Bok Är vi långt från Montmartre?

: Apollinaire och hans epok i poesi,

bild och dokument / urval och presentation: Gunnar Harding ;
[översättare: Rolf Aggestam ...]
Utgivningsår: 1995
Språk: Svenska
Hylla: Hce(s)
Medietyp: Bok
Serietitel: FIB:s lyrikklubbs bibliotek, 0425-5232 ; 263
Omfång: 371 s. : ill.

Early years and education[edit]

He was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, rue de la Paix 27,[1] into a
bourgeois francophonefamily, to a Swiss father and a Scottish mother.[2] They sent young
Frédéric to a German boarding school, but he ran away. At the Realschule in Basel in 1902 he
met his lifelong friend the sculptor August Suter. Next they enrolled him in a school in Neuchâtel,
but he had little enthusiasm for his studies. Finally, in 1904, he left school due to poor
performance and began an apprenticeship with a Swiss watchmaker in Russia.
While living in St. Petersburg, he began to write, thanks to the encouragement of R.R., a librarian
at the National Library of Russia. There he wrote the poem, "La Légende de Novgorode", which
R.R. translated into Russian. Supposedly fourteen copies were made, but Cendrars claimed to
have no copies of it, and none could be located during his lifetime. In 1995, the Bulgarian
poet Kiril Kadiiski claimed to have found one of the Russian translations in Sofia, but the
authenticity of the document remains contested on the grounds of factual, typographic,
orthographic, and stylistic analysis.[3]
In 1907, Sauser returned to Switzerland, where he studied medicine at the University of Berne.
During this period, he wrote his first verified poems, Séquences, influenced by Remy de
Gourmont's Le Latin mystique.

Literary career[edit]
Cendrars was the first exponent of Modernism in European poetry with his works: The Legend of
Novgorode(1907), Les Pâques à New York (1912), La Prose du Transsibérien et la Petite
Jehanne de France (1913), Séquences (1913), La Guerre au Luxembourg (1916), Le Panama ou
les aventures de mes sept oncles (1918), J'ai tué (1918), and Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (1919).
He was the first modernist poet, not only in terms of expressing the fundamental values of
Modernism but also in terms of creating its first solid poetical synthesis, although this
achievement did not grow out of a literary project or any theoretical considerations but from
Cendrars' instinctive attraction to all that was new in the age and equally alive for him in literature
of the past.
In many ways, he was a direct heir of Rimbaud, a visionary rather than what the French call un
homme de lettres ("a man of letters"), a term that for him was predicated on a separation of
intellect and life. Like Rimbaud, who writes in "The Alchemy of the Word" in A Season in Hell, "I
liked absurd paintings over door panels, stage sets, backdrops for acrobats, signs, popular
engravings, old-fashioned literature, church Latin, erotic books full of misspellings," Cendrars
similarly says of himself in Der Sturm (1913), "I like legends, dialects, mistakes of language,
detective novels, the flesh of girls, the sun, the Eiffel Tower."[4]
Spontaneity, boundless curiosity, a craving for travel, and immersion in actualities were his
hallmarks both in life and art. He was drawn to this same immersion in Balzac's flood of novels on
19th-century French society and in Casanova's travels and adventures through 18th-century
Europe, which he set down in dozens of volumes of memoirs that Cendrars considered "the true
Encyclopedia of the eighteenth century, filled with life as they are, unlike Diderot's, and the work
of a single man, who was neither an ideologue nor a theoretician".[5] Cendrars regarded the early
modernist movement from roughly 1910 to the mid-1920s as a period of genuine discovery in the
arts and in 1919 contrasted "theoretical cubism" with "the group's three antitheoreticians,"
Picasso, Braque, and Léger, whom he described as "three strongly personal painters who
represent the three successive phases of cubism."[6]

Portrait bust of Blaise Cendrars by August Suter (Paris 1911)

