The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry

BLAISE CENDRARS

And when having passed that afternoon
Through Fontainebleau
We arrived in Paris
Just as the mobilization posters were going up
We understood my buddy and I
That the little car had taken us into a New epoch
And although we were both grown men
We had just been born
—ron padgett

Blaise Cendrars

(Frederick Louis Sauser) 1887–1961

les-chaux-de-fonds, switzerland

A

journalist, merchant seaman, foreign legionnaire, essayist, and art

critic, Cendrars also made films with Abel Gance (including La Fin du

monde) as well as writing seminal texts on cinema and on modernism,

collected in Profond aujourd’hui. His extensive travels—real and imagined—fur-

nish the vital matter of his work, both in poetry and in prose. Closely associated

with both Cubism and Surrealism, he was a leading figure in the fin-de-siècle

literary world. Born to a Swiss father and Scottish mother, he ran away at fifteen

to work in Russia. After studying briefly in Bern, he settled in Paris in 1910. He

served in World War I, losing his right arm in combat. His extensive curiosity

about widely di√ering cultures—particularly black ones—gave him a constantly

forward-looking orientation. Principal works: Les Pâques à New York, 1912; La

Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France, 1913; Du monde entier, 1919;

Au coeur du monde, 1919; Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques, 1919; L’Anthologie nègre,

1921; Feuilles de route, 1924.