Two Poems by Raymond Queneau:
Front-Page Carnage
    translated by Rachel Galvin
I've walked my sorrow
through the streets of Paris
I kept it on a leash
so the Parisians would laugh
pigsty cheese shop
window display all splayed out
bloody shop window
butcher stall
wallowing on every corner
a calf that blubbers
maybe it's me
maybe it's my double
I hold back my sadness
and sit down on a bench
to read the papers
which tell of misfortune
crime and assassination
floods earthquakes
murders epidemics
rape and violent death
and this does not console me one bit
and this consoles me not




Two Poems by Raymond Queneau:
Rue Galilée

    translated by Rachel Galvin
Why has no one ever sung the rue Galil(&e
rue Galilée full of dahlias
rue Galilée full of hydrangeas
rue Galilée with noble pediments
rue Galilée loved by pedestrians
rue Galilée lined with canals
rue Galilée adored by cars
rue Galilée terrible beauty
rue Galilée which is really she
whom I must sing
in prose and in verse
to all the Universe
rue Croix-Nivert



Raymond Queneau was born in 1903 in Le Havre and is one of the most influential French authors of the twentieth century. Queneau was at the forefront of the surrealist movement of the 1920s. During the Occupation, Queneau refused to work with the collaborationists and worked in secret on Resistance publications. After the war he was elected to Académie Goncourt and became director of the Encyclop'[die de la Pléiade. His best-known novel, Zazie dans le métro, was made into a movie by Louis Malle in 1959.

Rachel Galvin is a writer and editor for Humanities, the journal of the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has received fellowships at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and Hedgebrook. Her poems have recently appeared or are forthcoming in Spinning Jenny, Mars Hill Review, Comstock Review, and Nimrod.


 
 
 
 


 
 
 
 

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