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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
AN ESSENTIAL 20th CENTURY POET, March 8, 1999
By A Customer
Cendrars is poetry's perception of our finishing century....when it was starting, for the first half. He brillantly explored modernism, advertising, planes and boats, the cinema, cars, travel and shrinking distances. His language is like jazz. He could be Kerouac's uncle and Dizzie Gillespy's cousin, he could be the world's most original defender of freedom of expression, a peculiar pagnism of the spoken word, from a smallish swiss writing in French while growing coffee in Brazil. Cant wait to read him in English. That couldn't be bad...or could it?
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Leaves 'Night Mail' chugging behind., March 28, 2000
This review is from: Complete Poems (Paperback)
The second long poem in this volume, 'Trans-Siberian Express and little Jeanne of France' is a vast improvement on its derivative predecessor, 'Easter in New York'. We can feel beginning the Cendrars mode in full flow, the extended, rhythmic, almost Whitman-like expansiveness. The poem details a trip by the poet through Russia on the titular train during the 1905 Russian Revolution and Sino-Russian War. It contrasts his vagrant, poverty-stricken life with the inhuman brutlity of war (a foretaste of the mechanistic infernoes of the 20th century); the forward movement of the train with his development as a poet - the poem is as much about the writing of a poem as an historical travelogue. Cendrars' modernity is apparent in the poem's rhythms, often simulating the thrilling momentum of a hurtling train, as often breaking off, lurching, rattling. His 'plain' imagistic power is at full steam (horrible pun), as much at ease with awe at travelling through a new, alien country, as disgust with the horrors of war (the mutilated arms of soldiers dance in a passing carriage), and the sadnesses of those lives marginalised by great events, such as the little prostitute of the title. Although deriving much of its energy from nascent modernity, the poem also traces the connection between science and progress with war, barbarity, apocalypse, the forward thrust of humanity leading only to its destruction. But it is in the detail that life affirms itself, and the closing rejecting, melancholy coda cannot quite dispel the rush of the journey.
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3 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant verse, not sure about the translation., February 24, 2000
This review is from: Complete Poems (Paperback)
Blaise Cendrars is often considered the great poet of modernity and metropolitanism, and the opening long poem here, 'Easter In New York', certainly grapples with the present, as the starving, despairing narrator wanders through the Big Apple by night, confronted with prostitutes, beggars, deformed musicians, thieves; stared at with hostility by strangers, afraid of his own shadows. The trash-filled seediness of New York, the tense ethnic melting-pot, the spiritual banality of capitalism (in the form of Banks and skyscrapers), the jostling mechanisation of the mob, the roaring subways are all vividly captured. This is largely achieved by the insertion into Cendrars' famously plain style of unfamiliar or violent words that create a sense of wrenching alienation. What is bizarre is that Cendrars frames this modern narrative with a monologue addressed to Jesus on Good Friday. At first when he bemoans the lack of spirituality under modern capitalism, his visits to dank libraries to look up famous artistic representations of the Passion , as well as books and hymns, we may feel a conservative impulse. But the more the poet ruminates on representations - rather than manifestations - of Christ, the more we notice that it is Good Friday, the day Jesus died, all the year round; that there is no redemptive resurrecton in this living hell where even suicide is too expensive. This again mirrors the language's development. The poem's form is a series of steady, regular, rhymed, Latinate couplets, but as the language, images, sentiments become more violent, despairing, urgent, this form begins to burst until the final hallucinatory denial suggest escape. Some of the verses, such as the narrator accompanying God down a nameless street, His side gashed, the houses filling with blood, the occupants withering with sin, have a Wildean savour (I'm thinking of his stories and prose poems) as if to bridge the gap between the ancient and modern. There is an excellent introduction, by Jay Bochner, to Cendrars' life and art in this book, and the translations (by a practicising poet, Ron Padgett) have been acclaimed by prestigious worthies like the great John Ashbery, but they seem problematic to me. Padgett's attempt to translate the poems as verse results in many distorting omissions and cmpromises, and reduces Cendrars's methodical rhythms to singsong. It's okay for the likes of me, I have enough French to struggle with the original, but English readers might lose something. In one case he translates the word 'aube', clearly meant in the context as 'alb' (the priest's vestment), as 'dawn', its other meaning, used punningly throughout. This makes me fear for the rest of the text's accuracy.
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