Internet Peter Baker's translation of introduction: During the last week of August 1939, while rumors of war invaded Paris, a young literature professor, Vincent Degrael, was invited to spend several days at a property in the neighborhood of le Havre that belonged to the parents of one of his colleagues, Denis Borrade. The eve of his departure, while he was exploring the library of his hosts searching for one of the books that one has always promised oneself to read, but which one generally only has time to flip through the pages negligently next to the fire before going to make up the fourth at bridge, Degrael fell upon a slim volume entitled The Winter Voyage, whose author, Hugo Vernier, was absolutely unknown to him, but the first pages of which made such a strong impression on him that he barely took the time to excuse himself from his friend and his hosts before going to read it in his room. The Winter Voyage was a sort of first-person narrative, situated in a semi-imaginary country where the heavy skies, somber forests, soft hills and canals divided by greenish locks evoked with an insidious insistence the countryside of Flanders or the Ardennes. The book was divided into two parts. The first, the shortest, retraced in sibylline terms a voyage with initiatory implications, where it seemed as if each stage was somehow blocked, and at the end of which the anonymous hero, a man that everything led to believe was young, arrived at the shore of a lake drowned in a thick fog; there a guide awaited him, one who led him to a tiny island in the middle of which arose a high and somber building; the young man had barely set foot on the narrow gangplank that constituted the only access to the island when a strange couple appeared: an old man and an old woman, both draped in long black capes, who seemed to emerge from the fog and who came and placed themselves on either side of him, seized him by the elbows, squeezed themselves as close as possible to his sides; almost welded one to the other, they clambered up a rocky path, penetrated the dwelling, climbed a wooden staircase and arrived at a room. There, as inexplicably as they had appeared, the old people disappeared, leaving the young man in the middle of the room. It was barely furnished: a bed covered with a flowered bedspread, a table, a chair. On the table a meal had been prepared, fava-bean soup, fish stew. From the room's high window the young man watched the full moon emerge from the clouds; then he sat at the table and began to eat. And it was on this solitary supper that the first part came to a close. The second part constituted in itself almost four fifths of the book and it quickly became apparent that the short narrative which preceded it was nothing but an anecdotal pretext. It was a long confession of an exacerbated lyricism, mixed up with ems, enigmatic maxims, and blasphemous incantations. He had barely begun to read when Vincent Degrael experienced an unsettling sensation that was impossible for him to define precisely, but which did nothing but grow as long as he turned the pages of the volume with his hand trembling more and more: it was as if the sentences that he had before his eyes had suddenly become familiar to him, set themselves to recalling to him irresistibly something, as if with the reading of each one came to impose itself, or rather to superimpose itself, the memory both fluid and precise of a sentence almost exactly the same he would have already read elsewhere; as if these words, more tender than caresses or more perfidious than poison, these words in turn limpid or hermetic, obscene or warm, sparkling, labyrinthian, and endlessly oscillating like the crazy needle of a compass between a hallucinated violence and a fabulous serenity, sketched a confused configuration where one thought to rediscover mixed up together Germain Nouveau and Tristan Corbiere, Villiers and Banville, Rimbaud and Verhaeren, Charles Cros and Leon Bloy. Vincent Degrael, the field of whose preoccupations covered precisely these authors he had been preparing for several years a thesis on "The Evolution of French Poetry from the Parnassians to the Symbolists" believed at first that he had effectively already read this book by chance during the course of his research, then, more reasonably, that he was the victim of an illusion of dejà vu, as when he simple taste of a mouthful of tea takes you back all of a sudden thirty years to England, it had taken almost nothing, a sound, an odor, a gesture maybe that instant of hesitation that he had remarked before taking the book down from the shelf where it had been classified between Verhaeren and Viele-Griffin, or maybe the avid manner with which he had scanned the first few pages so