Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961,) originally Frédéric-Louis Sauser, was a French-speaking Swiss novelist, poet, essayist, and traveler. He is best known for creating a new poetic style to express a life of action and danger. His poems Pâques à New York (1912; ‘Easter in New York’) and La Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France (1913; ‘The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and Little Jehanne of France’) are combination travelogues and laments.
Cendrars was born in Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland. When he was 15, he ran away from home to work for a jewel merchant, with whom he traveled through Russia, Persia, and China; he later described the journey in a long poem, Transsibérien (1913.)
In 1910, Cendrars met the French poet and playwright Guillaume Apollinaire, who greatly influenced Cendrars. He wrote his first long poem in the U.S., Les Pâques à New York (1912, ‘Easter in New York,’) which, with Transsibérien and his third and last long poem, Le Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles (1918; Panama; or the Adventures of My Seven Uncles, 1931,) was crucial in shaping the spirit of modern poetry.
Cendrars’s novels include Les Confessions de Dan Yack (1927–29; 1946; Antarctic Fugue, 1948,) and L’Or (1925; Sutler’s Gold, 1926.)
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Blaise Cendrars
Writing is to descend like a miner to the depths of the mine with a lamp on your forehead, a light whose dubious brightness falsifies everything, whose wick is in permanent danger of explosion, whose blinking illumination in the coal dust exhausts and corrodes your eyes.
—Blaise Cendrars
Topics: Writing, Writers, Authors & Writing
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