| | | Local Details in a Moving Landscape:
Complete Poems of Blaise Cendrars translated by Ron Padgett, introduction by Jay Bochner, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992, 392 pages including Notes, Bibliographies, and Indexes, $45
Poetry dates from today
--Blaise Cendrars
I remember visiting de Kooning's exhibitions at Xavier-Fourcade in the 70s and urging him, in my mind, to give up figuration, to make the break with interpretation of reality and to continue his stretch to where it ultimately seemed to be headed: pure abstraction. I felt that if de Kooning could give up his attachment to the figure, if he could give up his need of portraying the seen (despite the inventiveness of his expressive interpretation), new breakthroughs would be made. I was depending on him to do it. We could see him, in his progressive shows, inventing the language necessary. I wasn't conscious of this at the time, but a new language was the only way possible to make something new and this would entail giving up attachment to and reliance on the familiar objects and devices of our present language. With the figure still in the painting, it was just theme and variation. Dazzling, but still, more of the same.
"Easter in New York"
For a twentieth century poem to invoke Jesus, as Blaise Cendrars does in "Easter in New York," the first poem in his Complete Poems, signals trouble to the reader looking for modern solutions to these new times. It's quite startling to open this volume, of the poet called by many the most avant-garde of the avant-garde (Henry Miller called him "the greatest man (of any order) in the entire twentieth century"), and to be in the territory of the most conservative, backwards looking escapist. However, though it is Jesus to whom the poet looks, something new is going on: a very earthy language, comfortable in its pedestrian exegesis, describing in language appropriate to its environment, is used. Cendrars, locating the poet at the point of writing, grounds the poem in its urban locality. He makes no attempt to falsify his intention with dreamy pastorals or an escape to a paradise where things could be different, if not reality-based. With a personal journalism, Cendrars defines the conditions of his immediate surroundings, concerned with the present facts of his destitution and his identification with the immigrant population sharing his views and situation.
At the same time that the poet looks to the methods of the Catholic religion for an answer, he seem to also be aware that confronted with the suddenness of the cacophonous city life in a new century breathing change—that imposes conditions unkind to the immigrants, like him, who are powerless to adjust and who can only comply—perhaps new methods are called for, a new language. The immediacy of the city, its ruthless insistence on survival, makes a metaphoric language superfluous and arcane. Cendrars needs a response that expresses the immediacy of his connection to the city and a rococo language won't do. The impact, the harshness, the abundance of the city experience makes an artificial poetic landscape, removed from experience, impossible for Cendrars so stuck with the bare facts of his situation. He accepts that it's enough to use every day language: the startlingness of the city, notated without embellishment, is enough to offer a share of transcendence.
Further, it's precisely an avoidance of transcendence, a grounding in the present, that Cendrars's common language accesses. Despite the poem's insistence on an otherworldly solution, with his use of daily language Cendrars makes a radical break with the past's methods and therefore with the past's entire belief system. If he's inventive enough to have found a new way to respond to his condition, the poet can take the next step and break with that allegiance to the past that—in its insistence on staying amidst the familiar—would imprison him. What was occurring in New York City in 1912, when the poem was written, was new and therefore too strange to apply an archaic language bound to traditional referents.
Cendrars shapes an attitude that can converse with the new material by redirecting the poem's intention away from a virtuosic display to a person-to-person, friendly, accessible address that grounds the poem amongst us and leads the way to a shift away from the need for an external solution. Jesus, to a reliance on ourselves and a trusting of the phenomena around us and the folks sharing it with us as the focus.
"The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France"
Poems never looked like this, not even Whitman's. It seems the urgency of the message precludes any stroking of formal appearance: the quickness, the wish Cendrars has to convey his information as immediately as a conversation would, with no time to shape it into rhetoric. He locates himself in the comfort of accessibility. He doesn't remove himself to a place of authority, he doesn't need to sound authoritative, make pronouncements. His language and the experience it chronicles are as daily as the pari-mutuel window at his horse track. The poems sprawl haphazardly on the page, he's making no attempt to pretty them up for a subscription audience. Their spontaneity announces new concerns, not the message disguised in ornamental dress to pretend, to assume privilege by using the accepting symbols of finery, that allies itself with traditional values by conforming to its rules of play. Here is a new form that has rejected the confinements of traditional forms to bloom into a style that's not as refined as its predecessors but whose rejection of those limits has liberated the poet past a refinement that would pretend the stance protects. At the very beginning of this poem he admits to having been "a really bad poet." How liberating. Now he doesn't have to act like one and can go about discovering and letting us in on the process.