that a fallacious memory of an anterior reading had come palimpsestically to perturb to the point of rendering impossible the reading he was in the process of doing. But soon doubt was no longer possible and Degrael had to give in to the evidence: maybe his memory was playing tricks on him, maybe it was only coincidence that Vernier seemed to borrow from Catulle Mendes his "seul chacal hantant des sepulcres de pierres," perhaps one could take into account fortuitous encounters, marked influences, voluntary homages, unconscious copies, the desire to parody, the taste for citations, happy coincidences, perhaps one could consider that expressions such as "le vol du temps," "brouillards d'hiver," "obscur horizon," "grottes profondes," "vaporeuses fontaines," "lumieres incertaines des sauvages sous-bois," belonged in common to all poets and it was therefore just as normal to encounter them in a paragraph of Hugo Vernier as in the stanzas of Jean Moreas, but it was absolutely impossible not to recognize, word for word or almost, by the simple happenstance of reading, here a fragment of Rimbaud ("Je voyais franchement une mosquee à la place d'une usine, une ecole de tambours faite par des anges") or of Mallarme ("l'hiver lucide, saison de l'art serein"), there of Lautreamont ("Je regardai dans un miroir cette bouche meurtrie par ma propre volonte"), of Gustave Kahn ("Laisse expirer la chanson mon c ur pleure / Un bistre rampe autour des clartes. Solonnel / Le silence est monte lentement, il apeure / Les bruits familiers du vague personnel") or, barely odified, of Verlaine ("dans l'interminable ennui de la plaine, la neige luisait comme du sable. Le ciel etait couleur de cuivre. Le train glissait sans un murmure "), etc. It was four in the morning when Degrael finished reading The Winter Voyage. He had located about thirty borrowings. There were certainly others. The book by Hugo Vernier seemed to be nothing other than a prodigious compilation of the poets from the end of the nineteenth century, an infinite diorama, a mosaic wherein each piece was the work of an other. But at the very moment when he forced himself to imagine this unknown author who had sought in the books of others the very matter of his text, when he was trying to imagine to its very limits this insane and admirable project, Degrael felt growing in him a disturbing suspicion: he had just remembered that in taking the book from its bookcase, he had mechanically noted the date, moved by the reflex of the young researcher who never consults a work without taking down the bibliographic materials. Maybe he was wrong, but he believed he had read: 1864. He verified this, heart beating. He had read well: this meant that Vernier had "cited" a verse by Mallarme two years in advance, plagiarized Verlaine ten years before his "Ariettes oubliees," written lines by Gustave Kahn almost a quarter of a century before he did! This meant that Lautreamont, Germain Nouveau, Rimbaud, Corbiere and many others were nothing but the copyists of a genial and neglected poet who, in a once-in-a-lifetime work, had known how to bring together the very substance from which three or four generations of authors would find their nourishment! At least, evidently, if the publication date figuring on the work were not false. But Degrael refused to envisage this hypothesis: his discovery was too beautiful, too evident, too necessary not to be true, and already he imagined the vertiginous consequences it was going to ovoke: the prodigious scandal that would be constituted by the public revelation of this "premonitory anthology," the amplitude of its implications, the enormous putting into question of everything that critics and professors of literature had imperturbably professed for years and years. And his impatience was such that, renouncing sleep for good, he rushed to the library to try to learn a little more about this Vernier and about his work. He found nothing. The few dictionaries and indexes present in the Borrade library ignored the existence of Hugo Vernier. Neither the senior Borrades nor Denis could teach him anything more: the book had been purchased at an auction, ten years ago already, at Honfleur; they had glanced at it without paying much attention. Throughout the day, with the help of Denis, Degrael proceeded to undertake a systematic examination of the work, going to seek scattered fragments in dozens of anthologies and collections: they found almost three hundred and fifty, divided among close to thirty authors: the most celebrated as the most obscure poets of the last part of the century, and even some prose writers (Leon Bloy, Ernest Hello), seemed to have made of The Winter Voyage their bible, where they had sought the best of