After a short stay in Paris, he traveled to New York, arriving on 11 December 1911. Between 6–8
April 1912, he wrote his long poem, Les Pâques à New York (Easter in New York), his first
important contribution to modern literature. He signed it for the first time with the name Blaise
Cendrars.[7]
In the summer of 1912, Cendrars returned to Paris, convinced that poetry was his vocation.
With Emil Szittya, an anarchist writer, he started the journal Les hommes nouveaux, also the
name of the press where he published Les Pâques à New York and Séquences. He became
acquainted with the international array of artists and writers in Paris, such
as Chagall, Léger, Survage, Suter, Modigliani, Csaky, Archipenko, Jean Hugo and Robert
Delaunay.
Most notably, he encountered Guillaume Apollinaire. The two poets influenced each other's work.
Cendrars' poem Les Pâques à New York influenced Apollinaire's poem Zone. Cendrars' style was
based on photographic impressions, cinematic effects of montage and rapid changes of imagery,
and scenes of great emotional force, often with the power of a hallucination. These qualities,
which also inform his prose, are already evident in Easter in New York and in his best known and
even longer poem The Transsiberian, with its scenes of revolution and the Far East in flames in
the Russo-Japanese war ("The earth stretches elongated and snaps back like an accordion /
tortured by a sadic hand / In the rips in the sky insane locomotives / Take flight / In the gaps /
Whirling wheels mouths voices / And the dogs of disaster howling at our heels").[8] The published
work was printed within washes of color by the painter Sonia Delaunay-Terk as a fold-out two
meters in length, together with her design of brilliant colors down the left-hand side, a small map
of the Transsiberian railway in the upper right corner, and a painted silhouette in orange of the
Eiffel Tower in the lower left. Cendrars called the work the first "simultaneous poem".[9] Soon after,
it was exhibited as a work of art in its own right and continues to be shown at exhibitions to this
day.[10]
This intertwining of poetry and painting was related to Robert Delaunay's and other artists'
experiments in proto-expressionism. At the same time Gertrude Stein was beginning to write
prose in the manner of Pablo Picasso's paintings. Cendrars liked to claim that his poem's first
printing of one hundred fifty copies would, when unfolded, reach the height of the Eiffel Tower.[9]
Cendrars' relationship with painters such as Chagall and Léger led him to write a series of
revolutionary abstract short poems, published in a collection in 1919 under the title Dix-neuf
poèmes élastiques (Nineteen elastic poems). Some were tributes to his fellow artists. In 1954, a
collaboration between Cendrars and Léger resulted in Paris, ma ville (Paris, my city), in which the
poet and illustrator together expressed their love of the French capital. As Léger died in 1955, the
book was not published until 1987.

The Left-Handed Poet[edit]

