Dizains

"Marcel Bénabou is a Professor of Ancient History at the University of Paris 7-Denis Diderot. This work of the Oulipo, a French literary group dedicated to constrained writing, reorders a bank of lines to produce unique dizains. The dizain is a French poetic form, a 10-line stanza traditionally of a fixed number of syllables in each line, with a typical rhyme scheme of a-b-a-b-b-c-c-d-c-d. Here, Bénabou has altered the form: each line is an Alexandrine, a line of 12 syllables, in which two halves of 6 syllables each are separated by a caesura. And the poem consists of 6 pairs of rhyming lines. In the generation of each dizain, the lines are permuted such that each pair can be separated by 0, 1, or 2 other lines. These 10 lines, rearranged according to this metric, provide 145,920 possible dizains. Dizains is part of a tradition of such permutational poetry, which here takes advantage of the capabilities of computational systems to re-order the lines automatically. In the translation, as much of the meaning of the lines as possible is preserved, along with their ability to be reordered, though the verse loses the metrical qualities of the original." -- from Electronic Literature Collection, Volume 3