Particularly what is occurring is a replacement of stance (the poem as containment unit in which feelings, impressions, and description are processed into the art object translated into a heightened language but a language whose function it is to remove the narrator from the impression to a position of authority from where he/she can issue pronouncements on the material) with a welcoming of the immediate impressions and an accepting of the way they sprawl in our consciousness. Cendrars's courage is in recognizing the need to not pretty it up. That would impose a sense of order and the sense that the poet is in control of the material but that is only a construct, it is only a seeming. The brick house structure of the poem comforts us because we're familiar with and feel safe with it. It is a privilege cling, an attachment, an assumption. Cendrars is not only traveling across a great deal of geography in this poem, he also transgresses the established forms to step into the twentieth century. He chose to leave behind the already archaic relics of poetic style. Those structures were too much baggage for this trip, too inadequate to contain the flood of new material available to the person traveling in the early twentieth century. The lines "Say, Blaise, are we really a long way from Montmartre?"//Of course we are, stop bothering me, you know we are, a long way..., repeat several times, in various guises, as a refrain to emphasize the traveler's sense of needing to acclimate to the new surroundings.
He doesn't merely use the language of the newspapers. Startling things occur ("The train does a somersault and lands on all fours") and metaphor is still suggestive ("We are a storm in the skull of a deaf man").
"Panama, or the Adventures of My Seven Uncles"
This poem was written from June 1913 to June 1914 as World War I was disordering everyone's senses. Perhaps Cendrars didn't need such public border disputes to disrupt his sense of stability, but in this poem the sense of dislocation sings with a chorus of sadness and homesickness, of periodic letters home and an exile's sense of being unable to accept his fate at the same time as he keeps moving further and further from home.
The narrator immerses himself in the exotic made available in his recalling the tales his mother told him of her seven brothers: misfits, rogues, and outright criminals. Misdeeds performed in foreign locales take on an energizing sense of adventure for the narrator, seemingly holed up in a drabber existence (though the locations of the poem's composition, given at the end, indicate that Cendrars moved around quite a bit in the year of the poem's telling).
The 18-page poem is stuffed with the details of the hard-traveling uncles' adventures. Their deeds are built into an epic against stability and domestic achievements, an epic celebrating the unshaven, tawdry, and rough, an epic against anything and everything opposite to clean sheets, chained-to-a-job humility, grounded, responsible, "decent" citizen ways of life.
Even with its inescapable sadness and homesickness, Cendrars finds his uncles' waywardness appealing as a fantasy, as an escape, as an other. But the people inhabiting the poem aren't personalities so much as encounters with the exotic. They're identified by their nationalities as if they'd been encountered only long enough to establish their origins to verify the exile's own sense of dislocation. They're identified only to establish a connection of being similarly across frontiers. There's no real encounter, no communication, no life occurring at the present location. All are in a state of exile, in transit, dazzled at finding themselves in such a condition and amongst others in similar states.
There's a postcard-like sense of brevity, of glimpses in transit, of the essence not fulfilling the need for a connection, leaving the adventurers unsatiated, continually raging in their search for an adventure to quell their need for the values and self-worth they're, in fact, running away from.
"Nineteen Plastic Poems"
Cendrars is rather cranky in this series of 1913-1914, with a final poem of 1919. That breakdown of civility, World War I, seems to be affecting the poet as he struggles against the warring nationalities, he who's derived so much pleasure and fantasy from cultural and political differences.
These poems expose raw nerves expressing a sad desperation against mean times. The poems are often choppy and fragmented as if lucidity and coherence are impossible at this shell-shocked time. All is condensed to a few screams. The overall tone of this poem sequence is one of annoyance and confusion with "thoughts that make buses jump." He even resorts to evoking Christ, once again, in the opening poem: "Christ / Life / That's what I've ransacked."
With "10. News Flash" Cendrars gets to the found object three years before Duchamp's urinal. A newspaper report of a jailbreak in Oklahoma becomes poetry by Cendrars fashioning the words of the account into poetic lines, each line a sequence of the narrative. Two verse breaks emphasize the climaxes in the action. The telling is animated past detached journalism as the verbs are present tense so we are "present" at each moment in the sequence: "Three convicts get hold of revolvers / They kill their guard and grab the prison keys ..." Cendrars also fudges the actual ending, according to the Notes, fictionalizing to end the story on an upbeat where, in fact, there was tragedy.