His writing career was interrupted by World War I. When it began, he and the Italian
writer Ricciotto Canudo appealed to other foreign artists to join the French army. He joined
the French Foreign Legion. He was sent to the front line in the Somme where from mid-
December 1914 until February 1915, he was in the line at Frise (La Grenouillère and Bois de la
Vache). He described this war experience in the books La Main coupée (The severed hand)
and J'ai tué (I have killed), and it is the subject of his poem "Orion" in Travel Notes: "It is my star /
It is in the shape of a hand / It is my hand gone up to the sky . . ." It was during the attacks in
Champagne in September 1915 that Cendrars lost his right arm and was discharged from the
army.
Jean Cocteau introduced him to Eugenia Errázuriz, who proved a supportive, if at times
possessive, patron. Around 1918 he visited her house and was so taken with the simplicity of the
décor that he was inspired to write the poems published as De Outremer à indigo (From
ultramarine to indigo). He stayed with Eugenia in her house in Biarritz, in a room decorated with
murals by Picasso. At this time, he drove an old Alfa Romeo which had been colour-coordinated
by Georges Braque.[11]
Cendrars became an important part of the artistic community in Montparnasse; his writings were
considered a literary epic of the modern adventurer. He was a friend of the American writer Henry
Miller,[12] who called him his "great idol", a man he "really venerated as a writer".[13] He knew many
of the writers, painters, and sculptors living in Paris. In 1918, his friend Amedeo
Modigliani painted his portrait. He was acquainted with Ernest Hemingway, who mentions having
seen him "with his broken boxer's nose and his pinned-up empty sleeve, rolling a cigarette with
his one good hand", at the Closerie des Lilas in Paris.[14] He was also befriended by John Dos
Passos, who was his closest American counterpart both as a world traveler (even more than
Hemingway) and in his adaptation of Cendrars' cinematic uses of montage in writing, most
notably in his great trilogy of the 1930s, U.S.A. One of the most gifted observers of the times, Dos
Passos brought Cendrars to American readers in the 1920s and 30s by translating Cendrars'
major long poems The Transsiberian and Panama and in his 1926 prose-poetic essay "Homer of
the Transsiberian," which was reprinted from The Saturday Review one year later in Orient
Express.[15]
After the war, Cendrars became involved in the movie industry in Italy, France, and the United
States.[16] Cendrars' departure from poetry in the 1920s roughly coincided with his break from the
world of the French intellectuals, summed up in his Farewell to Painters (1926) and the last
section of L'homme foudroyé (1944), after which he began to make numerous trips to South
America ("while others were going to Moscow", as he writes in that chapter). It was during this
second half of his career that he began to concentrate on novels, short stories, and, near the end
and just after World War II, on his magnificent poetic-autobiographical tetralogy, beginning
with L'homme foudroyé.

Later years[edit]
Cendrars continued to be active in the Paris artistic community, encouraging younger artists and
writing about them. For instance, he described the Hungarian photographer Ervin Marton as an
"ace of white and black photography" in a preface to his exhibition catalogue.[17] He was with the
British Expeditionary Force in northern France at the beginning of the German invasion in 1940,
and his book that immediately followed, Chez l'armée anglaise(With the English Army), was
seized before publication by the Gestapo, which sought him out and sacked his library in his
country home, while he fled into hiding in Aix-en-Provence. He comments on the trampling of his
library and temporary "extinction of my personality" at the beginning of L'homme foudroyé (in the
double sense of "the man who was blown away"). In Occupied France, the Gestapo listed
Cendrars as a Jewish writer of "French expression", but he managed to survive. His youngest
son was killed in an accident while escorting American planes in Morocco. Details of his time with
the BEF and last meeting with his son appear in his work of 1949 Le lotissement du
ciel (translated simply as Sky).
In 1950, Cendrars settled down in the rue Jean-Dolent in Paris, across from the La Santé Prison.
There he collaborated frequently with Radiodiffusion Française. He finally published again in
1956. The novel, Emmène-moi au bout du monde !…, was his last work before he suffered a
stroke in 1957. He died in 1961. His ashes are held at Le Tremblay-sur-Mauldre.

Legacy and honors[edit]

 In 1960, André Malraux, the Minister of Culture, awarded him the title of Commander of
the Légion d'honneur for his wartime service.
 1961, Cendrars was awarded the Paris Grand Prix for literature.
 His literary estate is archived in the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern.
 The Centre d'Études Blaise Cendrars (CEBC) has been established at the University of
Berne in his honor and for the study of his work.
 The French-language Association internationale Blaise Cendrars was established to study
and preserve his works.
 The Lycée Blaise-Cendrars in La Chaux-de-Fonds was named in his honor.

Works[edit]
Blaise Cendrars, circa 1907.
Name of the work, year of first edition, publisher (in Paris if not otherwise noted) / kind of work /
Known translations (year of first edition in that language)

 Les Pâques à New York (1912, Éditions des Hommes Nouveaux) / Poem / Spanish (1975)
 La Prose du Transsibérien et la Petite Jehanne de France (1913, Éditions des Hommes
Nouveaux) / Poem / Spanish (1975); Bengali (1981, Bish Sataker Pharasi Kabita, Aliance
Française de Calcutta; 1997)
 Selected Poems Blaise Cendrars (1979, Penguin Modern European Poets, /English tr. Pete
Hoida)
 Séquences (1913, Editions des Hommes Nouveaux)
 Rimsky-Korsakov et la nouvelle musique russe (1913)
 La Guerre au Luxembourg (1916, D. Niestlé, editor) / Poem / Spanish (1975)
 Profond aujourd'hui (1917, A la Belle Édition)
 Le Panama ou les aventures de mes sept oncles (1918, Éditions de la Sirène) / Poem /
English (1931); Spanish (1975); Bengali (2009)
 J'ai tué (1918, La Belle Édition) / Poetic essay / English (1992)
 Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques - (1919, Au Sans Pareil) / Poems / Spanish (1975)
 La Fin du monde filmée par l'Ange Notre-Dame - (1919, Éditions de la Sirène) / English
(1992)
 Anthologie nègre - (1921, Éditions de la Sirène) / African Folk Tales / Spanish (1930);
English (1972)
 Documentaires - (1924, with the title "Kodak", Librairie Stock) / Poems / Spanish (1975)
 Feuilles de route - (1924, Au Sans Pareil) / Spanish (1975)
 L'Or (1925, Grasset) / Novel / English (Sutter's Gold, 1926, Harper & Bros.) / Spanish (1931)
 Moravagine (1926, Grasset) / Novel / Spanish (1935); English (1968); Danish (2016, Basilisk)
 L'ABC du cinéma (1926, Les Écrivains Réunis) / English (1992)
 L'Eubage (1926, Au Sans Pareil) / English (1992)
 Éloge de la vie dangereuse (1926, Les Écrivains Réunis) / Poetic essay / English (1992);
Spanish (1994)
 Le Plan de l'Aiguille (1927, Au Sans Pareil) / Novel / Spanish (1931); English (1987)
 Petits contes nègres pour les enfants des blancs (1928, Éditions de Portiques) / Portuguese
(1989)
 Les Confessions de Dan Yack (1929, Au Sans Pareil) / Novel / Spanish (1930); English
(1990)
 Une nuit dans la forêt (1929, Lausanne, Éditions du Verseau) / Autobiographical essay
 Comment les Blancs sont d'anciens Noirs - (1929, Au Sans Pareil)
 Rhum—L'aventure de Jean Galmot (1930, Grasset) / Novel / Spanish (1937)
 Aujourd'hui (1931, Grasset)
 Vol à voile (1932, Lausanne, Librairie Payot)
 Panorama de la pègre (1935, Grenoble, Arthaud) / Journalism
 Hollywood, La Mecque du cinéma (1936, Grasset) / Journalism
 Histoires vraies (1937, Grasset) / Stories / Spanish (1938)
 La Vie dangereuse (1938, Grasset) / Stories
 D'Oultremer à Indigo (1940, Grasset)
 Chez l'armée Anglaise (1940, Corrêa) / Journalism
 Poésie complète (1944, Denoël), Complete poetic works / English (Complete Poems, tr. by
Ron Padgett, Univ. of California Press, 1992)
 L'Homme foudroyé (1945, Denoël) / Novel / English (1970); Spanish (1983)
 La Main coupée (1946, Denoël) / Novel / (in French) / English (Lice, 1973 / The Bloody Hand,
2014[18] ), Spanish (1980)
 Bourlinguer (1948, Denoël) / Novel / English (1972); Spanish (2004)
 Le Lotissement du ciel (1949, Denoël) / Novel / English (1992)
 La Banlieue de Paris (1949, Lausanne, La Guilde du Livre) / Essay with photos by Robert
Doisneau
 Blaise Cendrars, vous parle... (1952, Denoël) / Interviews by Michel Manoll
 Le Brésil, des Hommes sont venus (1952, Monaco, Les Documents d'Art)
 Noël aux 4 coins du monde (1953, Robert Cayla) / Stories emitted by radio in 1951 / English
(1994)
 Emmène-moi au bout du monde!... (1956, Denoël) / Novel / Spanish (1982), English (To the
End of the World, 1966, tr. by Alan Brown, Grove Press)
 Du monde entier au cœur du monde (1957, Denoël) /
 Trop c'est trop (1957, Denoël)
 Films sans images (1959, Denoël)
 Amours (1961)
 Dites-nous Monsieur Blaise Cendrars (1969)
 Paris ma ville. Illustrations de Fernand Léger. (1987, Bibliothèque des Arts)

