Obviously, and contrary to common belief, you can’t find everything on the Internet—nor in Swedish public and research libraries.
I’ve been looking out for the ALGOL poems since your post, and—violà!—I’ve found a French anthology of Oulipian texts that includes a dozen or so of Noël Arnauds ALGOL Poems. The original «Poèmes ALGOL» were 96 pages, apparently, including postface etc., so there has to be more of them somewhere.
To my surprise (since ALGOL keywords are in English) the poems seems to be all in French. Arnaud has translated the 24 keywords of plain vanilla ALGOL to French and then used these French words as the basis for his ALGOL poems.
[code]true vrai
false faux
goto aller à
if si
then alors
else sinon
for pour
do faire
step pas
until jusqu’à
while tant que
comment commentaire
begin début
end fin
own rémanent
Boolean booléen
integer entier
real réel
array tableau
switch aguillage
procedure procédure
string chaîne
label étiquette
value valeur
[/code]
As a translation of ALGOL, Arnaud’s translation has a few flaws, I guess—«aller à» and «faire» are not imperatives (but infinitives) while «pas», «début», and «fin» are not verbs at all (but nouns); still (as English doesn’t wear its syntactical categories on its sleeves, anyway), you might expect that the resulting poems would be eminently retranslatable into English, but you would be disappointed.
Here’s an example:
Whatever that means (and I’ll leave it to the French speakers of the forum to tell us what it actually means.), it can’t very well be anything like
Here’s another:
This, I think, means (though the parenthetical remark to the title warns there is not much meaning in it):
«Pas» in French meaning both “step” and “not”!
And yet another one (said to be richer in meaning):
I guess this means:
Note that in that last one, Arnaud introduces the word «faut», meaning “has to”, which is pronounced just like the base vocabulary word «faux» (meaning “false”).
There’s a deep lesson here (perhaps) to be learned with regard to translation in general. I’m not positive just what it is, though.
Several of the other poems are composed not directly out of Arnauds French ALGOL vocabulary itself but of syllables (as pronounced, not as spelled) contained in that vocabulary. Here we go:
using syllables from the following French ALGOL words (pronounced identically, though spelled differently when needed): tabLEAU, déBUT, commENTAIRE, ENTIER, vaLEUR, TANT QUE.
Arnaud also plays other tricks with his base vocabulary—changing the consonants in all the words he uses for another e.g. S as in
transforming the words:
and meaning something like
(Unless this would be a more faithful translation!
)