"16. Titles" besides being the sequence's 16th poem, is simply a list of 16 titles. But with this poem he announces new possibilities, new freedoms available to the pioneering spirit dispensing with old values. "Stripped / First Poem with No Metaphors / No Images / News / The New Spirit" are five of the sixteen titles clearly proclaiming a defiant, in-your-face confrontation, as well as a rejection of staid forms for these times which are so in need of new solutions. Artillery across the borders won't solve the issues as metaphors in poems are no longer forceful enough to connect the populace with the urgency of the times. Metaphor will only hearken back to the romantic times of the previous century to enslave participants in a removal from the present, from a denial of the clatter and dehumanization of the present.
In an attempt to connect to those forces which offer him stability, Cendrars manages a few appreciations in the midst of the depraved times: the Eiffel Tower ins serenaded, we get to visit Chagall in his studio and are given a sense of the specific passions expressed in paint there, women's bodies are adored and claimed for the poet ("And on her hip / The poet's signature"), Apollinaire, Archipenko, and Leger are appreciated for being "Nude" and "New" and moving forward.
"Kodak"
Wholesale appropriation was the next step for Cendrars. In "Kodak" he could let someone else's voice serve for his own. Information, conveyed in a pleasant enough tone of voice, is the content of the poem and for this Cendrars adapted passages with little revision directly from the pulp author Gustave Le Rouge's The Mysterious Doctor Cornelius. According to the Notes, Cendrars's point was to prove to Le Rouge that his words were the stuff of poetry.
The poem, if we're to believe the end dates, is a chronicle of 36 years traveling the world. Portraits of people and views are described in the plain, no frills language Cendrars is most comfortable with, each verse a firm snapshot permanizing a glimpsed tableaux. Cendrars's language is no nonsense and a direct imparting of meaning. Its stripped down quality, shed of gesture and metaphor, all the finery we'd associate with poetry, announces its modernity, its new voice for the new times. Its precise descriptiveness and its present tense verbs embolden the portraits to a just flashed scene taken in. Unburdened by romantic verbiage and uncluttered with archaic idioms (immensely aided by the crisp alertness of Padgett's translation), the lines are free of dust and read as if written this morning. The photographic process seems still in motion, barely dry.
This isn't a poetry of meditation or self-conscious reflection. Like postcards, these verses offer scenes from the present moment. There's an ecstasy, an exhilaration at what is being glimpsed, but descriptions are brief and last only long enough to sketch in enough details to give a concise picture. Modern life urges a brevity, an immediate grasping of the glimpsed and an immediate processing, without time for interpretation, often without time for commas.
Cendrars's obviously marvels at these scenes of modern life—railroad bridges, modern office, luxury liner, society people, etc.—enough to carry the emotional tone embedded in the objective reporting of details. At the same time as obvious delight in the sparkle of modern developments, there are also warnings of what these advancements are giving rise to and encroaching on: "fatigue of labor of poverty," "monstrous growth," "there aren't any pumas anymore," "Around a square that still has a few nice trees . . . ," "I drink a whisky cocktail then another then another," "the ship city of Frisco loaded with dead Chinese workers headed to burial in the native soil," "they harvest eider nests whose feathers are worth a fortune," "the incandescent forest which a gang of / lumberjacks are circumscribing." An eco-sense of damage amidst the glorious keeps the poet from rhapsodizing beyond the scene like a Soviet worker. Foreignness is becoming appropriated into the modern age. As Cendrars travels, the sights all become digested into the broader conception of the time's, not the geography's, landscape.
The even-toned poem sequence climaxes with a sustained elephant hunt (with Kodak and bullets) and, like a coda, ends with a mouthwatering sampling of menus that gastronomically sums up the wide range of journeying we've just been on.
"Travel Notes"
The sixty pages that make up "Travel Notes" of 1924 are a bit sketchier than the episodes of "Kodak" and some poems don't transcend the flatness of their details as do his other poems of this brief, pastiche form, haiku-like in their minimal telling and intensified because of their narrow focus and beam of attention. They refresh in the way they dent reality with the self-conscious manipulation made hilarious by cartoon and Melies Brothers animation: "See how my page looks / Still to please you I add in ink / Two or three words / And a big blot of ink / So you can't read them..."
A line like "I'll never drag my ass into another one of these colonial dives" clued later poets to direct ways of speech, announced that poetry was available to the language of the common street chat, opened the gates of poetic limitation to embrace the familiar speech of the most personal response. It didn't have to elevate that speech to something peculiar, instead it accepted its delivery as the friendliest of greetings and thus allowed its essential plainness to sparkle.