Blaise Cendrars: A Poet for the Twenty-First Century

Cendrars was, beyond all questions, the pioneer of poetic
modernism.

Since the first two decades of the twentieth century, so much has changed radically in
the space of poetry, in its evaluations and critical confrontations. One thing, however,
remains absolutely the same: the force of authentic poetry. Such is the poetry of Blaise
Cendrars.

Its powers are inexhaustible; it is a poetry of energy and life, always modern and
provocative. If Rimbaud was the true founder and pillar of the spirit of the new poetry,
Cendrars was the architect of its brand new structure.

Cendrars was, beyond all questions, the pioneer of poetic modernism. Already in 1914
— while Ezra Pound was preoccupied with translating Latin epigrams, Chinese
quatrains, and trying to control his aesthetics; long before T. S. Eliot’s transcription of
Indian scriptures and formation of structural complexity — Cendrars had completed five
of his poetic masterpieces: The Legend Of Novgorode, Easter in New York, The Prose
Of The Transsiberian, Sequences and Panama. The unique Nineteen Elastic
Poems followed in 1919.

Cendrars integrated into his works the tropes of advertising and journalism, and the
temper of jazz. Yet he was one of the few poets who gave a distinctive emphasis to the
handling of the poetical subject, rather than the subject itself. Cendrars was also one of
the few, and possibly the first poet of his generation, who believed in differentiating the
poetic flow of reason for the benefit of spontaneity and discovery during the creation of
the poem. Moreover, he pioneered parallel and simultaneous correlations, wherein the
poem reflects at least two opposite forces whose relation constitutes the meaning.
 (via Flickr/Chris
Drumm)

Though Blaise Cendrars had deep knowledge of the legacy and voices of the old masters
from the near and distant literary past, he left everything behind him. He undertook
serious risks and advanced into chaotic and incoherent fields, which he conquered with a
steady belief in innovation, compassion and consequence. What was his goal? It was
nothing more than the complete reprioritization of the world’s values and ethics.

Life experience does not influence writing in itself; together with intellect and
spirituality it serves as the source of poetical inspiration. “Cendrars taught me that you
must live poetry, before you start writing” noted Philippe Soupault. Fundamentally an
extraordinary modernist in his way of life, Cendrars was the major pioneer of a poetical
avant-garde; his work is more than difficult to compare with the work of most of the
major poets of our time.

Cendrars’s longer poems are rooted partly in the poetry of the Middle Ages, having
certain kinships with the Swiss Benedictine hymnographer Notker le Bègue, and, more
concretely, with Latin hymns. Although produced in a more linguistic and formal
climate, his poetry has affinities with that of Remy de Gourmont, whose writings were
equally founded on the musicality and syntactic styles of ecclesiastical antiphonaries
and hymnals. Yet all these influences are incidental; his overall poetic synthesis was
unique and totally unexpected.
 Photograph of
Blaise Cendrars in his Foreign Legion uniform, taken on Easter Sunday 1916, a few months
after his amputation of the right arm (via Wikipedia)

Except for Cendrars’s three major and extended poetic works — which continue to bear
a tremendous influence today — he focused on what he characterized as “verbal
snapshots,” astonishing works of rhythm, vocabulary and style that prefigured so-called
“poetic cubism,” a pioneering movement that made its official appearance soon after in
the work of certain avant-garde poets.

