About the book and this project
The author
Raymond Queneau (1903–1976) was a French poet and writer. In 1960, together with the mathematician François Le Lionnais, he founded Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, the Workshop of Potential Literature) — a group of writers and mathematicians exploring what formal constraint can do in literature.
The book
Cent mille milliards de poèmes (1961) was the first book to appear under the Oulipo imprint, and remains the best known of them. It holds only ten sonnets, but every page is cut into fourteen horizontal strips — one per line.
All ten sonnets are written in the same metre and on the same rhymes, so any line can be replaced by the line of the same number from any other sonnet — and the result is again a well-formed sonnet. Ten choices in each of the fourteen positions give 10¹⁴ — a hundred thousand milliard — readable poems; by Queneau’s own reckoning, reading them all would take more than 190 million years.
Translators
- English translation — Bev Rowe
- Russian translation — Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya
About the project
This site generates one sonnet for every day — each possible date corresponds to exactly one of the hundred thousand milliard poems. It is derived from the date itself, is the same for every reader in the world, and is stored nowhere. The sonnet of the day changes at midnight GMT.
You can find here the poem of any day at all — the day you were born, or another date that matters to you, a sonnet for any day past or future. It will always stay the same, however many times you come back to it.
You can also generate a random poem, or simply read Queneau’s original sonnets.
The project was built entirely with Claude Code.