Blaise Cendrars, _Selected Writings_, ed. & introd. Walter Albert, various translators

SO, IN PARIS, in those heady days of cubism and the Ballets Russes, there was a poet hanging out with painters, exploding traditional French prosody, and bringing the bustling new cityscape of the new century into verse...and that was Guillaume Apollinaire, of course, but Blaise Cendrars was doing roughly the same thing at the same time.

I had seen Cendrars's name often, but it was Lucy Sante's article in the November 2 NYRB that inspired me to take up this volume that first appeared in the 1960s. A lengthy introduction (which I only skimmed), about 170 pages of poetry (with original French versions facing English translations, so call it about 85 pages, really), and about 50 pages of excerpts from Cendrars's prose. 

Lucy Sante will  never steer a reader wrong, so yes, definitely excellent stuff, especially the three long poems with which the selections open, Les Pâques à New-York, Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France, and Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles. All have a certain erratic narrative movement, being about journeys one is not fully confident ever actually took place, but the main thing is the energy, the invention, the freshness of things that are  showing up in poetry for perhaps the very first time, like the Eiffel Tower or the skyscraper (gratte-ciel).

European modernism has a reputation for bleakness and dread, utterly deserved given the prominence of The Waste Land, the Cantos, the Duino Elegies, Robert Musil, Egon Schiele, Céline, and so many others, but before the First World War disembowelled western civilization and left it a quivering husk there was a modernism of joy, discovery, exuberance--Matisse's Dance, for instance, or The Firebird, or even Blast. Cendrars's long poems come out of that moment, and their vitality is still bracing.