Frédéric Louis Sauser better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss novelist and poet naturalized
FrenchThe French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the modernist movement.
Early years
He was born in
La Chaux-de-FondsLa Chaux-de-Fonds is a Swiss city of the district of La Chaux-de-Fonds in the canton of Neuchâtel. It is located in the Jura mountains at an altitude of 1000 m, a few kilometres from the French border. After Geneva and Lausanne, it is the third largest city of Romandie, the French-speaking part of...
,
Neuchâtel,
SwitzerlandSwitzerland name of one of the Swiss cantons. ; ; ; or ), in its full name the Swiss Confederation , is a federal republic consisting of 26 cantons, with Bern as the seat of the federal authorities. The country is situated in Western Europe,Or Central Europe depending on the definition....
, to a bourgeois francophone family. Initially, they attempted to send young Frédéric to a German boarding school, but he ran away. After, they tried enrolling him in a school in Neuchâtel, but he had little enthusiasm for his studies. Finally, in 1904, he left school due to poor performance and began an apprenticeship with a Swiss watchmaker in Russia.
It was in St Petersburg that he began to write, thanks to the encouragement of R.R., a librarian at the National Library of Russia. There he wrote the poem La Légende de Novagorode, which R.R. translated into Russian. Supposedly fourteen copies were made, but Cendrars claimed to have no copies of it, and none could be located during his lifetime. In 1995, the Bulgarian poet
Kiril KadiiskiBulgarian Poet, essayist and translator born on 16 June 1947.Kiril Kadiiski is a well-known as a translator inside his native Bulgaria, he is famous as a poet in France where he is the Director of the Bulgarian Cultural Institute...
found one of the Russian translations in
SofiaSofia is the capital and largest city of Bulgaria and the 12th largest city in the European Union with a population of 1.27 million people. It is located in western Bulgaria, at the foot of Mount Vitosha and approximately at the centre of the Balkan Peninsula.Prehistoric settlements were excavated...
. Today the authenticity of the document is still contested.
In 1907, he returned to Switzerland, where he studied medicine at the University of Berne. During this period he wrote his first verified poems, Séquences, influenced by
Rémy de Gourmont'sRemy de Gourmont was a French Symbolist poet, novelist, and influential critic. He was widely read in his era, and an important influence on Blaise Cendrars...
Le Latin Mystique.
After a short stay in Paris, he traveled to New York, where he arrived on 11 December 1911. Between 6–8 April 1912 he wrote his long poem, Les Pâques à New York, his first important contribution to modern literature, and signed it, for the first time, Blaise Cendrars.
He returned to Paris in the summer of 1912, now convinced that poetry was his vocation. With Emil Szittya, an anarchist writer, he started Les Hommes Nouveaux, a journal and a publishing house, where he published Les Pâques à New York and Séquences. He soon became acquainted with many of Parisian artists and writers, such as
ChagallMarc Chagall Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century."According to art historian Michael J...
,
LégerJoseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style...
,
SurvageLéopold Survage was an important French painter of Russian-Danish-Finnish descent born in Vilmanstrand, Finland .-Biography:At a young age, Survage was...
,
ModiglianiAmedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...
, Csaky,
ArchipenkoAlexander Porfyrovych Archipenko was a Ukrainian avant-garde artist, sculptor, and graphic artist.-Biography:...
,
Jean HugoVictor Jean Hugo is a South African professional golfer.Hugo matriculated at Paul Roos Gymnasium in Stellenbosch, South Africa in 1994 and graduated three years later with a BA Degree from the University of Stellenbosch prior to becoming a professional golfer...
and
Robert DelaunayRobert Delaunay was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee...
. Most notably, he encountered
Guillaume ApollinaireWilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki, known as Guillaume Apollinaire was a French poet, playwright, short story writer, novelist, and art critic born in Italy to a Polish mother....
. The two poets mutually influenced each other's work. Cendrars' poem Les Pâques à 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 FranceLa prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France is a collaborative artists' book by Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay-Terk...
in which he described his world journey. The work was accompanied by the paintings of
Sonia Delaunay-TerkSonia Delaunay was a Jewish-French artist who, with her husband Robert Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. Her work extends to painting, textile design and stage set design...
