GUEST POST BY NATALIE D'ARBELOFF: REDISCOVERING BLAISE CENDRARS
Writer Natalie d’Arbeloff revisits Blaise Cendrars’s poem Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France via translation and images.
The Tate Modern's current Sonia Delaunay exhibition includes one of the priceless original copies of the avant-garde poet Blaise Cendrars’ ground-breaking poem Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France on which Delaunay collaborated in 1913, decorating Cendrars’ hand-printed text with her simultaneous abstract imagery.
Coincidentally, the Old Stile Press has recently published Trans-Siberian Prosody and Little Jeanne from France, a new English translation by Dick Jones, illustrated by me with 43 relief prints. This project was born when I first read on his blog Patteran Pages, Dick’s translation of Cendrars’ epic poem and immediatly felt inspired to create images for it. The Old Stile Press and Dick Jones became equally excited by the project and together we have created a fusion of image and words, a livre d’artiste, in an edition of only 150 hand-printed, signed copies. The book was inaugurated with an audio-visual presentation in early July at the London Review Bookshop.
Below are the first lines of the poem:
Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jehanne de France
En ce temps-là j’étais en mon adolescence
J’avais à peine seize ans et je ne me souvenais déjà plus de mon enfance
J’étais à 16.000 lieues du lieu de ma naissance
J’étais à Moscou, dans la ville des mille et trois clochers et des sept gares
Et je n’avais pas assez des sept gares et des mille et trois tours
Car mon adolescence était si ardente et si folle
Que mon cœur, tour à tour, brûlait comme le temple
d’Éphèse ou comme la Place Rouge de Moscou
Quand le soleil se couche.
Et mes yeux éclairaient des voies anciennes.
Et j’étais déjà si mauvais poète
Que je ne savais pas aller jusqu’au bout.
Translation by Dick Jones:
Trans-Siberian Prosody and Little Jeanne from France
At that time I was just an adolescent
Barely sixteen and already I’d forgotten my childhood
I was 16,000 leagues from my birthplace
I was in Moscow, city of one thousand and three belltowers and seven railway stations
And I couldn’t get enough of those seven stations and the thousand and three belltowers
Because as a kid I was so passionate, so wild
Beat-by-beat, my heart blazing like the temple
of Ephesus or like Moscow’s Red Square
When the sun sets
My eyes shone out over the ancient ways.
But I was so bad a poet
that I just didn’t know how to follow it through.
A slide show of pages from the book can be viewed here.
A link to a video about Blaise Cendrars by Natalie D'Arbeloff with a reading of the poem by Dick Jones can be found here.