Not Bouzingo-related per se, but here's an intriguing little mystery, which perhaps some better francophones might shed light on--it involves Phonetic Poetry (probably for satirical effect) in the 1890s:
I've come across a VERY strange 1890 text from the Symbolist journal 'Entretiens'. My current hypothesis is that it's a Symbolist parady or fake review, relating to some intra-avant debate regarding the poetics of Symbolism v. its precursor Parnassianism. Or, it's a review of a book with no bibliographic record online, by an author equally without any other (digital) trace.
Either way, it contains ("quotes" ?) something that looks a hell of a lot like Phonetic Poetry--very reminiscent of Zoum and Zurich Dada sound poems. There are fragments of French, embedded amidst apparent nonsense syllables; of it looks Slavic, but from what I can tell it is no known language. I've tried looking for homonyms, reversed spellings, etc for French but don't recognise anything.
The essay is by the Symbolist Francis Vielé-Griffin, who claims to be reviewing a book by a writer named Toussaint de Morne, of whom no other evidence exists. He devotes most of the article to quoting and paraphrasing the book's Preface/Manifesto. Apparently, de Morne claims to be a member of the Parnassian movement, which he upholds against Symbolism. The interesting thing is that the last anthology of the Parnassians had been published 14 years earlier--I would expect this to be old news, but clearly it reflects SOME discourse within the avant-garde at the time. He claims that the movement had degraded because of the failure of many of the individual poets, but that the theory still holds strong against the Symbolists (whose founders had begun in the Parnassian group).
He then moves on to relay Toussaint de Morne's assertions regarding linguistic evolution, Parnassianism's differences from Classicism, and finally a detailed argument about the way in spoken rhythm ought to be measured and structured in the writing of verse, which I can only half-follow due to my unfamiliarity with the details of French poetics. Then, Vielé-Griffin gives us some (supposed?) examples of the poet's verses--which, as I say, look like sound poetry written 15-25 years later, but which I hypothesize are actually intended to ridicule whomever it was in reality that held the views on scansion attributed to Toussaint de Morne.
The tone throughout is superficially positive, but given Vielé-Griffin's Symbolist affiliations and the fact that he makes no mention of the poems' odd orthography but instead compares them to the Parnassian poems of Copée (a particular target of Symbolist attacks) and Lecomte de l'Isle lead me to the conclusion that the piece is satirical, despite my French being inadequate to consistently register sarcasm.
Interestingly, in the same year Verlaine published another text veering toward sound poetry, in response to a new orthographic apparently being circulated by a now-unknown individual named Duvigneaux--it looks similar to this in some respects, though it sticks nearer to the French aurally--it's a deformation of spelling, whereas this seems truly phonetic--or am i wrong?
hello, i'm french, and was searching for some english comments about nodier (who seems to be as underrated outside of france, as he is in his homecountry) - your blog seems very interesting, but this post attracted my attention, for some reason - i followed the link, and indeed, on the surface, this poetry seems very strange - but then, i think the explanation is clearly given in the article : this is supposed to be (and may indeed be) written in volapük - i don't know much about this language, which was created before the esperanto, but one can recognize bits of latin AND germanic languages, so that this may well be volapük...
ReplyDeletehoping that this note may shed some light on the mystery -
thx for good work !