Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames: The d'Antin Manuscript (Mother Goose 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 Rhymes" with a strong French accent; it literally means "Words of Hours: Pods, Paddles." Here is van Rooten's version of Humpty Dumpty:

Nursery rhymes

The original English nursery rhymes that correspond to the numbered poems in Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames are as follows:

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 Mörder 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 similar in style and appearance to the original Mots d'Heures. The book contains a different selection of nursery rhymes.

Raymond Roussel

Raymond Roussel, was a French author, whose writings are considered to have influenced the Surrealists. Roussel, in writing his novel Locus Solus and elsewhere, used a technique that involved putting together in different contexts words that sound similar. The result produces unexpected and even irrational new meanings, and is a bit similar to van Rooten’s technique when he wrote Mots d'Heures: Gousses, Rames. The two books differ in that Roussel’s technique doesn’t involve bilingualism or humor, at least not in the same way. According to Marcel Jean, the surrealist artist, Marcel Duchamp, discovered Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames, and shared it with others.

Publication history