‘Sometimes we imagine things.’

June 24, 2024 1:01 AM

The idea had come to Queneau on a visit to Greece in the early 1930s. There he learned about the dispute between adherents of the two rival forms of the Greek language: the archaic, revivalist Katharevousa, harking back to classical Greek, and the modern, vernacular Demotic. Queneau recognised a similar gulf between literary French and the contemporary spoken language: ‘I came to realise that modern, written French must free itself from the conventions that still hem it in.’ What was needed was an overhaul, an attentiveness to everyday speech, which would bring about a new written language, a ‘néo-français’, corresponding to the language as it was actually spoken. from How to Speak Zazie [London Review of Books; ungated]

The article is eventually a review of Queneau's The Skin of Dreams

Queneau, previously

posted by chavenet (5 comments total)

vive la révolution
posted by HearHere at 1:32 AM on June 24 [1 favorite]

I learned French at school, which has enabled me to understand Italians pretty well
posted by doiheartwentyone at 7:26 AM on June 24 [1 favorite]

I just realized that all my surrealism books are diagonally opposite on the other side of my apartment from my Oulipo books. I knew about Queneau’s break from them, but I didn’t know that I mirrored that break in where these books ultimately ended up, the farthest apart they could be. Thanks to this posting I have to get another book for the southeast corner.
posted by njohnson23 at 8:15 AM on June 24 [4 favorites]

I read this piece yesterday and enjoyed it quite a bit. To the extent that I picked up my English and French Zazies to, finally, make a go of reading it. Relatedly, the movie adaptation by Louis Malle is quite fun and recommended. (Fun fact I learned today: Malle's The Lovers was the film at the center of the obscenity case Jacobellis v. Ohio, which, before the Supreme Court, prompted Justice Potter Stewart to issue his definition of hard-core pornography, "I know it when I see it.")
posted by the sobsister at 8:18 AM on June 24 [2 favorites]

I hadn't known that Queneau was such a pioneer in using spoken French.

All the French you learn in school is wrong. We're taught 19th century French, suitable for reading Balzac or Maupassant. Maybe, at a stretch, Sartre. The colloquial language is spectacularly different, with modified syntax, and an extremely rich slang. So as Steve Martin complained, they have a different word for everything, and then they have a different slang word for everything. You can learn colloquial French from comics, movies, and a few books (like Street French).

Looking him up on Wikipedia, a couple of notes that made me like him even more:
* "Queneau also joined the Democratic Communist Circle founded by Boris Souvarine and took up numerous left-wing and anti-fascist causes."
* He stayed married to Janine.
posted by zompist at 2:20 PM on June 24 [3 favorites]