Blaise Cendrars was a pioneer of modernist literature. The full range of his poetry-from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor-offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now.
Here, for the first time in English translation, is the complete poetry of a legendary twentieth-century French writer. Cendrars, born Frederick Louis Sauser in 1887, invented his...