Blaise Cendrars

Blaise Cendrars (1887–1961) was a French poet and novelist who became one of the central figures of the European avant-garde in the early twentieth century.

Born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Switzerland, he traveled extensively from adolescence — through Russia, China, and New York — before settling in Paris, where he became part of the literary and artistic community that included Picasso, Léger, Modigliani, Chagall, and Apollinaire. His long poem La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (1913), published as a fold-out accordion book in collaboration with the painter Sonia Delaunay, is among the foundational works of modernist poetry, using the imagery of railway travel across Russia to produce a text that is simultaneously lyric and geographic. His other major poetry — Pâques à New York (1912) and Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (1919) — sustained this attention to movement, speed, and the modern city. He lost his right arm during the First World War, fighting in the Foreign Legion at the Battle of the Marne in 1915; the experience marked everything he wrote afterward. His prose — above all the picaresque novel Moravagine (1926), the biography L'Or (Gold, 1925), and the late autobiographical volumes L'Homme foudroyé (1945) and Bourlinguer (1948) — brings to fiction the restless energy and eye for material detail of a lifelong traveler and adventurer.

His work has been widely translated and continues to be read as one of the most original voices linking poetry and modernity.