Georges Perec: The Machine (1972/2009)

One of Georges Perec’s Oulipian works, the radio play The Machine was written “in collaboration with his German translator and close friend, Eugen Helmle, in the heady atmosphere of the Saarbrücken literary circle that met at Helmle’s house. The Machine is an early example of writing inspired by the existence of modern computers (Perec’s other computer-simulation, a stage play entitled [L’Augmentation, appeared in English as The Art of Asking Your Boss for a Raise in 2011]). It pretends to analyze and recompose, demolish and then rebuild a short lyric by Goethe that is almost indescribably well-known to all speakers and learners of German. To do this, it uses pretty much all the rewriting devices invented to date by Oulipo, and at the outset of Perec’s apprenticeship to a group that included many scientists and mathematicians far more learned than he, it served as a kind of demonstration piece, or Meisterstuck. Its inventiveness, irreverence, and closing sadness has made it just about the best-loved and most frequently rebroadcast example of the Neues Hörspiel, the name given to the experimental reinvention of radio drama that was such a marked feature of German literary culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Perec is nothing it not international.” (from David Bellos’s Introduction to the Review‘s special issue)

First broadcast on 13 November 1968 by Saarländischer Rundfunk, Saarbrücken
First published in German as Die Maschine, Reclam, Stuttgart, 1972
English translation by Ulrich Schönherr
Published in Review of Contemporary Fiction 26(1), Special Issue on Georges Perec, 2009
61 pages (pp 33-93)
via lermontov

Review (M.A. Orthofer, The Complete Review, 2009)
Commentary (Florian Cramer, Words Made Flesh, 2005)
Commentary (Hans Hartje, 1997, in French)
Commentary on a live performance of the English translation (Third Angel, 2012)

Publisher

PDF

Guillaume Apollinaire: Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War, 1913–1916 (1918–) [FR, CZ, RU, EN, ES]

Calligrammes is a key work not only in Apollinaire’s own development but in the evolution of modern French poetry. Apollinaire–Roman by birth, Polish by name (Wilhelm-Apollinaris de Kostrowitski), Parisian by choice–died at thirty-eight in 1918. Nevertheless, he became one of the leading figures in twentieth-century poetry, a transitional figure whose work at once echoes the Symbolists and anticipates the work of the Surrealists.

Apollinaire described calligrams as “an idealisation of free verse poetry and typographical precision in an era when typography is reaching a brilliant end to its career, at the dawn of the new means of reproduction that are the cinema and the phonograph.” (from a letter to André Billy, quoted in a preface to the 1966 French edition by Michel Butor)

French edition
With a portrait of the author by Pablo Picasso
Publisher Mercvre de France, Paris, 1918
205 pages

English/French bilingual edition
Translated by Anne Hyde Greet
With an Introduction by S.I. Lockerbie
Commentary by Anne Hyde Greet and S.I. Lockerbie
Publisher University of California Press, 1980
ISBN 0520242122, 9780520242128
513 pages

Apollinaire in UbuWeb Sound
Wikipedia (EN)
Publisher (EN)

Calligrammes, poèmes de la paix et de la guerre 1913-1916 (via Gallica.BNF.fr)
Kaligramy (Czech, trans. Karel and Miloslav Baláš, 1948, incomplete)
Stikhi (includes “Kalligrammy”, pp 99-150, Russian, trans. M. Koudinov, 1967, DJVU)
Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War (1913-1916) (English/French, trans. Anne Hyde Greet, 1980, from UbuWeb)
Kalligrammy. Stikhotvoreniya mira i voyny 1913-1916 (Russian, 1999, TXT)
Caligramas: Poemas de la paz y de la guerra (1913-1916) (Spanish, trans. José Ignacio Velazquez, 1987, selection)
Idéogrammes (Spanish translation of Et moi aussi je suis peintre by Jorge Segovia, 2012)

Cahiers du Cinéma, vols. 1–4 (1951–78/1985–2000) & Special Issues in English (1966-67)

Cahiers du Cinéma [Notebooks on Cinema] is an influential French film magazine founded in 1951 by André Bazin, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. It developed from the earlier magazine Revue du Cinéma involving members of two Paris film clubs—Objectif 49 (Robert Bresson, Jean Cocteau and Alexandre Astruc, among others) and Ciné-Club du Quartier Latin. Initially edited by Éric Rohmer, it included amongst its writers Jacques Rivette, Jean-Luc Godard, Claude Chabrol and François Truffaut. (from Wikipedia)

This set of four volumes presents selected texts from the years 1951-1978 in English translation.

Cahiers du Cinéma: The 1950s: Neo-Realism, Hollywood, New Wave
An anthology from Cahiers du Cinéma, nos 1–102, April 1951 – December 1959
Edited by Jim Hillier
Publisher Harvard University Press, 1985
ISBN 0674090608
312 pages

Cahiers du Cinéma: 1960-1968: New Wave, New Cinema, Reevaluating Hollywood
An anthology from Cahiers du Cinéma, nos 103–207, January 1960 – December 1968
Edited by Jim Hillier
Publisher Harvard University Press, 1986
ISBN 0674090624
363 pages

Cahiers du Cinéma, Volume 3: 1969-1972: The Politics of Representation
An anthology from Cahiers du Cinéma, nos 210–239, March 1969 – June 1972
Edited by Nick Browne
Publisher Routledge, in association with the British Film Institute, 1990
ISBN 0415029872
352 pages

Cahiers du Cinema, Volume 4: 1973-1978: History, Ideology, Cultural Struggle
An anthology from Cahiers du Cinéma, nos 248–292, September 1973 – September 1978
Edited by David Wilson
With an Introduction by Bérénice Reynaud
Publisher Routledge, in association with the British Film Institute, 2000
ISBN 0415029880
323 pages

Publishers: Volume 1, Volume 2, Volume 3, Volume 4.

Volume 1 (1950s)
Volume 2 (1960-1968)
Volume 3 (1969-1972)
Volume 4 (1973-1978)

Cahiers du Cinema in English, ed. Andrew Sarris:
Number 1 (Jan 1966, 74 pp, 57 MB, via chef, added 2015-1-11),
Number 2 (Mar 1966, 82 pp, 65 MB, via chef, added 2015-1-12),
Number 3 (May 1966, 74 pp, 63 MB, via chef, added 2015-1-16),
Number 4 (Jul 1966, 66 pp, 57 MB, via chef, added 2015-1-16),
Number 5 (Sep 1966, 65 pp, 56 MB, via chef, added 2015-1-16),
Number 6 (Dec 1966, 66 pp, 57 MB, via chef, added 2015-1-16),
Number 7 (Jan 1967, 66 pp, 61 MB, via chef, added 2015-1-16),
Number 8 (Feb 1967, 68 pp, 44 MB, via LtJ),
Number 9 (Mar 1967, 65 pp, 59 MB, via chef, added 2015-1-17),
Number 10 (May 1967, 68 pp, 43 MB, via LtJ),
Number 11 (Sep 1967, 68 pp, 43 MB, via LtJ)
Number 12 (Dec 1967, 66 pp, 60 MB, via chef, added 2015-1-18)

See also: Daniel Fairfax: The Red Years of Cahiers du cinéma, 1968-1973 (2021).