Letter by Blaise Cendrars

Jean Epstein, La Poésie d’aujourd’hui un nouvel état d’intelligence, Paris : La Sirène, 1921, pp. 213-5

The Poetry of Today, A New Mindset

Letter by Blaise Cendrars

Jean Epstein, you’re outlining the collective psychosis of the end of a generation rather than the more evolved psychosis of a few of us who already went through the stage that you point out. You see us from the backside, and like the assault troops with a white patch on the back of their uniform, we’ve passed the goal-line and shells from our side are landing smack on our kissers.* Are you carefully taking stock of the former crisis as well as the beginning of the new one?

Clean break. New straight start on a steel rail-line.

These are the times: Tango, Ballets russes, Cubism, Mallarmé, intellectual Bolshevism, madness.

Then war: a void

Then the times: construction, Simultaneism, statement. Banner: Rimbaud: change of ownership. Posters. The façade of houses eaten up by letters. The street enjambed by the word. The modern machine people know how to do without. Bolshevism in action. World.

You are the first who said true and meaningful things about today’s poetry, you are not political, and you are shuffling the cards of all these gentlemen—the militants of Literature.

Since you are giving us the scoop on so many people while constantly adjusting the aperture, we no longer see them at scale under this sad light dribbling from magazines.

This is why a new way of being and feeling can be gleaned from your book.

Blaise Cendrars

Nice, 1920

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* This refers to an insane practice of trench warfare (which Cendrars fought): front line soldiers had a white square sewn on the back of their uniform so commanders could see when they arrived at the opposing trench in all the smoke. Of course, when these assault troops made it alive to the enemy’s trench, their own artillery often still crushed them to death

Translated for The Chiseler by Christophe Wall-Romana