. The long poem printed in folded form (2 m), was called "the first simultaneous poem" by Cendrars. This is especially important since this was an outgrowth of
Robert DelaunayRobert Delaunay was a French artist who, with his wife Sonia Delaunay and others, cofounded the Orphism art movement, noted for its use of strong colours and geometric shapes. His later works were more abstract, reminiscent of Paul Klee...
and other's experiments in proto-
abstract expressionismAbstract expressionism was an American post–World War II art movement. It was the first specifically American movement to achieve worldwide influence and put New York City at the center of the western art world, a role formerly filled by Paris...
. Similarly,
Gertrude SteinGertrude Stein was an American writer, poet and art collector who spent most of her life in France.-Early life:...
was attempting to write prose in the manner of abstractness of
Picasso'sPablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
works. Cendrars liked to claim that the poem's first printing of one hundred fifty copies would, when unfolded, reach the height of the Eiffel Tower.
Cendrars' relationship with painters like
ChagallMarc Chagall Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century."According to art historian Michael J...
and
LégerJoseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style...
lead him to write revolutionnary abstract short poems called "19 elastic poems" in 1919, some of which are tributes to those fellow artists. Moreover, a book containing Cendrars' prose combined with
LégerJoseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style...
's drawings was born from the collaboration of the two artists in 1954 : "Paris,ma ville" ("Paris, my town") is a work of art praising their love for the french capital. Their collaborative project was suddenly interrupted by
LégerJoseph Fernand Henri Léger was a French painter, sculptor, and filmmaker. In his early works he created a personal form of Cubism which he gradually modified into a more figurative, populist style...
's death in 1955, and its publication was delayed until the 1980s.
The Left-Handed Poet
His writing career was interrupted by
World War IWorld War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. When it began, he and Italian writer
Ricciotto CanudoRicciotto Canudo was an early Italian film theoretician who lived primarily in France. He saw cinema as "plastic art in motion". He gave cinema the label "the Seventh Art", which is still current in French....
appealed to other foreign artists to join the French army in battle. He himself joined the
French Foreign LegionThe French Foreign Legion is a unique military service wing of the French Army established in 1831. The foreign legion was exclusively created for foreign nationals willing to serve in the French Armed Forces...
. He was sent to the front line in the
SommeSomme is a department of France, located in the north of the country and named after the Somme river. It is part of the Picardy region of France....
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 the books La Main Coupée ("The Severed Hand") and J'ai Tué ("I have Killed"). It was during the bloody attacks in Champagne in September 1915 that Blaise Cendrars lost his right arm and was discharged from the army.
Jean CocteauJean Maurice Eugène Clément Cocteau was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, designer, playwright, artist and filmmaker. His circle of associates, friends and lovers included Kenneth Anger, Pablo Picasso, Jean Hugo, Jean Marais, Henri Bernstein, Marlene Dietrich, Coco Chanel, Erik Satie, María...
introduced him to
Eugenia ErrázurizEugenia Huici Arguedas de Errázuriz was a Chilean patron of modernism and a style leader of Paris from 1880 into the 20th century, who paved the way for the modernist minimalist aesthetic that would be taken up in fashion by Coco Chanel. Her circle of friends and protégés included Pablo Picasso,...
, 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
BiarritzBiarritz is a city which lies on the Bay of Biscay, on the Atlantic coast, in south-western France. It is a luxurious seaside town and is popular with tourists and surfers....
, in a room decorated with murals by
Pablo PicassoPablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Ruiz y Picasso known as Pablo Ruiz Picasso was a Spanish expatriate painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer, one of the greatest and most influential artists of the...
. At this time he was also driving an old
Alfa RomeoAlfa Romeo Automobiles S.p.A. is an Italian manufacturer of cars. Founded as A.L.F.A. on June 24, 1910, in Milan, the company has been involved in car racing since 1911, and has a reputation for building expensive sports cars...
which had been 'colour-coordinated' by
Georges BraqueGeorges Braque[p] was a major 20th century French painter and sculptor who, along with Pablo Picasso, developed the art style known as Cubism.-Early Life:...
. Cendrars became an important part of the era of artistic creativity in
MontparnasseMontparnasse is an area of Paris, France, on the left bank of the river Seine, centred at the crossroads of the Boulevard du Montparnasse and the Rue de Rennes, between the Rue de Rennes and boulevard Raspail...
at the time, his writings a literary epic of the modern adventurer. He was a friend of
Henry MillerHenry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
- Miller called him his great idol, a man he 'really venerated as a writer', - as well as many of the writers, painters, and sculptors living in Paris. In 1918, his friend
Amedeo ModiglianiAmedeo Clemente Modigliani was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form...
painted his portrait. He was acquainted with Ernest Hemingway, who mentions having seen him "with his broken boxer's nose and his pinned-up empty sleeve, rolling a cigarette with his one good hand," at the Closerie des Lilas, in Paris.
After the war, he became involved in the movie industry in
ItalyItaly , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...
,
FranceThe French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
, and the
United StatesThe United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...
. Needing to generate sufficient income, after 1925 he stopped publishing poetry and focused on novels or short stories.
Later life
During
World War IIWorld War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, tragedy struck when his youngest son was killed in an accident while escorting American planes in
MoroccoMorocco , officially the Kingdom of Morocco , is a country located in North Africa. It has a population of more than 32 million and an area of 710,850 km², and also primarily administers the disputed region of the Western Sahara...
. In occupied France, the
GestapoThe Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...
listed Cendrars as a Jewish writer of "French expression."
In 1950, he ended his life of travel by settling down on the rue Jean-Dolent in Paris, across from the
La Santé PrisonLa Santé Prison is a prison operated by the Ministry of Justice located in the 14th arrondissement of Paris, France. It is one of the most famous prisons in France, with both VIP and high security wings....
. There he collaborated frequently with
Radiodiffusion Française.Radiodiffusion-Télévision Française was the French national public broadcasting organization established on 9 February 1949 to replace the post-war "Radiodiffusion Française" , which had been founded in 1945...
He finally published again in 1956. The novel, Emmène-moi au bout du monde !…, was to be his last work before suffering a stroke in 1957.
In 1960,
André MalrauxAndré Malraux DSO was a French adventurer, award-winning author, and statesman. Having traveled extensively in Indochina and China, Malraux was noted especially for his novel entitled La Condition Humaine , which won the Prix Goncourt...
bestowed upon him the title of Commander of the
Légion d'honneurThe Legion of Honour, or in full the National Order of the Legion of Honour is a French order established by Napoleon Bonaparte, First Consul of the Consulat which succeeded to the First Republic, on 19 May 1802...
for his wartime service. A year later, he also received the Paris Grand Prix for literature. Shortly after, he died. His ashes now rest at
Le Tremblay-sur-MauldreLe Tremblay-sur-Mauldre is a commune in the Yvelines department in the Île-de-France in north-central France.-References:*...
.
Works
Name of the work, year of first edition, publisher (in Paris if not otherwise noted) / kind of work / Known translations (year of first edition in that language)
- Les Pâques à New York (1912, Édition des Hommes nouveaux) / Poem / Spanish (1975)
- La Prose du Transsibérien et la petite Jehanne de France
La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France is a collaborative artists' book by Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay-Terk...
(1913, Édition des Hommes nouveaux) / Poem / Spanish (1975); Bengali (1997)
- Séquences (1913, Editions des Hommes Nouveaux)
- Rimsky-Korsakov et la nouvelle musique russe (1913)
- La Guerre au Luxembourg (1916, D. Niestlé, editeur) / Poem / Spanish (1975)
- Profond aujourd'hui (1917, A la Belle Édition)
- Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles (1918, Éditions de la Sirène) / Poem / English (1931); Spanish (1975); Bengali (2009)
- J'ai tué (1918, La Belle Édition) / Poetic essay / English (1992)
- Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques - (1919, Au Sans Pareil) / Poems / Spanish (1975)
- La Fin du monde filmée par l'Ange Notre-Dame - (1919, Éditions de la Sirène) / English (1992)
- Anthologie nègre - (1921, Éditions de la Sirène) / African folk tales / Spanish (1930); English (1972)
- Documentaires - (1924, with the title "Kodak", Librairie Stock) / Poems / Spanish (1975)
- Feuilles de route - (1924, Au Sans Pareil) / Spanish (1975)
- L'Or (1925, Grasset) / Novel / English (Sutter's Gold, 1926, Harper & Bros.) / Spanish (1931)
- Moravagine (1926, Grasset) / Novel / Spanish (1935); English (1990)
- L'ABC du cinema (1926, Les Écrivains Réunis) / English (1992)
- L'Eubage (1926, Au Sans Pareil) / English (1992)
- Éloge de la vie dangereuse (1926, Les Écrivains Réunis) / Poetic essay / English (1992); Spanish (1994)
- Le Plan de l'Aiguille (1927, Au Sans Pareil) / Novel / Spanish (1931); English (1987)
- Petits contes nègres pour les enfants des blancs (1928, Éditions de Portiques) / Portuguese (1989)
- Les Confessions de Dan Yack (1929, Au Sans Pareil) / Novel / Spanish (1930); English (1990)
- Une nuit dans la forêt (1929, Lausanne, Éditions du Verseau) / Autobiographical essay
- Comment les Blancs sont d'anciens Noirs - (1929, Au Sans Pareil)
- Rhum—L'aventure de Jean Galmot (1930, Grasset) / Novel / Spanish (1937)
- Aujourd'hui (1931, Grasset)
- Vol à voile (1932, Lausanne, Librairie Payot)
- Panorama de la pègre (1935, Grenoble, Arthaud) / Reportage
- Hollywood, La Mecque du cinéma (1936, Grasset) / Reportage
- Histoires vraies (1937, Grasset) / Stories / Spanish (1938)
- La Vie dangereuse (1938, Grasset) / Stories
- D'Outremer à indigo (1940, Grasset)
- Chez l'armée Anglaise (1940, Corrêa) / Reportage
- Poesie complète (1944, Denoël)
- L'Homme foudroyé (1945, Denoël) / Novel / English (1970); Spanish (1983)
- La Main coupée (1946, Denoël) / Novel / (in French) / English (Lice, 1973), Spanish (1980)
- Bourlinguer (1948, Denoël) / Novel / English (1972); Spanish (2004)
- Le Lotissement du ciel (1949, Denoël) / Novel / English (1992)
- La Banlieue de Paris (1949, Lausanne, La Guilde du Livre) / Essay with photos by Robert Doissneau
- Blaise Cendrars, vous parle... (1952, Denoël) / Interviews by Michel Manoll
- Le Brésil, des Hommes sont venus (1952, Monaco, Les Documents d'Art)
- Nöel aux 4 coins du monde (1953, Robert Cayla) / Stories emitted by radio in 1951 / English (1994)
- Emmène-moi au bout du monde!... (1956, Denoël) / Novel / Spanish (1982), English (To the End of the World, 1966, tr. by Alan Brown, Grove Press)
- Du monde entier au cœur du monde (1957, Denoël) / Complete poetic works / English (Complete Poems, tr. by Ron Padgett, Univ. of California Press, 1992)
- Trop c'est trop (1957, Denoël)
- Films sans images (1959, Denoël)
- Amours (1961)
- Dites-nous Monsieur Blaise Cendrars (1969)
- Paris ma ville. Illustrations de Fernand Léger. (1987, Bibliothèque des Arts)
See also
- Le Mondes 100 Books of the Century
The 100 Books of the Century is a grading of the books considered as the hundred best of the 20th century, drawn up in the spring of 1999 through a poll conducted by the French retailer Fnac and the Paris newspaper Le Monde....
, a list which includes Moravagine
External links