However, “poetic cubism” fails to capture Cendrars’s linguistic originality; in fact, he

was never identified with any literary movement and was, himself, completely
indifferent to the characterizations and classifications of the poetic idioms of his time.
He moved forward, all alone, toward unknown waters of poetical creation, composing
complex but superlative work, which American writer Henry Miller defined as “a
splendiferous hulk of a poem dedicated to the archipelago of insomnia.”

Concerning his equally extraordinary prose works, Cendrars’s goal was not to
concentrate on the fatal outcome, not even to originate meaning, but to be deeply
involved with the emptiness of literary process and the versatile paths of its
incompleteness. A monument of innovative fiction, his was a tireless artistic drive that
brought the future into the present.

Such a literary man was Blaise Cendrars, a Poet. A true writer with a made-up name,
whom life baptized several times over in its innumerable maneuvers of changes. The
Hand that got lost in the Legion made the typewriter sound like a furious demoniac
machine.
 (via Wikipedia)

Since the days of early modernism to today, assertion and literariness work
against creation and content. Content is created the moment of the poem’s completion;
it is given shape for the first time with the form of the poem. Most poetry written today
is a mere expression of “personal truths,” centered on the individual or in the society.
Yet poetry is nothing but creation; it is a forever-unprecedented substance. Originality.
Not compliance.

That’s why the small amount of powerful poetry, never matches the countless editions
which fill the selves of the bookshops worldwide. Cendrars was a rare creator of new
content.
The essence of his texts is not located in conceptual definitions of aesthetics, but in the
most obvious and immediate difficulty of its inventive nature. Blaise Cendrars was the
first poet of the twenty-first century.

Blaise Cendrars
1887–1961

Blaise Cendrars was born Frédéric Louis Sauser in La Chaux-de-

Fonds, Switzerland, to a Swiss father and a Scottish mother.
Cendrars was famous for self-mythologizing, and details of his
childhood vary: in his own account, he was apprenticed to a
Russian watchmaker at 15 and witnessed the Russian
Revolution of 1905. In 1911, he changed his name to Blaise
Cendrars, “a bastardisation,” according to Lee Rourke, “of
‘braise’ (embers) and ‘cendres’ (ashes) with ‘ars’ (art) thrown in
for good measure.” Cendrars was an important figure in the
formation of modernist art, mixing in avant-garde circles in
Paris and New York City that included Guillaume Apollinaire,
Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, and others. His poems from this
period, emphasizing direct experience and formal
experimentation and utilizing techniques such as montage
gleaned from cinema, influenced the developing international
modernist style. Cendrars’s long poems from this period
include Pâques à New-York (Easter in New York), which he wrote
over a few days in 1912; La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite
Jehanne de France (The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little
Joan of France, 1913), originally published on a nearly 7-foot-
long sheet of paper with paintings by Sonia Delaunay-Terk in
what Cendrars called the first “simultaneous poem”; and Le
Panama ou Les Aventures de Mes Sept Oncles (1918), which was
translated by John Dos Passos and published in the United
States as Panama or the Adventures of my Seven Uncles in 1931.
Cendrars joined the French Foreign Legion when World War I
broke out; he served as a corporal and lost his arm in the
fighting. After the war, he continued to write and to work in film
as both a writer and director. He also became interested in the
cultures of South America, championing South American writers
such as Ferreira de Castro and editing Anthologie Nègre (1921),
the first of a proposed three-volume anthology that collected
writings he had discovered during his travels to Africa and
South America. (Volumes 2 and 3 were destroyed by the
Germans in WW II.) Cendrars wrote mainly novels and
“novelized” biographies in the 1920s and 1930s,
including L’Or (1925), based on the life of Johann August Sutter
and published in the United States as Sutter’s Gold (1926).
Cendrars was a war correspondent during the early months of
World War II, but after the fall of France in 1940, he retired to
his country house in Aix-en-Provence, where he began work on
the tetralogy of war memoirs that most critics consider his most
important work: L’Homme foudroyé (The Astonished Man,
1945), La main coupée (Lice, 1946), Bourlinguer (Planus, 1948),
and Le lotissement du ciel (Sky, 1949). Inducted into the Légion
d’Honneur by the French government in 1958, Cendrars was
awarded the Grand Prix Littéraire de la Ville de Paris weeks
before his death in 1961.

