Jacques Roubaud

An introduction to the ancient Japanese strategy game of Go by Oulipo members Pierre Lusson, Georges Perec and Jacques Roubaud Written by a mathematician, a poet and a mathematician-poet, this 1969 guide to the ancient Japanese game of Go was not only the first such guide to be published in France (and thereby introduced the centuries-old game of strategy into that country) but something of a subtle Oulipian guidebook to writing strategies and tactics. As in the Oulipian strategy of writing under constraint, the role of structured gameplay (within literature and without) proves to be of primordial importance: a means of moving outside an inherent system, of instigating new figures of style and meaning, new paths toward collaboration and new strategies for filling a space: be it the space of a terrain, a blank page, a white screen or a freshly stretched canvas. Translated for the first time, this treatise outlines the history of Go, the rules for playing it, some central tactics and strategies for playing it and overcoming the threats posed by an opponent, general information and trivia, and a glossary that ranges from Atari (check) to Yose (the end of a match). Pierre Lusson (born 1950) is a French mathematician and musicologist. With Jacques Roubaud, he helped introduce the game of Go into France. Georges Perec (1936–82) was a French novelist, essayist and filmmaker whose linguistic talents ranged from fiction to crossword puzzles to authoring the longest palindrome ever written. Winner of the prix Médicis in 1978 for his most acclaimed novel, Life A User’s Manual, Perec was also a member of the Oulipo, a group of writers and mathematicians devoted to the discovery and use of constraints to encourage literary inspiration. One of their most famous products was Perec’s own novel, A Void, written entirely without the letter “e.” Jacques Roubaud (born 1932) is a French poet and mathematician, a former professor of mathematics at University of Paris X and a member of the Oulipo group. His many books translated into English include The Great Fire of London, Some Thing Black, The Form of a City Changes Faster, Alas, than the Human Heart and The Loop.

-

I dette andet bind af serien 'Londons store brand' fortsætter Roubaud det, han kalder sin “erindringsprosa” og fortæller – lærd og let, dybsindigt og dog humoristisk – om sin egen barndom, særlig årene under anden verdenskrig, præget af afsavn og en for barnet ubestemmelig uhygge.

... L'art des troubadours a un nom, le trobar. L'origine du nom est controversee, mais il est en tout cas lie au verbe francais trouver . L'art du trobar est un art de decouverte, d'invention les troubadours sont ceux qui trouvent, inventent, imaginent le chant, dans ses differents aspects, qui recouvrent aussi bien la creation formelle, la combinatoire de la canso, que la poesie, la musique et le choix des paroles et arguments de l'amour... . ... On a dit: l'amour est une invention du XIIe siecle. Et si invention de l'amour il y a, les inventeurs en furent les trouveurs , les trobadors. On leur reconnaitra ici, dans cet essai, une invention a la fois plus limitee et plus singuliere, plus particuliere, plus orgueilleuse et plus bouleversante: l'invention, ou decouverte, des troubadours, n'est pas l'amour elle est que l'amour est inseparable de la poesie, est le moteur de la poesie dans le chant. Les troubadours ont invente qu'il est un lien indissoluble: celui qui unit l'amour a la poesie... Ce livre est un hommage aux troubadours et la description de leur art du langage a la fois comme forme de vie et comme recherche, comme instrument et comme passion.

Jacques Roubaud, född 1932, är poet och matematiker, prosaist och pjäsförfattarem essäist och minnesteoretiker, poesihistoriker och ordförande för Oulipo. Sedan debuten 1967 med den hårt strukturerade sonettsamlingen Epsilon har han publicerat ett femtiotal böcker, som gör honom till en av Frankrikes viktigaste och formellt mest uppfinningsrika författare under det senaste halvseklet. Någonting svart från 1986 är en okonventionell sorge. och meditationsbok skriven efter hustrun, fotografen och Wittgenstein-kännaren Alix Cléo Roubauds död 1983. Boken innehåller också efterord av Jonas (J) Magnusson.

Cast as a dialogue among six interlocuters, this lyric blend of poetry and prose considers light from a variety of perspectives - philosophical, physical, ethical, and metaphorical.

-- First paperback edition.-- In this madcap metafictional mystery a 22-year-old philosophy student (Hortense) is kidnapped and a dog is murdered -- the imaginary country of Poldevia is somehow involved. Arranged in the form of a sestina (replete with authorial asides and plenty of puns, jokes and wordplay), this is the second installment in Roubaud's popular and widely acclaimed Hortense series.-- A professor of mathematics at the University of Paris X Nanterre and a long time member of Oulipo, the Workshop for Potential Literature, Jacques Roubaud is the author of several novels and works of poetry.-- First published in the U. S. by Dalkey Archive (1989).

-- First paperback edition.-- Hortense is in trouble again. Set to marry the Premier Prince Presumptive, our heroine finds herself caught in the middle of the plot of Hamlet, playing the unfortunate role of Ophelia. Can she escape in time? Brimming with brilliant wordplay, mathematical equations, literary allusions, and cats, Hortense in Exile continues the Hortense series in grand style.-- Jacques Roubaud is president of the l'Association Georges Perec, a society dedicated to honoring the work of his fellow Oulipian.-- First published in the U. S. by Dalkey Archive (1992).

Ce livre est consacre a deux formes poetiques du champ de la poesie de langue francaise: la ballade et le chant royal. Ces deux formes sont etroitement apparentees, bien que chacune ait ses caracteristiques specifiques. Elles apparaissent au cours du XIVe siecle et entrent en declin vers 1550. On trouvera ici: - d'une part, une description des deux formes, de leur evolution formelle, des origines a la fin du XIXe siecle. Le but de cette description est de permettre aux amateurs contemporains de s'exercer a la composition dans ces deux genres de poesie. - d'autre part, un choix de textes representatifs. L'ensemble est decoupe en cinq " strophes" (ou coupples), augmentees d'un " envoi" qui presente un tres petit nombre d'exemples du XXe siecle, siecle pour lequel il n'existe pas de "tradition" identifiable des formes ici evoquees. J'espere que l'expose descriptif (non normatif) qui est ici presente pourra contribuer a leur eventuelle renaissance au XXe siecle. Jacques Roubaud

A postmodern fairy tale might best describe Jacques Roubaud's delightful book The Princess Hoppy or, The Tale of Labrador. How else to describe a novel that reads like an Arthurian romance as rewritten by Lewis Carroll, with enough math puzzles to keep the game reader busy with a calculator for months? The tale concerns a princess, her faithful dog (who happens to be a wiz at math), four royal uncles always plotting, four royal aunts always potting, a lovesick hedgehog named Bartleby, two camels named North Dakota and South Dakota, four ducks who double as boats (thus called doats), and an amphibious blue whale named Barbara-to name only a few. (Even the Sun has a speaking role.) There are dramatic abductions, daring rescues, passages in hitherto untranscribed languages (Dog, Grasshopper, Duck), tales of unrequited love, allegorical interludes, poems, a playlet, and much more. (But no suspenders, the author promises.)Finally, there are 79 questions for readers of the novel, to see how closely they've been paying attention-for ultimately The Princess Hoppy is a giddy inquiry into how we read literary works. It is both an old-fashioned tale and an ultramodern hypertext, the oldest and the latest thing in fiction.