Dennis Duncan

Jan 2012: Comparative Literature 64(1): 94-109

A recurring problem in much critical writing about the Oulipo is a tendency to homogenize the output of the group’s writers in order to present a universal poetics of constrained writing. Oulipians rightly bristle at these attempts to oversimplify the group’s history. Nevertheless one useful distinction has been made by Jacques Roubaud who notes the widening of the group’s membership which began with himself in 1966, and postulates that a second era—the “Perecquian era”—of the Oulipo began in 1969, when Georges Perec published his infamous novel without the letter e, La Disparition.

This paper will look closely at the theoretical writing of Italo Calvino over the six year period from 1967 to 1973—the years between his translation of Raymond Queneau’s novel Les Fleurs bleues and his full election to the Oulipo—arguing that, during this time, Calvino’s own poetics underwent a significant change with regard to the perceived relationship between creativity and constraint. The paper will make its case by analogy with two authors often cited by the Oulipo—the medieval theologian Ramón Llull and the Atomist philosopher Lucretius—between whom Calvino draws a parallel in one of his final works, the undelivered lectures, Six Memos for the Next Millennium. Instead of a parallel, however, this paper will argue that Llull and Lucretius represent two opposing models of the combinatorics, and that the former encapsulates Calvino’s views at the start of the period in question, while the latter neatly exemplifies his later position. It will suggest too that the trend in Calvino’s thought is germane to the distinction which Roubaud makes—that Calvino’s earlier position is characteristic of the “pre-Perecquian Oulipo,” while his later views are closer to those expressed by some of his peers among the group’s second wave.

PEER English 5 (2010): 125-37
This paper uses two case studies to illustrate the poles of one of the axes on which the translator must situate herself when tackling particular types of literary or scriptural writing.  It will look at two accounts of translation: Philo of Alexandria's description of the creation of the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, and John Crombie's introduction to his own translation of Raymond Queneau's Cent mille milliards de poèmes.  Both accounts exhibit a concern about the inadequacy of translation to convey vital aspects of the source text.  Philo seeks to allay this anxiety by inventing the miracle of corroborating versions—he claims that numerous scholars produced identical texts—thereby implying a divine authority for the translation.  Crombie meanwhile self-consciously avoids using the word translation altogether, referring to his text as a version.
Analysing both accounts, this paper will demonstrate which aspects of the source texts have given rise to the authors' anxieties.  It will argue that Philo is driven by a sense that, for his readership, it does not behove a sacred text to be subject to synonymy—that the form of the words themselves, as much as their meaning, bears the spiritual message.  Yet Philo cannot fully commit to his invented miracle, and his account is undermined by a number of half-hidden vacillations.  Crombie, on the other hand, exhibits the opposite anxiety—that in maintaining the form of Queneau's highly stylised source text, he has strayed too far from it's meaning to warrant the term translation.

Resonance FM: 21 May 2013
In which - this week—James ‘Kidd’ Kidd and Adam ‘Kidd’ Smyth are joined by Dr Dennis Duncan to muse over literature and translation. What is translation? What happens when Shakespeare’s To be or not to be’ turns Japanese? Can Finnegans Wake be written in Basic English – and what has this to do with Sex and the City? Join our polyglot podders as they tussle with Dan Brown, John Keats, Aphex Twin, Lydia Davis, Stieg Larsson, Humpty Dumpty and Die Hard (‘where are my detonators?’).

TLS: 9 Aug 2013
Georges Perec, La Boutique obscure: 124 Dreams, trans. by Daniel Levin Becker (New York: Melville House, 2013).
Raymond Queneau, Exercises in Style, trans. by Barbara Wright (New York: New Directions, 2012).
Lauren Elkin and Scott Esposito, The End of Oulipo? An Attempt to Exhaust a Movement (Zero, 2013).