About the Book
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.
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.