Raymond Queneau (1903-1976) was born in the French town of
Le Havre and educated at the Sorbonne. He performed his military
service in Morocco. An early association with the Surrealists ended
in 1929, and after completing a scholarly study of literary madmen
of the nineteenth century for which he was unable to find a
publisher, Queneau turned to fiction, writing his first
novel, Le Chiendent (published as Witch Grass by NYRB
Classics), in Greece in the summer of 1932. Influenced by James
Joyce and Lewis Carroll, Queneau sought to reinvigorate French
literature, grown feeble through formalism, with a strong dose of
language as really spoken. He further encouraged innovation by
founding, with the mathematician François Le Lionnais, the famous
group OULIPO (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle), which
investigated literary composition based on the application of
strict formal or mathematical procedures (members of the group
included Italo Calvino, Georges Perec, and Harry Mathews).
Queneau’s many books, which typically blur the boundaries between
fiction, poetry, and the essay, include Pierrot mon ami, The
Sunday of Life, Zazie in the Metro (made into a movie by Louis
Malle), and Exercises in Style; under the name of Sally Mara,
he published We Always Treat Women Too Well, a brilliant
comic spoof on the excesses of smutty popular novels. Queneau was
the editor of the Encyclopédie de la Pléiade as well as a
fine poet, whose lyric “Si tu t’imagines” was a hit for the
celebrated postwar chanteuse Juliette Gréco.
Barbara Wright is one of the premier English translators of
modern French literature. In addition to Raymond Queneau, she has
also translated such authors as Alfred Jarry, Nathalie Sarraute,
Pierre Albert-Birot, and Patrick Modiano.
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