La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and the Little Joan of France), published in Paris in September 1913, is in many respects a foundational text for modernism in literature and the arts. Blaise Cendrars’s best-known work, the original edition—a projected 150 copies—was accompanied or “illuminated” by the colorful, mostly abstract graphics of Sonia Delaunay. Folded in an accordion style, it measured two meters when unfolded. The sum total (the length of all the “books” in the original edition, taken together) would equal the height of the Eiffel Tower. Each copy, as it came through the silkscreen process, is a unique work of art, with slight variations in hue and intensity of color, sometimes retouched by the hand of the artist. Her contribution forms one of the first significant abstract expressions in the history of modern art.
The poem is frequently cited as either cubist or futurist because of the modernity of its theme of global transportation in a shrinking and violent world. In defiance of any labels such as “futurism,” publicity for the poem made much of its innovative nature as the first simultaneous composition. The phrase “simultaneity” is meant to characterize the collaborative and visual nature of the published work. Both Delaunay’s designs on the left side and the eccentrically jammed and violent typography of the text on the right allow the viewer to engage the composition with a single sweep of the eye.
The text reflects Cendrars’s interest in speed, both in the jump cuts between segments of the poem and in the disjointed nature of the phrasing. Cendrars, like Arthur Rimbaud, is a poet of endlessly varied series. This is true of his prose, like Moravagine, as well as of the poetry of La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France. Chefdor compares La Prose to Rimbaud’s “Drunken Boat,” fusing “immediacy of perception” and “the recollection of experience, passing from a present tense to the litany-like” effect (44). The rhythms are controlled by syntax, not meter, erasing a cardinal distinction between prose and poetry. That erasure is one reason that the poem is identified as a “prose.”
Cendrars, in a letter published in Herwarth Walden’s Der Sturm in 1913, described the poem as an illuminated billboard reflecting the fevered pace of modern life (quoted in Perloff 10). The composition emphasizes this modernity of conception, in the process collapsing the distinction between high and low culture, an erasure distinctive of all Cendrars’s literary productions. For this same reason the poem is called a “prose” in the sense of the Latin dictu, which Cendrars understood as common speech (Miriam Cendrars 30, 43–44). Rainer Maria Rilke, in conversation with Frank Budgen, identified the poem as an instance of “street corner balladry” (quoted in Bochner 103).
Ironically, at several points in La Prose, Cendrars identifies himself as a bad poet who has no sense of how to set himself the task of composing a work like that in hand:
Et j’étais déjà si fort mauvais poète.
Je ne savais pas aller jusqu’au bout.
(Cendrars, Oeuvres Complètes, I:16)
(And I was already such a bad poet
That I didn’t know how to go about it.)
(Translated by Wellman)
In this respect La Prose, in addition to its many other qualities, is a highly self-reflexive work, its autobiographical flatness of ordinary detail being another hallmark of the poem’s innovative style. The poem, in its use of the rail journey motif as a figure for both speed and a revolution in consciousness, is based on Cendrars’s experiences as an apprentice to a jewelry salesman in St. Petersburg, Russia. At 16, Cendrars took the train as far as the Russian border with Manchuria at Harbin. This trip, through a devastated landscape undergoing the stress of both the Russian Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s loss that same year to Japan in the Russo-Japanese War, provides the main structure of the poem:
J’ai déchiffré tous les textes confus des roues et
j’ai rassemblé les éléments épars d’une
violente beauté
Que je possède
Et qui me force (Oeuvres Complètes, I:31)
(I deciphered all the scrambled texts of the
wheels and rearranged the scattered elements
into a violent beauty
That I master
And that drives me)
(Translated by Wellman)
Accompanying the poet is the figure of Little Joan of France, clearly an association with Joan of Arc and French national identity. First, the poet presents her as a child prostitute, a pathetic product of the homelessness and alienation of modern life; sometimes he castigates her maliciously; finally, he treasures, soothes, and protects her weary form.
The account of the trip is supplemented by a coda that apostrophizes Paris. Marjorie Perloff concludes her examination of the significance of The Prose by writing, “the poet’s hallucinatory vision remains rooted in the most ordinary reality . . . a mordant ecstasy of ‘profound aujourd’hui’” (42–43). This ecstasy or rebirth through immersion in daily life is the stance to be most deeply treasured throughout Cendrars’s oeuvre.
Bibliography
Bochner, Jay. Blaise Cendrars, Discovery and Re-creation. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1978.
Cendrars, Blaise. Blaise Cendrars: Complete Poems. Translated by Ron Padgett, introduction by Jay Bochner. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Appendix with Poésies complètes.
———. La prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France. Translated by Donald Wellman.
———. Œuvres complètes. 16 vols. Edited by Raymond Dumay and Nino Frank. Paris: Le Club Français du Livre, 1968–1971.
———. Poésies complètes avec 41 poèmes inédits. Paris: Denoël, 2001.
Cendrars, Miriam. Blaise Cendrars: L’or d’un poète. Paris: Gallimard, 1996.
Chefdor, Monique. Blaise Cendrars. Boston: Twayne, 1980.
Perloff, Marjorie. The Futurist Moment. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986.
Categories: Literature, World Literature
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