La Prose du Transsibérien (1913)

Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay, La prose du transsiberien (1913)

"Visual-Verbal Encounters": https://www.reading.ac.uk/web/FILES/modern-languages-and-european-studies/Katherine_Shingler_Visual_Encounters_in_Cendrars_and_Delaunays.pdf

“I used the word 'prose' in the Trans-Siberian in the early Latin sense of prosa dictu. Poem seemed to me too pretentious, too narrow. Prose is more open, popular.”

Cendrars is full of vigor and initiative. He constantly travels, he writes, and, after becoming better known and recognized for his poetic genius, he starts up magazines, he is an art critic, he publishes unknown authors, he explores the spaces between the obvious, he wants to get to the bottom of suffering. The Trans-Siberian describes his initiation or crossing over into manhood, both sexually and spiritually. This is his first great voyage, of which he was able to write for the first time “I saw” in the same way that Goya has

Legend of Novgorod

use of women figure at the center of the poem -- like a Theophila

hearing bells

So numerous the visual associations that I can't develop them all in my verses For I am still a very bad poet For the universe overwhelms me For I have neglected to insure myself against railroad accidents For I don't know how to go all the way to the end And I'm afraid

OR

So many image-associations that I can't get into my poems Because I'm still a very bad poet Because the universe sweeps me on Because I forgot to buy accident insurance for the trip Because I don't know how to go about it. I'm afraid

Marc Chagall, Vitebsk, hub of multimedia

It is on an evening of sadness that I wrote this poem in her honor. Jeanne

differing opinions regarding simultaneity

"prospectus" about the work circulated before its appearance in 1913

cendrars constantly skirting idea of what simultaneity means

apollinaire -- after publication, connected simultaneity to his own poetic experiments attempting to get people to take into account the global poem--not just one word after another; claims that reading simultaneously might be more like reading a musical score; also like poster art

simultaneity built on contrast; vividness of color enhanced by juxtaposing complementary colors

in text, this means bringing together ancient and modern, different images of relationship

not necessarily merging verbal and visual -- perhaps just bringing them into greater contrast

opposites attracted to each other, like magnetic poles or opposite sexes

marjorie perloff, futurist moment

DIFFERENCE is the key -- about maintaining and harmonizing differences not reducing verbal to visual, as in appollinaire's calligrammes

major innovation of the poem is it s use of colored print

visual link between some links created by typographic innovation -- creates associations and echoes, as the poem turns back on itself

painting is illustrative in the sense that it somehow represents the journey of the poem, but does not figure the text's motifs

painting as representation of time, not space; poem as a representation of space, not time

poèmes élastiques

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Perloff, from The Futurist Moment

Les Hommes nouveaux, radical journal and small press founded by BLaise Cendrars and his friend Emile Szytta

subtitle of La Prose: "poems, simultaneous colors, in an edition attaining the height of the Eiffel Tower" [edition as a totality]

"The particular version of modernity found in this text makes it an especially fitting emblem of what I call the Futurist moment."knowledge

Cendrars -- saved by the war

Cendrars and Delaunay didn't consider themselves Futurists

publication of poem preceded by flurry of leaflets, subscription forms, and prospectuses announcing a poem whose height would rival that of the Eiffel Tower

annoyed Italian Futurists, who had often used simultaneity in their manifesto-- mixture of motion and speed

Apollinaire on the poem: "Blaise Cendrars and Mme Delaunay-Terk have carried out a unique experiment in simultaneity, written in contrasting colors in order to train the ey to read with one glancee the whole of a poem, even as an orchestra conductor reads with one glance the notes placed up and down on the bar, even as one reads with a single glance the plsatic elements printed on a poster.

Cendrars' manifesto -- see 164; doesn't write by vocation, literature as life; "all of life is nothing but a poem, a movement"

La Prose became "not only a poem but an event, a happening" -- was displayed and performed in Berlin, London, NewYork, Moscow, and St Petersburg