Tweeting in Style is a game of sorts, the results of which serve as an international collection of translations of Exercises in Style (Queneau, 1947) in which a each translation is limited to a total of 135 characters.

In the original Exercises, 99 versions of the same short story are told through a variety of perspectives. The boarding of a bus, some bumping of passengers, and a short conversation about a coat button.

Considering spoken and written French to be quite unique from one another, Queneau stated  “I came to realize that modern written French must free itself from the conventions which still hem in it, (conventions of style, spelling and vocabulary) and then it will soar like a butterfly away from the cocoon spun by the grammarians of the 16th century and the poets of the 17th century.”  In her 1958 English translation of the book, Barbra Wright tells the reader that Exercises was a work Queneau himself wished to see translated.

Given the nature and intent of Exercises, now seems a great time for authors the world over to begin translating the book’s stories into extremely short versions for Twitter in the language of their choice. You could do all this with posts on any social networking site, blog host, etc – but for this version I enjoy the tight 140-total-character constraint Twitter imposes - it feels more like a classic Oulipo-style rule and, much more of a challenge. An exercise in compression, perhaps.

A second version of this project: Whereas Queneau’s had versions such as Past, Blurb, and Sonnet – you may seek to create NEW interpretations such as WOW, Kewl, and Haxor.  

Why 135? As there are well over a billion tweets to date, we need a hash tag that keeps this project unique & it’s additions easy to locate. I am suggesting #rayq. The problem here of course is that #rayq requires a total of 5 characters – making translations even tighter and more challenging at 135. However, there are currently no other uses of #rayq, whereas #eis and others I tried were already being used frequently for other reasons. So, it’s not perfect but I’m OK with it if you are.

I’ll start things off with a version of Queneau’s initial entry, Notation via @bensisto

S bus at rush. longneck chap, snivel-tone, 26 - has beef w/ jostler b4 he nabs empty seat. l8r told at Cour de Rome: “get xtra button” #rayq