Dennis Duncan · How to Speak Zazie: Translating Raymond Queneau

Dennis Duncan · How to Speak Zazie: Translating Raymond Queneau

‘At seventeen, Queneau left for Paris to study philosophy. His journal from these years is pretty bleak: lots of angst, lots of billiards. In the winter of 1924, however, he fell in with the Surrealists. For a time, he double-dated with André Breton. Breton had married Simone Kahn, a Surrealist salonnière, and Queneau followed him by marrying her sister Janine. In the Bretonian world, however, once André was done with someone he expected his circle to shun them too. So when Breton left Simone and Queneau refused to ostracise his sister-in-law, he found himself excluded from the Surrealist movement and harbouring a ‘passionate hatred’ for it.

‘The genesis of the animosity was personal, but it quickly acquired a theoretical flavour when Queneau denounced Surrealism as intellectually facile. Automatic writing, he argued, was mere gormless passivity, with the poet waiting ‘open-mouthed for inspiration like an entomologist hoping to catch an insect’.’

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