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Modernities and Other Writings
Blaise Cendrars was the pseudonym of Frederic-Louis Sauser (1887-1961), a Swiss-born poet and novelist. A contemporary of Apollinaire and Max Jacob, and a friend of Chagall and Modigliani, he must be reckoned with as a prophetic voice. Of all the avant-garde writers, he was the one most attuned to our age; hence the title of this collection of his short prose works. Modernities represents the poet at his most intense. The seven essays consider modern artists, many of them his friends and associates, and their altered relations to a new world of communications technology, advertising, and mass politics. These essays are daring and inventive in their expression of the sense of simultaneity—far more so than the "official" artistic manifestoes of their period, the first quarter of the twentieth century. Because most of the selections have never before been translated and have been hard to find, this volume brings to the English-language reader for the first time an essential part of the European voice of the avant-garde.
134 pages, Hardcover
First published October 1, 1992
About the author
Blaise Cendrars
283 books280 followersFrédéric Louis Sauser, better known as Blaise Cendrars, was a Swiss novelist and poet naturalized French in 1916. He was a writer of considerable influence in the modernist movement.
His father, an inventor-businessman, was Swiss, his mother Scottish. He spent his childhood in Alexandria, Naples, Brindisi, Neuchâtel, and numerous other places, while accompanying his father, who endlessly pursued business schemes, none successfully.
At the age of fifteen, Cendrars left home to travel in Russia, Persia, China while working as a jewel merchant; several years later, he wrote about this in his poem, Transiberien. He was in Paris before 1910, where he got in touch with several names of Paris' bélle époque: Guillaume Apollinaire, Modigliani, Marc Chagall and many more. Cendrars then traveled to America, where he wrote his first long poem Pâques à New-York. The next year appeared The Transsibérien.
When he came back to France, I World War was started and he joined the French Foreign Legion. He was sent to the front line in the Somme where from mid-December 1914 until February 1915. During the attacks in Champagne in September 1915 that Cendrars lost his right arm. He described this war experience in the books La Main coupée.
After the war he returned to Paris, becaming an important part of the artistic community in Montparnasse. There, among others, used to meet with other writers such as Henry Miller, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway.
During the 1920's he published two long novels, Moravagine and Les Confessions de Dan Yack. Into the 1930’s published a number of “novelized” biographies or volumes of extravagant reporting, such as L’Or, based on the life of John August Sutter, and Rhum, “reportage romance” dealing with the life and trials of Jean Galmont, a misfired Cecil Rhodes of Guiana.
La Belle Epoque was the great age of discovery in arts and letters. Cendrars, very much of the epoch, was sketched by Caruso, painted by Léon Bakst, by Léger, by Modigliani, by Chagall; and in his turn helped discover Negro art, jazz, and the modern music of Les Six. His home base was always Paris, for several years in the Rue de Savoie, later, for many years, in the Avenue Montaigne, and in the country, his little house at Tremblay-sur Mauldre (Seine-et-Oise), though he continued to travel extensively. He worked for a short while in Hollywood in 1936, at the time of the filming of Sutter’s Gold. From 1924 to 1936, went so constantly to South America. This life globertrottering life was pictured in his book Bourlinguer, published in 1948.
Another remarkable works apparead in the 40s were L’Homme Foudroyé (1945), La Main Coupée (1946), Le Lotissement du Ciel (1949), that constitute his best and most important work. His last major work was published in 1957, entitled Trop, C’est Trop.
==========
Sources:
- http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_...
His father, an inventor-businessman, was Swiss, his mother Scottish. He spent his childhood in Alexandria, Naples, Brindisi, Neuchâtel, and numerous other places, while accompanying his father, who endlessly pursued business schemes, none successfully.
At the age of fifteen, Cendrars left home to travel in Russia, Persia, China while working as a jewel merchant; several years later, he wrote about this in his poem, Transiberien. He was in Paris before 1910, where he got in touch with several names of Paris' bélle époque: Guillaume Apollinaire, Modigliani, Marc Chagall and many more. Cendrars then traveled to America, where he wrote his first long poem Pâques à New-York. The next year appeared The Transsibérien.
When he came back to France, I World War was started and he joined the French Foreign Legion. He was sent to the front line in the Somme where from mid-December 1914 until February 1915. During the attacks in Champagne in September 1915 that Cendrars lost his right arm. He described this war experience in the books La Main coupée.
After the war he returned to Paris, becaming an important part of the artistic community in Montparnasse. There, among others, used to meet with other writers such as Henry Miller, John Dos Passos and Ernest Hemingway.
During the 1920's he published two long novels, Moravagine and Les Confessions de Dan Yack. Into the 1930’s published a number of “novelized” biographies or volumes of extravagant reporting, such as L’Or, based on the life of John August Sutter, and Rhum, “reportage romance” dealing with the life and trials of Jean Galmont, a misfired Cecil Rhodes of Guiana.
La Belle Epoque was the great age of discovery in arts and letters. Cendrars, very much of the epoch, was sketched by Caruso, painted by Léon Bakst, by Léger, by Modigliani, by Chagall; and in his turn helped discover Negro art, jazz, and the modern music of Les Six. His home base was always Paris, for several years in the Rue de Savoie, later, for many years, in the Avenue Montaigne, and in the country, his little house at Tremblay-sur Mauldre (Seine-et-Oise), though he continued to travel extensively. He worked for a short while in Hollywood in 1936, at the time of the filming of Sutter’s Gold. From 1924 to 1936, went so constantly to South America. This life globertrottering life was pictured in his book Bourlinguer, published in 1948.
Another remarkable works apparead in the 40s were L’Homme Foudroyé (1945), La Main Coupée (1946), Le Lotissement du Ciel (1949), that constitute his best and most important work. His last major work was published in 1957, entitled Trop, C’est Trop.
==========
Sources:
- http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blaise_...
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 9, 2013
Linguistic brilliance. With taut sentences that trap you like a web, Cendrars writes like Henry Miller making loving to metaphysical trapeze artists. Or something like that...
January 7, 2025
"i tell him about new york, berlin, moscow, prodigious centers of industrial activity scattered over the whole surface of the earth, i tell him about the new way of life that is taking shape, about universal lyricism, and he, hardly more than a boy, who has never left paris and who has been concerned only with questions of form and color, had guessed all of it as he contemplated the tower, as he deciphered the first colored posters that were beginning to cover the buildings, as he watched the birth of a mechanical life in the streets."
read this in two frenzied bursts after getting curious about cendrars from reading about him in dan franck's survey of bohemian paris. cendrars as a figure gives you a good portrait of that 20s generation in a nutshell. simultaneous horror of world war and exhilaration with the emerging mechanical/technological age promising speed novelty flight progress speed you name it inspires them with a dual sense of mortality and pathological need to renew culture and vitality at large. cendrars' writing perfectly gets at all this and modernity feels born in his electric prose so aptly named collection.
read this in two frenzied bursts after getting curious about cendrars from reading about him in dan franck's survey of bohemian paris. cendrars as a figure gives you a good portrait of that 20s generation in a nutshell. simultaneous horror of world war and exhilaration with the emerging mechanical/technological age promising speed novelty flight progress speed you name it inspires them with a dual sense of mortality and pathological need to renew culture and vitality at large. cendrars' writing perfectly gets at all this and modernity feels born in his electric prose so aptly named collection.
October 2, 2013
want to reead some blaise cendrars sci-fi?The Eubage; or, at the Antipodes of Unity is awesome. the painters section is a little boring but the rest of this book is great.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews