TRANSSIBERIAN.

June 28, 2003 by 5 Comments

I somehow missed wood s lot yesterday, and now I find that he consecrated the day in large measure to one of my favorite modernist poets, Blaise Cendrars (self-chosen name; he was born Frédéric-Louis Sauser). He wrote quite a bit, but the poem you need to know (if you don’t already) is Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (“Trans-Siberian Prose and Little Jeanne from France”), which reflects his trip across Russia during the Russo-Japanese war (1904-1905) and the Russian Revolution of 1905; a full translation by Ekaterina Likhtik is online here, beginning:

I was in my adolescence at the time
Scarcely sixteen and already I no longer remembered my childhood

I was 16,000 leagues from my birthplace
I was in Moscow, in the city of a thousand and three belfries and seven railroad stations
And they weren’t enough for me, the seven railroad stations and the thousand and three towers
For my adolescence was so blazing and so mad
That my heart burned in turns as the temple of Epheseus, or as Red Square in Moscow
When the sun sinks.
And my eyes shone upon the ancient routes
And I was already such a bad poet
That I didn’t know how to go all the way to the end.

The Kremlin was like an immense Tatar cake
Crusted with gold,
With great almonds of cathedrals all done in white
And the honeyed gold of the bells…

An old monk was reading to me the legend of Novgorod
I was thirsty
And I was deciphering cuneiform characters
Then, suddenly, the pigeons of the Holy Spirit soared above the square…

The original French is here, and you can see an image of the exceedingly rare first edition (multicolored, printed on a single sheet of paper that unfolded is two meters long) here. The whole last century is contained therein. All aboard!

Comments

  1. jean-pierre says
    June 29, 2003 at 12:53 am

    What a nice surprise, for a Sunday morning! Yes, B.C. is one of my favorite too! One of the best consolations for being stuck in a bad support unit at Fort Campbell, was being able to order a special edition of Mr. Cendrars’ work, set in type by himself, through the post library system.

  2. Hans says
    September 3, 2019 at 10:53 am

    That is really good. Thanks to you for posting that, 16 years ago, and thanks for the random link feature.

  3. languagehat says
    September 3, 2019 at 11:06 am

    Don’t thank me, thank John Cowan — I too am eternally grateful to him for that indispensable feature! And thanks for reviving this post so I could replace the dead link for the Likhtik translation with a functioning one.

  4. languagehat says
    September 3, 2019 at 11:09 am

    And now that I know how to use the Wayback Machine, I was even able to replace the long-dead final link.

  5. languagehat says
    September 1, 2024 at 11:30 am

    See now Lucy Sante’s NYRB essay “Rhapsodies in Bop” (archived):

    The Blaise Cendrars show at the Morgan may have been contained in a space about the size of a studio apartment, but it seemed much larger, because like its subject it pointed in so many different directions at once. Cendrars was a poet who was also involved, in various capacities, with painting, music, film, photography, and even advertising. As the curator, Sheelagh Bevan, wrote in a wall text, he “never aligned himself with a single school of art, though his career was intertwined with figures tied to Cubism, Orphism, Futurism, Dada, and Surrealism.” Cendrars was a lightning rod for all the artistic currents that blew through Paris between about 1912 and the mid-1920s. His experiences and travels made him seem larger than life in his own time, a kind of poetic Jack London, and he kept reinventing himself as the decades passed, dropping poetry for novels and then journalism, and then a series of what today might be called autofictions: memoirs laced with more than the usual amount of malarkey. […]

    Like Apollinaire—“a poet among the painters”—Cendrars was thoroughly at home among visual artists. He wrote about Fernand Léger, Chagall, and Alexander Archipenko; Léger, Moïse Kisling, and Modigliani illustrated his books. He was especially close to Robert and Sonia Delaunay, with whom he shared a wholehearted love of Paris the modern and its heraldic beast, the Eiffel Tower.

    In 1913 Cendrars and Sonia (who was born in Odesa) collaborated on the spectacular Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France)—an example of which, towering over the room at the Morgan, was the centerpiece of the show.

    Cendrars’s long poem is printed as an accordion book on a sheet of paper nearly seven feet high, in a series of different colors and typefaces, with Delaunay’s painting, electric and undimmed by time, running down the left alongside the text. The planned print run of 150 would, if stacked vertically end to end, have reached the top of the Eiffel Tower. (Only about sixty were printed.) The poem tumbles along, as if bouncing on rails, recounting a journey from Moscow to Harbin with digressions and asides and cooing to his companion, little Jeanne, who may be a French sex worker adrift in the East, and who keeps asking Blaise if they’re really a long way from Montmartre […]

    Its sawtooth lines and cascading rhythms mark it not only as one of the signal poems of pre-war French modernism but also as a pioneering work of beatnik poetry. A progenitor of spontaneous bop prosody, Cendrars made a direct impact on proto-beats in Paris after World War II—Jean-Paul Clébert, Jacques Yonnet, Robert Giraud—and eventually on Ginsberg and Kerouac and the first and second iterations of the New York School; Ron Padgett published his definitive translation of Cendrars’s Complete Poems in 1992.

    Cendrars always claimed that Prose du Transsibérien recounted his experiences with the Russian watch merchant, but there is no evidence he went very far on the train, certainly not to Harbin. However, recent scholarship has turned up evidence of the Trans-Siberian Express at the Paris Exposition of 1900, a restaurant Cendrars visited, with his parents, where dining in stationary railcars was accompanied by a panorama continuously rolling along outside the windows.

    I’d love to have dined at that restaurant!

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