Harry Mathews (1930-2017) was a writer -- novelist, poet, essayist, and translator --whose work interests me a great deal. He was the only American member of the original Oulipo -- a group formed around 1960 of writers and mathematicians who experimented with a variety of constraints designed to force new arrangements of words and thoughts. An example cited in a NYTimes feature that followed his death on January 25 illustrates the challenges he set for himself: he rewrote a poem by Keats using the vocabulary of a Julia Child recipe. What some might have seen as pointless, Mathews found intellectually liberating.
Mathews served as Paris Editor of the Paris Review from 1989 to 2003 and the Spring 2007 issue offers an interview. The summer 1998 issue offers samples of his perverbs -- that is, permuted proverbs:
"The word perverb was invented
by Paris review editor Maxine Groffsky
to describe the result obtained by crossing two proverbs.
For example, "All roads lead to Rome" and "A rolling stone gathers no moss"
give us "All roads gather moss" and "A rolling stone leads to Rome"
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