8.8 /10 1 Votes
Publisher Grossman Publishers Published in English 1967 Pages 76 Originally published 1967 Page count 76 Published in english 1967 | 4.4/5 Goodreads Publication date 1967 Media type book LC Class 67-21230 Editor Luis van Rooten OCLC 1208360 | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames: The D'Antin Manuscript (Mother Goose's Rhymes), published in 1967 by Luis d'Antin van Rooten is purportedly a collection of poems written in archaic French with learned glosses. In fact, they are English-language nursery rhymes written homophonically as a nonsensical French text (with pseudo-scholarly explanatory footnotes); that is, as an English-to-French homophonic translation. The result is not merely the English nursery rhyme but that nursery rhyme as it would sound if spoken in English by someone with a strong French accent. Even the manuscript's title, when spoken aloud, sounds like "Mother Goose's Rhymes" with a strong French accent.
Contents
Here is van Rooten's version of Humpty Dumpty:
Secondary use
Ten of the Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames have been set to music by Lawrence Whiffin.
Similar works
An earlier example of homophonic translation (in this case French-to-English) is "Frayer Jerker" (Frère Jacques) in Anguish Languish (1956).
A later book in the English-to-French genre is N'Heures Souris Rames (Nursery Rhymes), published in 1980 by Ormonde de Kay. It contains some forty nursery rhymes, among which are Coucou doux de Ledoux (Cock-A-Doodle-Doo), Signe, garçon. Neuf Sikhs se pansent (Sing a Song of Sixpence) and Hâte, carrosse bonzes (Hot Cross Buns).
A similar work in German-English is Morder Guss Reims: The Gustav Leberwurst Manuscript by John Hulme (1st Edition 1981; various publishers listed; ISBN 0517545594, ISBN 978-0517545591 and others). The dust jacket, layout and typography are very similar in style and appearance to the original Mots D'Heures albeit with a different selection of nursery rhymes.
Marcel Duchamp draws parallels between the method behind Mots d'Heures and certain works of Raymond Roussel.