Blaise Cendrars
Blaise Cendrars (pseudonym för Frédéric Louis Sauser-Hall), född 1 september 1887 i La Chaux
de Fonds, död 21 januari 1961 i Paris, var en schweizisk, franskspråkig, författare.

_______

Reseanteckningar & Sydamerikanskor, förord, kommentarer och tolkning från franskan: Kennet
Klemets, Ellips 2013

Övrig utgivning på svenska:

Legenden om Novgorod [autenticiteten ifrågasatt], Aorta 13/2006, tolkning: Gunnar Harding &
Karl Erik Blomqvist
Påsk i New York (Les Pâques à New York, 1912) samt Transsibiriska järnvägen och lilla Jehanne
av Frankrike (La Prose du transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France, 1913), tolkning
Gunnar Harding, ingår i Är vi långt från Montmartre?, 1995
Små svarta sagor för de vitas barn, illustrationer av Jacqueline Duhême, översättning av Ingalisa
Munck, 1985
Dikter och prosa, översättning: Gunnar Harding, Olle Orrje, Stina Orrje, 1969
Akrobater i tredjeklasskupén: Apollinaire, Cendrars och Jacob, översatta och presenterade av
Gunnar Harding, 1967
Guld : general Johann August Suters underbara historia, översättning av Lotti Jeanneret, 1930
_______

Sagt om Reseanteckningar

Vad är det för en poet som så pass muntert redovisar yrkesrollens utanförskap och definierar sin
verksamhet lika högmodigt som ödmjukt, som en blandning mellan övermänniska och
sinnevärldens lyhörde protokollförare? Det stolta visitkortet tillhör Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961),
en av Parismodernismens centralgestalter, i den makalösa
diktsamlingen Reseanteckningar från 1924, som nu för första gången i sin helhet finns på
svenska. (Kristoffer Leandoer, Svenska Dagbladet)

Oceanbrev – finns något sådant i sinnevärlden? Fanns sådana 1924 när Blaise Cendrars
skickade dem? tänker jag. Och därpå: vilken fröjd att de nu kommer till mig, fint översatta av den
svenska poeten Kennet Klemets och hopbuntade av det österbottniska förlaget Ellips till en liten
skatt, Reseanteckningar(Feuilles de route). Flaskpost, kastad hit och dit över haven i nittio år,
men med hela sin friskhet bevarad. ”Dikter som aldrig kan dö” säger Kennet Klemets, och jag
håller med. (Carita Backström, Lysmasken)

Som helhet har Reseanteckningar en driv och lätthet som gör den till ett nöje att läsa, och
Klemets svenska språkdräkt känns kongenial. Roligt är också att se den starka släktskapen med
en finlandssvensk lite senare modernist, Henry Parland. Båda två bejakade den moderna
tekniken och stadslivet med dess puls, hunger, förfall och elegans. (Henrika Ringbom, Ny Tid)

Dikterna är till synes enkla och med ett direkt tilltal. I själva verket krävs en stor avspändhet, ja,
nästan ett lugn eller ett slags varm likgiltighet för att kunna skriva som Cendrars gör, och det är
inte liktydigt med brist på engagemang. Cendrars dikt i Reseanteckningar &
Sydamerikanskor är tidlös och utan omsvep, den rör sig inte bland klichéer eller poetiska
omskrivningar. (Boel Schenlaer, Merkurius)

”När du älskar måste du ge dig av”, skriver han i en dikt och Blaise Cendrars får också en lång
livsresa och skriver redan från början på ett stort livsverk. Han dör 1961, 74 år gammal. Men
hans Reseanteckningar, snart 90 år gamla har behållit sin fräschör. (Mats Granberg,
Norrköpings Tidningar)

