Poem of the week: The Bin-Men Go on Strike by Raymond Queneau | Poetry
The Bin-Men Go on Strike
it’s strike day for the bin-men
it’s a lucky day for us
we can play ragpicker or peddler
junk dealer who knows even antiquarian
there’s a little of everything
it’s a tough call
between the eyeless armless noseless doll
the tin of sardines that lost all its sardines on the way
the can of French peas that lost all its French peas on the way
the ripped homework which unfastened a zero with some bother
the tube of toothpaste several rollersteams ran over
bone fish-bone cotton ball
yes it’s a tough call
rubbish bins yawn in the midday sun
full of stuff ripe for the picking
for the person in the know
all of the sudden you see there…there…there
a work of art…art…art
there…there…there
an ignorant philistine abandoned it
you pounce on it lickety-split
sometimes it’s the Mona Lisa that you snatch
sometimes it’s the Night Watch
sometimes the Venus de Milo
sometimes the Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault
but there isn’t a strike every day
strike day for the bin-men
Translated by Rachel Galvin
Raymond Queneau co-founded the Oulipo group in 1960 with the writer and mathematician François Le Lionnais. It was after he had asked Le Lionnais for help with constructing his ever-proliferating and “interactive” (as it would now be called) sonnet collection, One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. The Oulipians specialised in techniques collectively known as “constrained writing”. Queneau described the group as “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape”. It might be a fairly good definition of what formalist poets in general are about, but Oulipian constraints were extreme and often randomly generated.
Queneau was multitalented and innovative in ways other than the Oulipian. He was a mathematician and linguist. Besides poetry, he wrote essays, translations, fiction and journalism, including a newspaper column of Paris trivia. Called Do You Know Paris? the column was designed as a three-question local knowledge quiz and appeared in L’Intransigeant from November 1936 until October 1938.
Queneau relished his stint of roaming and research. Its artistic fruits include Zazie in the Metro, a consistently delightful and surprise-filled novel that’s about to be reissued, in Barbara Wright’s English translation, as a Penguin Modern Classic, and the 1967 poetry collection Hitting the Streets (Courir les Rues), where this week’s poem first appeared.
As in the novel, Hitting the Streets is spiced with some delicious wordplay. The language is colloquial and the form free-range, dipping in and out of zany rhyme. Acclaimed by Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian in 2013, the dual-text Hitting the Streets is about to be republished by Carcanet.
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Queneau’s affection for the Paris streets is always tempered by realism, flies and pigeon-shit not excluded. The Bin-Men Go on Strike (see the original poem here) takes an almost surreal approach. It’s not directly concerned with the politics of the strike, nor with the smells and squalor of unemptied bins, though the taste of poverty and living hand-to-mouth is caught in the satirical opening lines. But it evolves into an unexpected flight of radical fantasy that questions the nature of art.
The “lucky day” of the strike allows the passersby “to play ragpicker or peddler / junk dealer who knows even the antiquarian” and “it’s a tough call” to choose their free gift. Queneau has fun with his list of derelict objects, among which is “the tube of toothpaste several rollersteams ran over”. In the original, the steam-rollers (compresseurs rouleaux) get a rhyme with “zero”, the mark given to the “ripped homework”. Galvin compensates with a Queneaulian flip, turning the steam-rollers into “rollersteams” – a kind of portmanteau word that’s suitably more ponderous and ridiculous than the pedestrian “steam-rollers” of correct English.
In the third section, there’s an excited lift of Queneau’s imagination, and the chant of repetition in the first three lines makes compelling music in French. This “work of art” has been abandoned by “an ignorant philistine” and is there to be grabbed by the more discerning ragpicker. Queneau skims the cream of the art galleries from the rubbish, finding the Mona Lisa, The Night Watch, the Venus de Milo and the Raft of the Medusa. It’s as if he had conjured art from soiled fragmented images, and, just possibly, simultaneously performed the opposite transformation. The flowing, overturned bins have overturned economic values and declared a new aesthetics.
Queneau’s joke contains a radical idea in keeping with the politics of Oulipo, of the possibility of art without conventional framing as art. Above all, it affirms his own technique in writing the Paris poems. Galvin quotes Jacques Roubaud who, in a short film honouring Queneau and the Oulipians, says, “Queneau walked around Paris and when he found a place where there was a poem, he took the poem, and he wrote it.” It’s a near-perfect comparison to the process of finding your own Rembrandt in the refuse.
