QUENEAU Raymond. - Lot 200

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Lot n° 200
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QUENEAU Raymond. - Lot 200
QUENEAU Raymond. MANUSCRIT autograph signed "Raymond Queneau", Courir les rues, [1966] ; 169 pages in-4 (21 x 27 cm). Complete manuscript of the poetic collection Courir les rues, inspired by Paris. Courir les rues was published in February 1967 by Gallimard in the collection Blanche collection. It is the first part of a trilogy completed by Battre la campagne (1968) and Fendre les flots (1969). The first idea for this collection dates back to October 1960, but Queneau began working on it in 1966. In 1936-1938, he had written a column entitled "Do you know Paris?" in L'Intransigeant. "This is not a collection of poems," Queneau wrote in the forward, "but the account of comings and goings in a Paris that is neither the 'mysterious Paris' nor the 'unknown Paris' of the specialists. It is only a question of small - It is a sort of ideal walk in a Paris that is not ideal, a walk that would begin at Pentecost and end at All Saints' Day, with the dead leaves. Among these marvellous exercises in urban poetry is Les Colombins, in which Queneau hijacks a Charles Trénet song: "Long, long, long after the pigeons have disappeared, their droppings will still be seen in the streets in my poems, too, and people will wonder what the point of pigeons was, or was it something like the aurochs or the pterodactyl or the coelacanth or the dodo, but no one will read my poems any more. This almost definitive manuscript, which has been cleaned up, contains all the poems, with a few variants, crossed-out lines and numerous corrections. Indeed, there are nearly 150 autograph corrections, including erasures with modifications, as well as additions and 25 lines entirely crossed out. It remained unknown to Claude Debon for the Pléiade edition. The manuscript of the 154 poems is in black ink, on versos of sheets of various origins: printed reading notes, literary advertisements, typed letters, circulars from Gallimard or the Oulipo... One back page contains a draft of a poem that has been crossed out, and two others contain calculations of probability. It is paginated from 1 to 169, and includes the title page: "Courir les rues / Raymond Queneau", page 2 with the epigraph of Heraclitus in Greek, 165 autographed pages and 2 typed pages. All the poems follow in the order of the printed collection, except for three: La Ronde, Vaugelas bouquiniste and Zoo familier, which are in the manuscript towards the end of the collection. Three handwritten poems and the typewritten poem do not appear in the published collection: ORTF (p. 61), Baptêmes (p. 72), and the very short poem composed of a single long line: Une expression toute faite (p. 166). These three poems are accompanied here by their printed and corrected proofs, as well as that of the poem Pour les cinquante ans de Mario Prassinos (pp. 92-93) in typescript with autograph title. A few poems are heavily corrected, for example the large poem Hotel Hilton (pp. 56-57), which also has a crossed-out "Appendix" of eight lines, which has not been published: "Whether it rains or snows or thunders / How nice it is to be at the Hilton Hotel / You don't hear gongs / You don't think about the Vietcong / Everything is air-conditioned / Everything is made to charm you / Whether it rains or snows or thunders / How nice it is to be at the Hilton Hotel" (p.57). The poem Le Diable à Paris (p. 85) also presents several corrections. Three titles will be changed in the edition: Le Petit peuple des statues bis (p. 78) will become Luxembourg; Maladresse is here entitled Hugolesque et Juvénalien, and Passés futurs is here Dites-moi zoù (bis). Among the main textual variants, the poem Rue de l'Ancienne-Comédie (p. 69) has a different version of its last two lines: "under which François Mauriac sat one day innocently / to talk with friends ab hoc et ab hac". Œuvres complètes, Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, tome I, edition established by Claude Debon, 1989 (p. 349-431, and notice p. 1326-1329)
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