Blaise Cendrars, the Ensign of the Surrealist Brotherhood

Since it belongs to that line of writers of raptured life, authentic men of action whose life would not be difficult to make a television series that hypnotized, the Swiss Blaise Cendrars has had, instead, to punish with the cross that his work has left behind a character who did not stop moving or after death . What is a real poverty, as the small and exquisite publishing house Trapisonda books has shown, which in very elegant volumes recovers the work of this authentic giant of European literature to which any label - traveler, avant-garde poet, editor, nocturnal reporter, anthologist, narrator - I would make him jibarizar. At the moment his writings on the underworld have appeared, Panorama of the underworld , and small memories of an editor are coming out, his testimony as inventor of the great collection The Mermaid in which they shook hands of the past as Apollinaire with the new masters of French poetry like Jean Cocteau, and The End of the World filmed by the angel of Notre Dame , extraordinary text with illustrations by Fernand Léger that culminates his simultaneistic adventure in which poetry and painting skipped the same rope producing artifacts hardly surpassed, however much the printing sciences have advanced.

When the first edition of that book was published in 1919, Blaise Cendrars was already legendary. First by the publication of The Legend of Novgorod , a book that nobody has seen or will see, of which 14 copies were printed on black paper with white characters . Then for his entry into the Foreign Legion to fight in the Great War: he lost an arm and thus entered the Commonwealth of mutilated writers, in which Cervantes and Valle-Inclán were already. About the war he wrote an intense poem entitled I have killed , which was his first collaboration with Fernand Léger. By then, he had already produced one of the most beautiful artifacts of universal poetry, Prose of the Trans-Siberian and little Jehanne of France , in which his nervous text, made of vertigo and images, blends into an extraordinary poster with the illustrations of Sonia Delaunay looking for whoever looks at the work is both spectator and reader. So convinced was the intrepid Cendrars that poetry - that is, each poem - had to leave the world in a certain way, conditioning his own impression, that when he published one of his best works, Panama or the story of my seven uncles , he decided that the book looked like a tourism brochure.

In the mid-20s he consolidated his fame as a great renovator of the edition of poetry books, he abandoned poetry himself, in which we still have to look for some of the most intense works of the French avant-garde: there are Nineteen elastic poems , and there is his latest work, Kodak , which the author defined as a collection of verbal photographs.

The novel was better suited to the ambitions of the Cendrars of the 20s: he had lived so many lives, it was time to find them grave in more or less reliable stories. He was very successful with his first attempt, Gold , celebrated with a slogan that would serve his best pieces: "It's not a novel, it's not an essay, it's not a poem: it's all three at once." In those years it was common for Cendrars' books to be translated immediately into Spanish. This was the case with El oro , starring a real and fantastic character, General Suter, a millionaire thanks to the gold rush, who works his own misfortune with his fortune. And it happened with Dan Yack's confessions , and with The needle plan and a little later, in Chilean version, Moravagine . His very important black Anthology was also translated at once, in which he makes a point in the vivid blackness of the time: Cendrars decided to military in the movement by inventing a bold anthology of stories that sometimes closely followed the oral tradition of some African people and others Many were limited to pure invention.

As you can see, Cendrars does not fit on a page. The least known Cendrars is precisely the one Trapisonda is putting in Spanish: the insatiable curiosity journalist and the memorialist who has lived it all. Many times that happy phrase that Borges dedicated to Quevedo - "more than a man is a literature" - has been repeated, referring to many authors. Whenever I read it, I think of Blaise Cendrars, who wrote poems that were stories, and essays that were novels, and novels that were poems. Someone who really seems to us more than an author: a whole literature.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

• culture
• literature
• novel

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