zazie dans le métro. Queneau, who died in 1976, at the age of seventy-three, was not only a novelist but also a poet and a publisher, and frequented surrealists, mathematicians, biologists, and linguists. For twenty years, beginning in 1956, he was the director of the respected Encyclopédie de la Pléiade, but at the same time he founded a journal of “potential literature” that described and offered dazzling instances of wordplay: there was no field of knowledge that escaped his curiosity, which was always lively and never amateurish. This Cosmogony is a poem in Alexandrine verse divided into six cantos, first published in 1950, and it tells nothing less than the story of the universe. I emerged from my reading of it dazed, giddy, with my head spinning, as if I’d just descended from a roller coaster.
There’s no doubt, it’s an extraordinary book, in both senses of the word. It’s not a book for everyone: it’s not for distracted readers, uneducated readers, or readers in search of instant entertainment; it’s neither homogenized nor precooked—it’s not easy to digest. Each of its nearly fourteen hundred lines contains a riddle, variously cunning, trivial, or dense with meaning: with allusions to illustrious French forebears (this amiable and universal soul here reveals himself to be, oddly, something of a chauvinist: he explicitly addresses his “lecteurs français.” But perhaps this means only that he’s well aware of how essentially untranslatable his poetry is) such as Baudelaire, Lamartine, and Rimbaud. Look closely, though: these are ambiguous references, midway between homage and derision.
At every step, the reader encounters slang impudently grafted onto terminology borrowed from every field of natural science; words transcribed phonetically (“l’histouar des humains,” “tu sais xé qu’un concept”; certain distant insects have discovered “que l’air est un espace où qu’on peut sdeplacer”). Frequently the hiatus demanded by the poetic meter is expressed with arbitrary spelling (“révolussilon” for “révolution”), in keeping with a mannerism that appears in Queneau’s essays as early as 1937, and is later used elegantly to render “spoken French” in his novels.
The array of his verbal inventions is surprising. The Diplodocus, one of the largest fossil reptiles, is an “interminable idiot”; the mammoth cetaceans wandering through the deep are so many “hercules” but also “erre-culs”; the ships that attack Syracuse and its defenses designed by Archimedes are “les flottes nazirêmes,” that is, the author explains to the German translator, Roman triremes with bad intent: Nazi triremes, in other words.
Given the number of instances of puns, Sergio Solmi’s translation into hendecasyllabic verse is outstanding, because no one could have done better, and at the same time inadequate, because at least half of the book’s color and spice has inevitably been lost. It is in any case an excellent guidebook for the Italian reader: it encourages him and smooths the way, but the facing text remains indispensable.
I think I’ve said enough about Queneau’s erudite whimsies and I would like to make one thing clear: these are not merely the caprices of a learned writer setting out to amuse himself. In this cosmogony they have a specific role; puns, vulgarisms, and sophomoric pranks clip off like a pair of shears any suspicion of rhetorical yeastiness. This is the same manner that Ariosto and Heine often employ; by virtue of it, these poets remain readable today, even for nonspecialists, while those who have spurned it are relegated to limbo. It’s an inescapable law: the author who cannot laugh on his own, ideally even at his own expense, eventually becomes the unwilling target of laughter. Queneau, a grand virtuoso of laughter, obtains with his comic wit what so many others have reached for in vain, and blends into a homogeneous continuum the much discussed “two cultures.”
It is no minor undertaking. In this baroque and heterodox yet fundamentally serious poem, a doctrine and a poetry emerge that are unusual, a pairing that had not been attempted since Lucretius: but Queneau is Queneau, and he fears protracted flights. His invocation to Venus closely follows the one that begins On the Nature of Things, but its lyrical impetus is at once solemn and buffoonish: the poetry of science is inextricably bound up with playfulness. It was Venus, “mère des jeux des arts et de la tolérance,” who gave the gift of valleys to mountains, women to men, cylinders to pistons, and coal cars to locomotives. Thanks to the goddess, all animals, at their given place and time, take pleasure from the planet “en y procréfoutant.”
Following the bilingual text is an extremely acute “Pocket Guide to the Pocket Cosmogony,” written by Italo Calvino, who was a friend and follower of the author (and how many Queneauian nuances we find in his books, from Cosmicomics on!). Calvino takes up the challenge and plays along: his clear-eyed commentary faithfully preserves the lightness and spirit of the text, and he works with patience and reverence to untangle the knots; this, too, is an intelligent game. With patience, indeed: let readers be forewarned, this is a book that demands patience; it’s not a cheap read.
Calvino has done the work of a philologist here, going back to the sources, consulting the comments of Jean Rostand, the renowned biologist and friend of Queneau, and questioning naturalists and chemists. He has solved many puzzles, but not all: the author himself had already admitted that there were some he couldn’t explain, illuminations of a moment. Perhaps that’s just as well for a reader who loves a game; he may be the one who comes up with the solution.
The reader’s patience will be rewarded. Out of this labyrinthine text spring passages of gleaming poetry and at the same time themes that are current and absorbing. The “Prosopopeia of Hermes” that we read in the third canto in its way expresses a serious and profound thought, the poetry of origins: a natural understanding of the universe that we rarely find in other “authorized” poets.
Poetry echoes all around anyone who pays attention: and not only in nature. “Il voit dans chaque science un registre bouillant / Les mots se gonfleront du suc de toutes choses” (“He sees in each science a boiling register / the words swell with the sap of all things”); there’s poetry in the buttercup and in the moon in springtime, but also in volcanoes, calcium, and the phenol function. “On parle des bleuets et de la marguerite / alors pourquoi pas de la pechblende pourquoi?” (“We speak of cornflowers and daisies / then why not also of pitchblende why?”) How can we disagree? The epic labor of the Curies, which led from pitchblende to the isolation of radium, waits in vain for the poet capable of telling the story.
The passage I’m talking about is the densest part of the poem. Shortly thereafter, Mercury describes the author to his readers in these words (the translation here is my own, and literal): “this one, you understand, is not at all didactic / what could he didactify, since he knows almost nothing?” This is one of the crucial elements of the work. It is not science that is incompatible with poetry but didacticism, speaking from a lectern, setting out with a dogmatic, programmatic, edifying intent. Queneau abhors the programmatic, he is the king of the arbitrary: he sets out to review all hundred chemical elements, and then, with a contrived excuse, he stops at scandium, which has an atomic number of 21, and calls an end to the game.
In this cosmogony, which starts from Chaos and comes all the way up to automation, the history of mankind is pointedly wedged into just two lines. But when he takes the opportunity to express what he feels, the cosmic and Biblical joy of the Beginning and, at the same time, the necessity of the end, Queneau spreads his wings and displays his power. He displays it, in his always surprising manner, in the very last lines of the poem: after describing the early days of Earth, the birth of the Moon, the mysterious transition from crystals to viruses, the primordial monsters, humans and their first devices, he lifts off with tones out of the Excelsior1 into the apotheosis of calculating machines: but it is right here that his music stops, just like an old adding machine breaking down, and repeats itself, like a stuck record, stalling on the infinitives of verbs and finally ending. Consummatum est, the cosmogony is completed.
1. A nineteenth-century ballet (or series of ballets) celebrating the triumph of progress and machines.