Cendrars, illustrated by Dos Passos

I've been threatening this post since Jan.2008, continually putting it off because of the hair-raising prospect of destroying the book by scanning. It survived.

Panama, Or the Adventures of My Seven Uncles
By Blaise Cendrars
Translated from the French and illustrated by John Dos Passos
Harper & Brothers, 1931

Dos Passos' Foreword

The poetry of Blaise Cendrars was part of the creative tidal wave that spread over the world from the Paris of before the last European war. Under various tags: futurism, cubism, vorticism, modernism, most of the best work in the arts in our time has been the direct product of this explosion, that had an influence in its sphere comparable with that of the October revolution in social organization and politics and the Einstein formula in physics. Cendrars and Apollinaire, poets, were on the first cubist barricades with the group that included Picasso, Modigliani, Marinetti, Chagall; that profoundly influenced Maiakovsky, Meyerhold, Eisenstein; whose ideas carom through Joyce, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot (first published in Wyndam Lewis's "Blast"). The music of Stravinski and Prokofieff and Diafeleff's Ballet hail from this Paris already in the disintegration of victory, as do the windows of Saks Fifth Avenue, skyscraper furniture, the Lenin Memorial in Moscow, the paintings in Diego Rivera in Mexico City and the newritz styles of advertizing in American magazines.

Meanwhile, in America at least, poetry (or verse, or little patches of prose cut into inevitable lengths on the page, or whatever you want to call it) has, after Masters, Sandberg and the Imagists, subsided again into parlor entertainment for highschool English classes. The stuffed shirts have come out of their libraries everywhere and rule literary taste. Library philosophies vaguely favorable to fascism, pederasty and the snobmysticism of dying religion, absorb the attention of "poets." A young man just starting to read verse in the year 1930 would have a hard time finding out that this method of putting words together had only recently passed through a period of virility, intense experimentation and meaning in everyday life.

For the sake of this hypothetical young man and for the confusion of the Humanists, stuffed shirts in editorial chairs, anthology compilers and prize poets, sonnetwriters and readers of bookchats, I think it has been worth while to attempt to turn these alive informal personal everyday poems of Cendrars' into English, in spite of the obvious fact that poetry by its very nature can't be lifted out of the language in which it was written. I only hope it will at least induce people to read the originals.

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You can now find "Panama" and the rest of Cendrars' poetry in Ron Padgett's superior translations: Complete Poems (Univ. of California, 1992).

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3/7/09 update: In the comments Dan Visel mentioned surprise at the connection between Dos Passos and Cendrars. I'll admit now that I haven't read any Dos Passos (nor did I know of his Lugones-like political journey from pro-Wobbly to anti-FDR), but I was able to find the story behind the connection in Jay Bochner's Blaise Cendrars: Discovery and Re-creation, and Manhattan Transfer is now on my reading list. All of this info comes from Bochner:

• Dos Passos wrote an article on Cendrars, "Homer of the Trans-Siberian," in 1926 for the Saturday Review of Literature.
• Dos Passos and Cendrars met in 1929 at a party of Gerald Murphy's.
• Murphy (who knew Cendrars from at least 1923) "most certainly acquainted his friend Gilbert Seldes with some of the work of Cendrars; for this critic, among the first to see the value of the popular arts, praised Cendrars in The Seven Lively Arts (1924) for proving that cinema could have a beneficial effect on writing, rather than the much proclaimed opposite."
• From Dos Passos, The Best of Times (1966), on meeting Cendrars in Paris in 1929: "Cendrars had lost a hand in the war. It was hair-raising to spin with him around mountain roads. He steered with one hand and changed gears on his little French car with his hook. We visited Les Eyzies and every other prehistoric cave within reach. Cendrars took every curve on two wheels."
• "A number of letters from Cendrars to Dos Passos covering the years 1929 through 1932 are in the possession of the University of Virginia and reveal that Cendrars was involved with the translation of The 42nd Parallel. Gallimard, Dos Passos' publisher, apparently lost interest, and Cendrars arranged a contract with Grasset."
• Bochner quotes George Wickes from the book Americans in Paris: "Does Passos assimilated Cendrars so completely that he did not need to imitate. In spirit, form and style Cendrars' poetry became the very fiber of USA."

Stay tuned, I have a couple more Cendrars posts in the works.