14 Songs and 1 Riddle is the recording of a performance at the Western Front (Canada)1 in 1977.
14 Songs and 1 Riddle was originally a text written by Robert Filliou in 1963. This text was translated into English in 1966 by George Brecht, then into German in 1968 by Didier Roth (these two artists, linked with the Fluxus movement, both worked with Robert Filliou). This text was to be published in a trilingual version by the publisher, Hansjörg Mayer (Stuttgart) in 1968.
In 1976, B.P. Nichol, Steve Mc Caffery and Dick Higgins (performing artists who worked at the Western Front) each made a more or less homophonic translation of the original text, and English and German translations. This homophonic translation - based more on the sound of words than on their meaning -: for example, "je m'appelle"(my name is) becomes "jim apple", or "quelle naissance"(what a birth), "kill nonsense" - was published in 1978 by Membrane Press (Milwaukee, Michigan) with the title Six Filliou.
During the performance of 14 Songs and 1 Riddle, Allan Capri read out the English translation by George Brecht, Vincent Trasov read Didier Roth's German translation, Steve Mc Caffery read his own homophonic translations, plus those of B.P. Nichol et de Dick Higging, and Robert Filliou read out extracts from his original text. The original text is a series of erotic/cranky poetry, with rhymes being made by repetition and enumeration. Alliteration, assonance, approximate homophonic are used, reminiscent of the "aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore" by Stéphane Mallarmé, Dadaist poetry (Duchamp, Schwitters), the futurists (Parole in Liberta, by Fortunato Depero), the lettrists, François Dufrène's audible, phonetic poems´
The creation process, present in the translation and the transcription, is also evident in the reading of the texts obtained. The performing artists read these texts separately or simultaneously, or as an echo, thus updating the approximate homophony process (the sound of the meaning and the meaning of the sound). It is a poetical experimentation of the language by the rigorous application of a perfectly arbitrary system of progression, up to the latest reading: Steve Mc Caffery's translation where each letter is replaced by its numeric value in Latin (C = 100, M = 1000, D = 50´).

Catherine Ouy

1 The Western Front, established in the Seventies in Vancouver (Canada), is one of the alternative centres for a group of artists who arrange exhibitions and distribution of their works themselves. The Western Front is directly oriented to event-related art (performances, concerts, public readings, dance, film shows...) and has set up a video production workshop.