The Bin-Men Go on Strike
it’s strike day for the bin-men
it’s a lucky day for us
we can play ragpicker or peddler
junk dealer who knows even antiquarian
there’s a little of everything
it’s a tough call
between the eyeless armless noseless doll
the tin of sardines that lost all its sardines on the way
the can of French peas that lost all its French peas on the way
the ripped homework which unfastened a zero with some bother
the tube of toothpaste several rollersteams ran over
bone fish-bone cotton ball
yes it’s a tough call
rubbish bins yawn in the midday sun
full of stuff ripe for the picking
for the person in the know
all of the sudden you see there…there…there
a work of art…art…art
there…there…there
an ignorant philistine abandoned it
you pounce on it lickety-split
sometimes it’s the Mona Lisa that you snatch
sometimes it’s the Night Watch
sometimes the Venus de Milo
sometimes the Raft of the Medusa by Théodore Géricault
but there isn’t a strike every day
strike day for the bin-men
Translated by Rachel Galvin
Raymond Queneau co-founded the Oulipo group in 1960 with the writer and mathematician François Le Lionnais. It was after he had asked Le Lionnais for help with constructing his ever-proliferating and “interactive” (as it would now be called) sonnet collection, One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems. The Oulipians specialised in techniques collectively known as “constrained writing”. Queneau described the group as “rats who construct the labyrinth from which they plan to escape”. It might be a fairly good definition of what formalist poets in general are about, but Oulipian constraints were extreme and often randomly generated.
Queneau was multitalented and innovative in ways other than the Oulipian. He was a mathematician and linguist. Besides poetry, he wrote essays, translations, fiction and journalism, including a newspaper column of Paris trivia. Called Do You Know Paris? the column was designed as a three-question local knowledge quiz and appeared in L’Intransigeant from November 1936 until October 1938.
Queneau relished his stint of roaming and research. Its artistic fruits include Zazie in the Metro, a consistently delightful and surprise-filled novel that’s about to be reissued, in Barbara Wright’s English translation, as a Penguin Modern Classic, and the 1967 poetry collection Hitting the Streets (Courir les Rues), where this week’s poem first appeared.
As in the novel, Hitting the Streets is spiced with some delicious wordplay. The language is colloquial and the form free-range, dipping in and out of zany rhyme. Acclaimed by Nicholas Lezard in the Guardian in 2013, the dual-text Hitting the Streets is about to be republished by Carcanet.
after newsletter promotion
Queneau’s affection for the Paris streets is always tempered by realism, flies and pigeon-shit not excluded. The Bin-Men Go on Strike (see the original poem here) takes an almost surreal approach. It’s not directly concerned with the politics of the strike, nor with the smells and squalor of unemptied bins, though the taste of poverty and living hand-to-mouth is caught in the satirical opening lines. But it evolves into an unexpected flight of radical fantasy that questions the nature of art.
The “lucky day” of the strike allows the passersby “to play ragpicker or peddler / junk dealer who knows even the antiquarian” and “it’s a tough call” to choose their free gift. Queneau has fun with his list of derelict objects, among which is “the tube of toothpaste several rollersteams ran over”. In the original, the steam-rollers (compresseurs rouleaux) get a rhyme with “zero”, the mark given to the “ripped homework”. Galvin compensates with a Queneaulian flip, turning the steam-rollers into “rollersteams” – a kind of portmanteau word that’s suitably more ponderous and ridiculous than the pedestrian “steam-rollers” of correct English.
In the third section, there’s an excited lift of Queneau’s imagination, and the chant of repetition in the first three lines makes compelling music in French. This “work of art” has been abandoned by “an ignorant philistine” and is there to be grabbed by the more discerning ragpicker. Queneau skims the cream of the art galleries from the rubbish, finding the Mona Lisa, The Night Watch, the Venus de Milo and the Raft of the Medusa. It’s as if he had conjured art from soiled fragmented images, and, just possibly, simultaneously performed the opposite transformation. The flowing, overturned bins have overturned economic values and declared a new aesthetics.
Queneau’s joke contains a radical idea in keeping with the politics of Oulipo, of the possibility of art without conventional framing as art. Above all, it affirms his own technique in writing the Paris poems. Galvin quotes Jacques Roubaud who, in a short film honouring Queneau and the Oulipians, says, “Queneau walked around Paris and when he found a place where there was a poem, he took the poem, and he wrote it.” It’s a near-perfect comparison to the process of finding your own Rembrandt in the refuse.
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