QUENEAU Raymond. - Lot 191

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Lot n° 191
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QUENEAU Raymond. - Lot 191
QUENEAU Raymond. AUTOGRAPHIC MANUSCRIPT, Le Chien à la mandoline, [1958-1965]; 95 pages small in-4. Important set of the original first draft manuscript of this poetic collection. The writing of the poems for Le Chien à la mandoline occupied Queneau from 1946 to 1965. The collection Le Chien à la mandoline, published in 1965 by Gallimard, brings together two collections from 1958 and adds unpublished poems: Le Chien à la mandoline, published by Temps Mêlés in Verviers, and the Sonnets published by Hautefeuille; some poems had previously appeared in magazines. This collection marks an essential stage in his poetic writing, using classical forms, such as the sonnet and the alexandrine, to bring out a new content, at once free, popular and fairy-tale. The classical rules of the verse and the sonnet are seen as protocols for the most unexpected forms of writing, absurd but also of extraordinary comic fecundity. The Sonnets, first published in 1958 (this first edition contained only 34), show how much Queneau found in this formal constraint, not a straitjacket, but a space allowing him a great variety of tones, and an astonishing verbal creation, mixing puns, phonetic spelling, wordplay, distortions and the most incongruous inventions of words, using slang, obscene and crude words, in a verbal intoxication that does not exclude scepticism and anguish. Several of these poems were set to music and performed by the most prominent voices of French song, from Juliette Gréco to Catherine Sauvage, not forgetting the Frères Jacques. The present dossier contains 92 autograph poems out of the 120 in the collection, five of which have not been retained. Of the 87 poems retained, 45 are related to the Chien à la mandoline (out of the 71 in this first part) and 42 to the Sonnets (out of 49). Five sonnets were not retained in the edition; they were published in the section "Sonnets écartés des Sonnets de 1958" in Volume I of the Complete Works in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade. Let us quote at random the beginning of the sixteenth sonnet, here entitled Cette odeur d'escalier... It's the metro, it's too much, yes, it's the politain, his smell of beans is going to my head, thanks to him I'll be able to circumvent Paris as a tourist from Auteuil to the Chapelle"... Most of these poems have numerous variants with their final version of 1965. We refer by number to the order of the poems in the 1965 collection, number preceded by an S for the Sonnets, and for the sonnets left out to the Pléiade edition. * A small in-4 (22 x 17 cm), large-ruled, pink-covered schoolboy notebook bearing the repeated autograph notation "Poésies," of 20 ff. and containing 20 sonnets, in black ink, with some titles added in pencil (titles often different from the edition), much corrected (over 180 erasures, including many lines crossed out and rewritten). The Geologist's Hair [S6 The Hemorrhoidal Earth] "The spirits that, without iron, face the baits"..., Between the cobblestones of the court of Rome [spread p. 823 A little blue flower that grows - why not? - on the side of the Gare du Nord] "Aboulez la monnaie, a dit la primevère"..., Le fin du fin [S2 Who causes? who doses? who dares?], Une révolution loupée [S7], Un maître humaniste [écartés p. 826 The little paths that lumberjacks take in the mountains] "We will go after you into the first stumps"..., New discovery of the Arabs in Puteaux [S13], Written several weeks before the coronation of Elizabeth II of England [S15], That smell of stairs... [S16 Singular coincidence of a rhyme and a prince], Twisted image, no resemblance of an Albert [S14], In April discovers only a Sun [S17], "Pignon sur rue et pignon au cul voilà bien"... [S18 Bird Time], The Converted Sodomites [S20], Elements and Principles of a Solar Idealism [discarded p. 822], "The Toad that Came Every Night to Hoot"... [S19 The avatars of this batrachian will now be known], My Adolescence Immediately Present [discarded p. 825], "After You After You After Whom Have They"... [S21 Here I am attending a grand formal dinner], "I will no longer sleep under the prime shadows"... [S22 The cultivation of mushrooms on lonely islets], The pharmacy where the legend wants etc. [S23 There is in the Rue Saint-Honoré a pharmacy] "These Paris cobblestones are no longer so grey"..., "It was not an altercation but at last"... [S25 Fighting in silence is still the best], "I am tired of feeding an eagle for itself"... [S26 Prometheus more or less in chains]. * 8 small in-4 double-sheets torn from a large-ruled school notebook (22 x 17 cm), in black ink, containing 15 poems, some titled, with about 100 corrections a
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