Blaise Cendrars

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Cendrars' portrait by Amadeo Modigliani (1917)
Cendrars' portrait by Amadeo Modigliani (1917)

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Frédéric Louis Sauser (September 1, 1887 – January 21, 1961), better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss novelist and poet naturalized French in 1916. A writer of considerable influence in the modernist movement.

[edit] Life

He was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchâtel, Switzerland and at age 15, he left home to work for a jewel merchant that provided him with the opportunity to travel. Throughout his life he spent much of his time traveling, visiting such places as China, Mongolia, Siberia, Persia, the Caucasus and Russia.

In 1910, he moved to Paris where he met the poet Guillaume Apollinaire mutually influencing each other's work. Cendrars' poem Paques a New York was of critical influence over Apollinaire's poem Zone. Cendrars would create a style based on photographic impressions, themes, and reflections in which nostalgia and disillusion were blended with a boundless vision of the world. In 1913, he demonstrated this through his lengthy poem titled in English as "The Prose of the Transsiberian and of the Little Jehanne of France" in which he described his world journey. His writing career was interrupted by World War I when he fought in the French Foreign Legion. He was sent to the front line in the Somme where from mid-December 1914 until February 1915 he was in the line at Frise (at La Grenouillère and the Bois de la Vache). He described this experience in his famous books "La main coupée" ("The Severed Hand") and "J'ai tué" ("I have killed"). It was during the bloody attacks in Champagne in September of 1915 that Blaise Cendrars lost his right arm and was discharged from the army.

Jean Cocteau introduced him to Eugenia Errázuriz, who proved a supportive if at times possessive patron. Around 1918 he visited her house and was so taken with the simplicity of the décor, he was inspired to write the sequence of poems D'Oultremer à Indigo (From Ultramarine to Indigo). He stayed with Eugenia in her house in Biarritz, in a room decorated with murals by Pablo Picasso. At this time he was also driving an old Alfa Romeo which had been "colour-coordinated" by Georges Braque.[1] Cendrars became an important part of the era of artistic creativity going on in Montparnasse at the time, his writings a literary epic of the modern adventurer. He was friends with Ernest Hemingway and Henry Miller plus many of the writers, painters, and sculptors living in Paris. In 1918, his friend Amedeo Modigliani painted his portrait.

After the war, he became involved in the movie industry in Italy, France, and the United States. Needing to generate sufficient income, after 1925 he stopped publishing poetry and focused on novels or short stories.

The artist Sonia Delaunay-Terk, a life-long friend, was one of the first to attempt to "illustrate" his poems in terms of painting. They worked together in the first edition of the Transsibérien, a long poem printed in folded form (2 meters). The length of the whole edition, adds up to the heigh of the Eiffel tower, and was called "the first simultaneous poem" by Cendrars. This is especially important since this was an outgrowth of Robert Delaunay and other's experiments in proto-abstract expressionism. Similarly, Gertrude Stein was attempting to write prose in the manner of abstractness of Picasso's works.

During World War II, tragedy struck when his youngest son was killed in an accident while escorting American planes in Morocco. In occupied France, the Gestapo listed Cendrars as a Jewish writer of "French expression."

In 1961, Cendrars was awarded the Paris Grand Prix for literature. Most of his works were translated into English including the long poem "Le Panama ou Les Aventures de Mes Sept Oncles" translated by John Dos Passos and published in the United States in 1931.

Blaise Cendrars died in Paris.

[edit] Selected poems

  • "Les Paques à New York" - (1912)
  • "La Prose du Transsibérien et la petite Jehanne de France" - (1913)
  • "Le Panama ou Les Aventures de Mes Sept Oncles" - (1918)

[edit] Selected stories and novels

  • "Profond aujourd'hui" - (1917)
  • ""J'ai tué" - (1918)
  • "La Fin du monde filmée par l'Ange N.-D." - (1919)
  • "L'Or" - (1925) In English, Sutter's Gold, a fictionalized story of John Sutter, a Swiss pioneer, who started the great gold rush in the northern California
  • "Moravagine" - (1926) (novel)
  • "Dan Yack" - (1927) (novel)
  • "Le Plan de l'Aiguille" - (1929) In English, "Antarctic Fugue"
  • "Les Confessions de Dan Yack" - (1929) (novel)
  • "Une nuit dans la forêt" - (1929)
  • "Comment les Blancs sont d'anciens Noirs" - (1930)
  • "Rhum--L'aventure de Jean Galmot" - (1930).
  • "Hollywood, La Mecque du cinéma" - (1936)
  • "Histoires vraies" - (1937)
  • "La Vie dangereuse" - (1938)
  • "D'Oultremer à indigo" - (1940)
  • "L'Homme foudroyé" - (1945)
  • "La Main coupée" - (1946) (in French)
  • "Bourlinguer" - (1948)
  • "Le Lotissement du ciel" - (1949)
  • "La Banlieue de Paris" - (1949)
  • "Nöel aux autre coins du monde" - (1953) (novel) In English "Christmas at the Four Corners of the World" (1994)
  • "Emmène-moi au bout du monde!... " - (1956)
  • "Du monde entier au cœur du monde" Poésies complètes - (1957)
  • "Trop c'est trop" - (1957)
  • "A l'aventure" - (1959)

[edit] External links

[edit] References

[edit] Notes

  1. ^ Richardson, op. cit. pages 9 and 14.