English translation by Madeleine Velguth.
Poem reproduced courtesy of Editions Gallimard and the estate of Raymond Queneau.
Styrene’s Song Oh, time, suspend your bowl, oh plastic substance
The styrene was only a liquid, colorless,
Whence are you? Who are you? And what accounts
Somewhat explosive and not odorless.
For your rare qualities? Of what might you consist?
Do take a good look: it’s the only occasion
From what have you come? The object, as it now exists,
You’ll have to see what is in question.
Has remote ancestors! Let us in reverse unfold
Styrene is produced in great quantities
Its exemplary history. To begin with, the mold.
From superheated ethyl-benzenes.
Including the nest, mysterious entity,
Formerly styrene was extracted from benzoin,
It engenders the bowl or whatever else may be.
Product of the styrax, in Indonesia grown.
But the mold is itself enclosed in a press
And so from pipe to pipe we are going back,
That injects the paste and forms the piece,
Through the desert of canalizations’ track,
And thus most advantageously extrudes
Toward the raw materials, toward matter abstract
The finished object, ready to be used.
Circulating without end, effective and secret.
The mold is expensive; this could be a prohibition.
It is washed and distilled and then redistilled
But then it can be rented out, even to the competition.
And these are not mere stylistic exercises skilled:
Vacuum forming is another way of
Ethylbenzene can – and even should blow up
Obtaining objects: simple aspiration pays off.
If its temperature rises high enough up.
The warmed material, carefully gauged,
As for ethylbenzene, it comes, I have seen,
Is extruded in sheets at the previous stage.
From the combination of liquid benzene
To go into the injector a piston was needed, so
With ethylene, a simple vapor.
Too the isomantle – or the mantleiso –
Ethylene and benzene have as generator
Into which was fed… What? Polystyrene,
Either coal, or oil, or oil or coal.
Hardy and boisterous, rushing, not serene.
To make them both, they both can have a role.
Vibrating on the sieve, the granulated swarm
We could set off down this new avenue
Bustled happily in colors so warm.
To try to get of both of their origins a view.
Before being a granule it was an extruded string,
Does oil come from masses and masses of fish?
Strings of all tints, shades, tones, coloring.
It’s not really known, and coal’s origin’s a wish.
These strings had been, following a procedure,
Does oil come from plankton in labor?
A sausage to which a plasticating screw applied pressure.
A much debated question… growing ever grayer…
And what occasioned the agglutination?
And oil and coal went up in smoke
Pearls colored to suit every imagination.
When along came the chemist who, with luck’s stroke,
And how was it colored? Why, the pigment mixed
Turned these clouds solid and made of them
With polystyrene became homogeneously fixed.
Innumerable objects utilitarian.
But before that the product to dry was tumbled
Into new materials these obscure residues
And so, rotatingly, the product stumbled.
Are thus transformed. And unknown brews
It was scarcely born, our polystyrene.
Are still awaiting chemical mutation
A polymer produced by the simplest styrene.
So they can merit commercial exploitation.
Polymerization: this word, as we all know, Designates obtaining a complex product, and so Of higher molecular weight. And in a reactor, An elementary machine, work of an engineer, The molecules into pearls, clinging, formed And linked to each other. Yes – but before?
History