From Action into Poetry

...J'ai peur...

...Immediately upon turning to his actual writings, to his poems and the novels which are really poetic fantasies in prose, one realizes that, though the process of writing may demand an element of reclusion from the world of action, it is nevertheless, in the case of Cendrars, the world of action that irradiates the writing...

...Malraux, Camus, Saint-Exupery, Aragon, show in their differing ways the same dichotomy, but none with quite the poetic intensity with which Cendrars contrived to illuminate his apparently divided self-image...

...Je chancelle comme un homme ivre sur les trottoirs...

...From every direction, when one observes the developments in literature and the visual arts during the 1960s, the feeling of d?©ja vu streams back towards Cendrars...

...A hideous old beggar gives me the cold eye...

...Je n'ose pas tourner la t??te...

...it has not even that one possible virtue of a lame rendering, exactness...

...If he had wanted to be anything, he could have been it most successfully...

...The concreteness of mind that makes Cendrars a chosiste ancestor inspires the very texture of his verse...

...Un effroyable dr??le m'a jet?© un regard...

...Someone's there...

...It is the intractability of Cendrars' verse that really underlies Professor Walter Albert's failure, in the Selected Writings he has edited, to present the poet adequately to English-speaking readers...

...Less impressionable and less gushing men have felt much the same as Miller, so that Cendrars, who was not single-minded enough to become a major writer of the calibre of Gide or even Malraux, is remembered less for his actual works than for what Wilde would have called a symbolic relationship to his age...

...Aigu, puis a pass?©, mauvais, comme un poignard...

...This was Henry Miller's feeling about the life-battered Cendrars in 1939, when the more significant part of his career was ended...

...Yet Cendrars was something tougher and more enduring than a mere literary figure or a cry in the wilderness...

...Compare the original with what comes out at the other end of the meat-grinder...

...One face was that of the man of restless action: the youth who travelled to Siberia as a jewel peddler at the time of the Russo-Japanese War, the Foreign Legionary of 1914, the avant-garde film-maker of the 1920s, the one-armed, middle-aged wanderer who spent the years between the wars travelling restlessly between Europe and Latin America...

...The compression of action and literature into a single dense, kaleidoscopic career was not, of course, peculiar to Cendrars in his era of French writing...

...Not all the translations are as bad as this, but none of them really trap the tone and texture of the original...

...The translation not only loses all the sound quality and all the nuances of the original...

...The other face was that of the half-willing recluse who regarded writing as "a kind of abdication" and once observed that "hemmed-in lives are densest.' It was the face of the man who voluntarily abandoned the writing of poetry in his middle age and who in the end, when World War II and his own ageing had rendered action less possible, retired for years into complete inactivity, to emerge, in his 60s, into a last phase completely dedicated to literary creation...

...Cendrars writes: Les rues se font d?©sertes et deviennent plus noires...

...And as English it is ugly and poverty-stricken...

...I don't dare turn my head...

...For the worst, there is the doggerel into which Scott Bates translates "Les P??ques ?  New York...

...J finally stop...

...They are getting dark...

...I am dizzy...

...If the chosiste anti-novelists of the last decade had been as anxious to find ancestors as the Surrealists before them, a claim to Cendrars as the great precursor of contemporary anti-literary trends might be well-founded...

...His magnificent "Prose du Transsib?©rien" was the last and probably the best of all the poetic celebrations of the railway age, and before World War I he had discovered that poetry of the advertisement hoardings which the Pop artists of our own day have exploited...

...His poetry is unique, so much its own self that it is virtually untranslatable...

...There follows a workmanlike biographical and critical introduction by Professor Albert which, though it runs to only 44 pages, is the most elaborate study of Cendrars yet done in English...

...He was also a pioneer in the esthetics of utility and functionalism, and before Marshall McLuhan can have left kindergarten, Cendrars had already hit upon the implications which modern communications and the developing mass media might have for the arts...

...The Selected Writings certainly informs the reader on Cendrars-his life and attitude-but if he does not read French it will give him little idea of the peculiarity of Cendrars as a writer...

...The core of the book, 180 pages, consists of the poems, including three major works, "Les P??ques ?  New York," "Prose du Transsib?©rien" and "Le Panama," together with a good selection from the shorter poems...

...In his time, like his friend Guillaume Apollinaire, he seemed a great deal larger than his actual writings...

...I am afraid of those shadows the buildings project...

...He belonged to an age more artistically vital than our own, and his work remains in the French literary tradition as a durable even if minor classic...

...he treats words as if they were as solid as objects, and the freedom of his form only masks the extreme density of the fabric of his writing, which makes it superficially unse-ductive but often extraordinarily compelling...

...J'ai peur...

...It would be hard to find a less abstract writer...

...That ended only with his death, at the age of 74, in 1961...

...For the contradiction in Cendrars was apparent rather than real...

...J'ai le vertige...

...I am afraid...

...Quelqu'un me suit...

...Et je m'arr??te expr??s...

...I am afraid...

...The French originals are paralleled with English translations by various hands which range from incompetent travesty to good stabs at an impossible task...

...Un pas clopin-clopant saute de plus en plus pr??s...

...This improbable Swiss, who understandably abandoned in youth the smug, burgherly name of Sauser, had become by middle age a self-constructed myth...

...On the pavement I stagger like a drunk...

...At the end of the volume are less than 50 pages of translated bits and fragments which give an appallingly scrappy idea of Cendrars' quite voluminous prose works...

...If he does, he will be much better off with one of the French collections of the verse, like that in the Po??tes d'aujourd'hui, supplemented by one or more of the four prose works published inexpensively in the Livre de Poche series...

...A step coming closer leaps clippetyclop...

...He did not want...

...The collection begins with a Preface by Henry Miller, nine-tenths Milleresque flapdoodle, with half-a-dozen wise and perceptive sentences looking out like shrewd eyes...

...so devoted was he to the concrete aspects of the life surrounding him that in his poems and prose writings one moves always through a thick flood of things...

...J'ai peur des grands pans d'ombre que les maisons projettent...

...Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Author, "The Paradox of Oscar Wilde," and "The Crystal Spirit: A Study of George Orwell" Blaise Cendrars impressed almost everyone who knew him with the sense of potentialities willingly unfulfilled...

...This is how Bates gives it back to us: The streets are empty...

...And wicked as a knife goes clipclopping on by...