Complete Poems

by Blaise Cendrars

Paperback, 1993

Status

Available

Call number

811

Genres

Fiction

Publication

University of California Press (1993), Edition: First, 424 pages

Description

Blaise Cendrars was a pioneer of modernist literature. The full range of his poetry--from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor--offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now. Here, for the first time in English translation, is the complete poetry of a legendary twentieth-century French writer. Cendrars, born Frederick Louis Sauser in 1887, invented his life as well as his art. His adventures took him to Russia during the revolution of 1905 (where he traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway), to New York in 1911, to the trenches of World War I (where he lost his right arm), to Brazil in the 1920s, to Hollywood in the 1930s, and back and forth across Europe. With Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob he was a pioneer of modernist literature, working alongside artist friends such as Chagall, Delaunay, Modigliani, and Léger, composers Eric Satie and Darius Milhaud, and filmmaker Abel Gance. The range of Cendrars's poetry--from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor--offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now.… (more)

Media reviews

Saturday Review of Literature

Now’s the time for the Homeric hymns of the railroads. Blaise Cendrars has written some of them already in salty French sonorous and direct as the rattle of the great express trains... From Paris has spread in every direction a certain esperanto of the arts that has “modern” for its

trademark. Blaise Cendrars is an itinerant Parisian well versed in this as in many other dialects. He is a kind of medicineman trying to evoke the things that are our cruel and avenging gods. Turbines, triple-expansion engines, dynamite, high tension coils. Navigation, speed, flight, annihilation. No medicine has been found strong enough to cope with them; in cubist Paris they have invented some fetishes and gris-gris that many are finding useful.

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New Boston Review

Cendrars was one of the first to embrace “the modern” in the full sense of the term. He saw clearly where the age was headed: toward speed, machinery, violence. The basis of human relationships was changing, and this change called for a new way of writing poetry. He responded. He wanted to do

for poetry what the cubists were doing for painting. But where they worked spatially, looking for means by which to transmit all visual aspects of an object, Cendrars was concerned with time and events: he was after simultaneity, situations registered from all geographic and temporal perspectives. Prose of the Trans-Siberian sent out shock waves when it first appeared. The poem made use of salad techniques: very long lines punctuated with lines of one or two words, abrupt transitions, shifting tenses, and imagery that anticipated the surrealists. By setting the narrative on a moving train, Cendrars was able to explore nuances of sound and tempo. This he did with the skilled ear of a jazz musician.

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New York Times

As a cowboy poet, Cendrars is, I’m afraid, only a cooey-booey. As a poet of tourism, he is less convincing than Valéry Larbaud and his world-wandering, world-weary billionaire, A.O. Barnabooth. Yet convincing he is, not for what he pretends to be, but for what he is. He is the poet of the lumpen

demimonde, of the sword-swallowers, escape-artists and streetcorner acrobats in the cheap hotels back of the Gaîté, of the worn and innocent whores of the Passage du Départ with runs in their stockings and holes in their shoes... One of Cendrars’s most important contributions to French literature is his prosody. He began writing vers libre in Vielé-Griffin’s sense, which is not to be translated “free verse,” but which in Cendrars’s case was a kind of rushing, sprung alexandrine or hexameter or hendecasyllable... The youngest generation of American poets should find Cendrars stimulating. It’s a long time since poetry like this, as good as this, has been written in America. Nothing less like the imitation Jacobean verse of the older Establishment and the Pound-Williams-Olson verse of the new Establishment could be imagined.

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