Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes

Raymond Queneau’s Cent Mille Milliards de Poèmes is a set of ten sonnets. They are printed on card with each line on a separated strip, like a heads-bodies-and-legs book. As all ten sonnets have not just the same rhyme scheme but the same rhyme sounds, any lines from a sonnet can be combined with any from the nine others, so that there are 10¹⁴ (= 100,000,000,000,000) different poems. It would take some 200,000,000 years to read them all, even reading twenty-four hours a day.

Two full translations have been published, those by John Crombie and Stanley Chapman. There is also a full translation on the internet by Beverley Charles Rowe that uses the same rhyme sounds.