themselves: Banville, Richepin, Huysmans, Charles Cros, Leon Valade brushed up against Mallarme and Verlaine and others at present fallen into obscurity who were named Charles de Pomairols, Hippolyte Vaillant, Maurice Rollinat (the godson of George Sand), Laprade, Albert Merat, Charles Morice or Antony Valabregue. Degrael noted carefully in a notebook the list of authors and references for their borrowings and regained Paris, firmly decided to pursue his researches the very next day at the Bibliotheque nationale. But events did not permit him to do so. At Paris, his draft notice awaited him. Mobilized at Compiegne, he found himself, without really even having the time to know why, at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, passed over into Spain and from there to England and didn't return to France until the end of 1945. During the entire war, he had carried his notebook with him and had miraculously succeeded in never losing it. His researches had evidently not progressed very much, but he had nonetheless made what for him was an important discovery: at the British Museum he had been able to consult the Catalogue general de la librairie française and the Bibliographie de la France and had been able to confirm his formidable hypothesis: The Winter Voyage (Le Voyage d'hiver), by Vernier (Hugo), had well been published in 1864, at Valenciennes, by the Herve Bros., Printers-Booksellers, and submitted to legal deposition as are all works published in France, and been deposited at the Bibliotheque nationale where the call number Z 87912 had been attributed to it. Named professor at Beauvais, Vincent Degrael devoted from then on all his spare time to The Winter Voyage. His avid researches into the diaries and correspondence of the greater part of the poets of the latter part of the nineteenth century rapidly convinced him that Hugo Vernier had, in his time, known the celebrity that he had merited: such notes as "received today a letter from Hugo," or "wrote a long letter to Hugo," "read Hugo all night," or again the celebrated "Hugo, only Hugo" by Valentin Havercamp, didn't refer at all to "Victor" Hugo, but rather to that bad-boy poet whose brief work had apparently singed the hands of everyone who had touched it. The startling contradictions that literary criticism and history had never been able to explain thus found their only logical solution, and it was evidently by thinking of Hugo Vernier and his Winter Voyage, that Rimbaud had written "Je est un autre" (I is an other) and Lautreamont "La poesie doit être faite par tous et non par un" (Poetry should be made by everyone and not by one alone). But the more he located the reponderant place that Hugo Vernier should have occupied in the literary history of France at the end of the last century, the less was he able to furnish tangible proofs: for he had never again been able to place his hands on a copy of The Winter Voyage. The one which he had consulted had been destroyed at the same time as the villa during the bombing of le Havre; the copy deposited at the Bibliotheque nationale was not in its place when he asked for it and only at the end of tedious searches was he able to learn that the book had been, in 1926, sent to a binder who had never received it. All of the researches that he had others make for him, literally dozens and hundreds of librarians, archivists, and booksellers, proved worthless, and Degrael soon convinced himself that the five hundred copies of the edition had been voluntarily destroyed by the very ones it had so directly inspired. About the life of Hugo Vernier, Vincent Degrael learned next to nothing. An unhoped-for footnote, unearthed in the obscure Biographie des hommes remarquables de la France du Nord et de la Belgique (Verviers, 1882), informed him that Vernier had been born in Vimy (Pas-de-Calais) on September 3, 1836. But all of the civil records of the town of Vimy had been burned in 1916, at the same time as the copies deposited at the hall of records in Arras. No death certificate had ever apparently been filed. For almost thirty years, Vincent Degrael forced himself in vain to reassemble the proofs of the existence of this poet and of his work. At the time of Degrael's death, at the psychiatric hospital in Verrieres, some of his former students undertook to classify the immense pile of documents and manuscripts he had left behind: among these figured a thick binder bound in black cloth and whose label read, carefully calligraphied, The Winter Voyage: the first eight pages retraced the history of these vain researches; the three hundred and ninety-two others were blank. In this book, other oulipo authors retell Perec's story. -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.