This is hi-larious. Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames : The D'Antin Manuscript is a 1967 book that purports to be a scholarly translation of a medieval manuscript, complete with arcane footnotes and analysis. What it is, in fact, is a French phonetic "translation" of nursery rhymes. It makes absolutely no sense in French, but if you can manage even a Pepe le Peu-level accent, you'll be able to make highly amusing sense of this book. [example: Try pronouncing the title until it sounds vaguely like "Mother Goose Rhymes."]
Of course, if you're reading it to a kid, you'll screw him up for life; he'll never be able to speak English OR French by the tie you're through.
The book was out of print, but now it's back.
Mots D'Heures: Gousses, Rames : The D'Antin Manuscript is $9 measly bucks at Amazon [via Andrew Hearst's blog, panopticist, which has some excerpt rhymes. Hearst turns out to be the guy who posed as a yuppie scum dad for the cover of American Gentrifier Magazine last year. What're the odds?]
