Frédéric-Louis Sauser (September 1, 1887 – January 21, 1961), better known as Blaise Cendrars (French: [sɑ̃dʁaʁ]), was a Swiss-born novelist and poet. He became a naturalized French citizen in 1916. Cendrars was a writer who had a significant impact on the European modernist movement.

Early years and education

Frédéric was born in La Chaux-de-Fonds, Neuchâtel, Switzerland, on rue de la Paix 27, into a middle-class French-speaking family. His father was Swiss, and his mother was Scottish. His family sent him to a German boarding school, but he ran away. In 1902, he attended the Realschule in Basel, where he met August Suter, a sculptor who became his lifelong friend. Later, he enrolled in a school in Neuchâtel but showed little interest in his studies. In 1904, he left school because of poor grades and began an apprenticeship with a Swiss watchmaker in Russia.

While living in St. Petersburg, he began writing with the help of R.R., a librarian at the National Library of Russia. There, he wrote the poem "The Legend of Novgorode" (La Légende de Novgorode), which R.R. translated into Russian. It is said that fourteen copies were made, but Frédéric claimed to own none, and no copies were found during his lifetime. In 1995, the Bulgarian poet Kiril Kadiiski claimed to have discovered one Russian translation in Sofia, but experts questioned its authenticity based on factual, typographic, orthographic, and stylistic analysis.

In 1907, Frédéric returned to Switzerland and studied medicine at the University of Berne. During this time, he wrote his first confirmed poems, Séquences, which were influenced by Remy de Gourmont’s Le Latin mystique.

Literary career

Blaise Cendrars was an early leader in the Modernist movement in European poetry. His important works include The Legend of Novgorode (1907), Les Pâques à New York (1912), La prose du Transsibérien et de 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).

Cendrars was influenced by the poet Arthur Rimbaud, who valued creativity over traditional writing. Like Rimbaud, Cendrars was interested in unusual things such as old art, travel stories, and everyday life. He believed that poetry should reflect real experiences rather than separate ideas from life.

Cendrars loved to travel and explore the world. He was inspired by the works of writers like Honoré de Balzac and Giacomo Casanova, who wrote about life in the 18th and 19th centuries. He also admired the early modernist artists, such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Fernand Léger, who created art without strict rules.

In 1911, Cendrars moved to New York, where he wrote his famous poem Les Pâques à New York ("Easter in New York") in 1912. He first used the name "Blaise Cendrars" as his pen name. He returned to Paris and began publishing poetry with a group of writers. He met many artists, including Marc Chagall, Fernand Léger, and Guillaume Apollinaire. Apollinaire’s poem Zone was influenced by Cendrars’s work.

Cendrars’s poetry used vivid images, fast-changing scenes, and strong emotions. His most famous poem, The Transsiberian, describes the Russian-Japanese war and includes powerful lines like, “The earth stretches elongated and snaps back like an accordion / tortured by a sadic hand.” The poem was printed in a special way by artist Sonia Delaunay-Terk, with colorful designs and a map of the Transsiberian railway. Cendrars called this the first “simultaneous poem.”

Cendrars worked with artists like Léger to create short poems called Dix-neuf poèmes élastiques (“Nineteen Elastic Poems”). In 1954, he and Léger wrote a book called Paris, ma ville (“Paris, My City”), which was published in 1987 after Léger’s death.

During World War I, Cendrars joined the French Foreign Legion and fought in the war. He lost his right arm during the Battle of Champagne in 1915 and wrote about his experiences in books like La Main coupée and J'ai tué.

Cendrars became a well-known figure in Paris’s art community. He was friends with writers like Henry Miller and Ernest Hemingway, and his work influenced American writer John Dos Passos, who translated his poems.

After the war, Cendrars worked in the film industry in Italy, France, and the United States. In the 1920s, he stopped writing poetry and focused on other projects. He traveled to South America and wrote about his experiences in later years.

Works

Name of the work, year the work was first published, publisher (if not mentioned, it was published in Paris) / type of work / Known translations (year the translation was first published in that language)