His poems are often like charged talk, directly addressing the reader as if he/she were a fine friend. The personal details he shares continually ("I've covered the wardrobe mirror so I can't see myself writing") allow the reader access to a personal relationship with the speaker that's incredibly pleasing in its warm regard, in the feeling of being with ol' Blaise on location at the moment of his composing. It's not so much a dazzlement at the dozens of scenes that go by through the course of the years but Cendrars's tone of voice used in documenting the moments, a welcoming of the reader to be as present as the medium of these written messages can allow. It's a great pleasure to travel with Cendrars, to accompany him to the strange ports, deep jungles, to hear the blaring horns in the streets of Sao Paulo, to meet the characters he meets at every step of the way—aboard ship, in the cafes. But it is the obvious delight in responding to these phenomena, the fascination he manages to express in an even-keeled manner, that makes the time spent with him such an enriching experience. His curiosity to know the names of mountain ranges he sails past, to know the minute details of what's going on around him in his constantly changing locations, inspires in its vitality, its aliveness, its eagerness to participate as chronicler, as experiencer for us stuck at home reading about it.
The final few poems collected in "To the Heart of the World" reek of derivation from Baudelaire and Rimbaud and lack the zest and originality of the bulk of the book.
Translation
Frequently a word startles us. It seems extraordinary within the flow of the narrative. This is the shakeup poetry, at its best, is useful for. It wakes us up and accesses that askew sense that promotes a realigning of the way we would continue to think if not bumped occasionally. It is to translator Ron Padgett's credit that this happens so frequently in reading this book. So often he has used the word that, in its irregularity, is so surprising. We're so accustomed to mundane language that it's a delight to experience the concern Padgett so obviously took in rendering these poems. One feels a true correspondence with the poet's intentions to use fresh, colloquial speech: mangy, I was such a hot and crazy teenager, craps on the battlefield, decked out, overheated madness, you have the clap, weird ricochets, Terrific Guy.
Dozens of improvements are made even in the translator's own previous translation. A line in "Kodak" that appeared in the Adventures of Poetry, 1976 version as: "And to the murmured song of the sea which is connected to the gramophone" becomes "And to the murmured song of the sea at the end of the record"; "giant sails" becomes "gigantic sails"; the original French la bonte goes from "goodness" to "kindness"; the last line of the first verse of the elephant hunt section goes from: "I'd barely noticed the elephants when they ran away" to "I got a quick look and they fled." Lines are tightened and tidied up and opt for directness and literal impact over literal supplanting.
Et al
The clean page layout and typographical design by David Bullen aids greatly in reading the poems, which often sprawl. Each poem sequence is given a title page with a photograph or a reproduction of the poem's original cover design. Since Cendrars had Dufy, Picabia, Modigliani, and Leger among his collaborators, these make for pleasant pauses in the reading.
While the poems in their original French were originally intended to lay opposite their English translations in facing pages, they ended up in the back of the book in smaller, though very readable, type. This is actually a happy accident as it allows for a purer reading of the poems, without the distraction and interruption of constantly comparing or looking over at the translation.
A 27-page Translator's Notes at the back of the book is a very useful, painstakingly looking, well-researched index to the plethora of references, popular and obscure, Cendrars flavors his poetry with. Jean-Pierre Goldenstein is credited for much of the searching. The Notes add greatly to the enjoyment of the poems. Each poem's publishing history and details surrounding its writing are provided. Real and imaginary geographical place names are located; characters ranging from Cendrars's contemporaries (painters, musicians) to actresses and poets of other times are profiled; bars and cabarets, expositions, events, brand names are pinpointed; references to Cendrars's own biography are explained.
Not much in English is available about Cendrars. A Selected Bibliography mentions much of what is available. I'd add the Spring 1979 issue of Studies in Twentieth Century Literature which is devoted to Cendrars.
The Introduction by Jay Bochner fills in the biographical details of Cendrars's life (which was more fantastic than most anything fictive) and the circumstances surrounding the composition of the poems and other work, writerly and otherwise, he engaged in. We become acquainted with the talents Cendrars befriended and collaborated with, and in the process see the surge of movement in the arts and get a sense of the reordering of frontiers these vanguard artists excited the century with.
This book brings one aspect of Cendrars's remarkable career to the English-speaking public. It makes one thirst for access to the many novels, memoirs, film scripts, and other writings awaiting translation.
Bibliography
Auster, Paul, The Random House Book of Twentieth Century French Poetry, Random House, New York, 1982
Cendrars, Blaise, Complete Poems, translated by Ron Padgett, introduction by Jay Bochner, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1992
——Gold, translated by Nina Rootes, Michael Kesend Publishing, Ltd., New York, 1984
Chefder, Monique and Jay Bochner, "Studies in Twentieth Century Literature," Vol. 3, No. 2, Spring 1979 (issue devoted to Cendrars)
| |