Cendrars poesi har både ett eko från det förgångna och en saltvattenbestänkt tidlöshet. (Gungerd
Wikholm, Kulturtimmen)
VII

Vi vill inte vara sorgsna

Det är för enkelt
Det är för dumt
Det är för bekvämt
Man har alltför ofta orsak till det
Det är inte smart
Alla är sorgsna
Vi vill inte längre vara sorgsna

Ur Sud-Américaines
Selected Writings of Blaise Cendrars
Nonfiction by Blaise Cendrars
“Everything is written in blood, but a blood that is saturated with starlight. You can
look clean through him and see the planets wheeling. The silence he creates is
deafening. It takes you back to the beginning of the world, to that hush which is
engraved on the face of mystery.” So writes Henry Miller of Blaise Cendrars in his
foreword to this collection of prose and poetry by one of the great figures of modern
French literature.…

Blaise Cendrars – Reseanteckningar

Ellips förlag, 2013, 172 sidor

Av Peter Nyberg

Blaise Cendrars
Plura Jonsson introducerar poeten Blaise Cendrars för mig i en av
Eldkvarns samlingsboxar. När Jonsson skriver en av sina sånger tar han
starkt intryck av ”Du är vackrare än himlen och havet”:

När du älskar måste du ge dig av

Lämna din kvinna lämna ditt barn
Lämna din pojkvän lämna din flickvän
Lämna din älskare lämna din älskarinna
När du älskar måste du ge dig av

De där raderna har blivit kvar, de har gång på gång upprepats inom mig tills de
övergått till att vara ett mantra utan speciellt mycket innebörd, men när jag
återupptäcker dem i Blaise Cendrars Reseanteckningaråterför de mig till ett
annat livsstadium, på det sätt som vissa formuleringar kan göra. Cendrars är
av Schweizisk-franskt ursprung och lika mycket äventyrare som poet. I
skrivandet av Reseanteckningar har han klivit ombord på en atlantångare som
ska ta honom till Brasilien. Han är laddad med en beatnikaktig känsla för livet
och glädje över att upptäcka det genom sitt skrivande. Ofta får jag intryck av
att han har genomskådat pretentionerna och skriver vad han ser. På gott och
ont.

Blaise Cendrars Reseanteckningar

Flera av dikterna i Reseanteckningar är storartade. I ögonblicket lyckas
Cendrars fånga människor och ögonblick, vilka överförs till nutida människors
livssituationer. I den meningen har inte boken gått ur tiden, trots att den
skrevs för 90 år sedan. I andra dikter tycks texten falla och bli platt.
Iakttagelsen leder ingenstans utan stannar vid att vara en nedtecknad
iakttagelse, en reseanteckning i dess mest alldagliga form. Som i SMÅFISK:
Himlen är skarpt blå
Väggen mittemot är skarpt vit
Det skarpa solskenet bränner på mitt huvud
En negress på en liten terrass friterar mycket små fiskar i ett kokkärl
utskuret ur en gammal kexburk
Två negerungar tuggar på en sockerrörsstjälk

Sammantaget genomströmmas läsningen av något mer än de enskilda

dikterna ger. Poetens iakttagelser är ofta vardagliga men nyfikenheten och en
vild livslust gör läsningen intressant. Formen tillåts aldrig störa, men blir
ibland väl platt och närmar sig i vissa dikter det lakoniska utan att i poesin ha
stöd för lakonismerna.

Volymen från Ellips innehåller också Cendrars svit ”Sydamerikanskor”, vilken

korresponderar med Reseanteckningar men saknar den övergripande energin
och övergår i en mer slentrianmässig poesi.

Jag kommer inte att få några bestående intryck av Reseanteckningar. Det är en

trevlig utgivning, jag tycker om Cendrars livsenergi, men grips inte av
dikterna.