Ron Padgett reads excerpts from Blaise Cendrars’s poem “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France,” 1913.

A collaboration between Sonia Delaunay and Cendrars, the “first simultaneous book” features her painting running down the left side, inspired by this poem, set in multicolored type on the right. Cendrars’s montaged verse recounts a young man’s impressions on the Trans-Siberian Railway, and with the accordioned panels mimicking a folding train schedule, the work achieves a collapse of time and space emblematic of the experience of modern life.

Transcript
Padgett: "The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jehanne of France,” by Blaise Cendrars.

She’s asleep
And she hasn’t taken in a thing the whole way
All those faces glimpsed in the stations
All the clocks
Paris time Berlin time Saint Petersburg time all those stations’ times
And at Ufa the bloody face of the cannoneer
And the absurdly luminous dial at Grodno
And the train moving forward endlessly
Every morning you set your watch ahead
The train moves forward and the sun loses time
It’s no use! I hear the bells
The big bell at Notre-Dame
The sharp bell at the Louvre that rang on Saint Bartholomew’s Day
The rusty carillons of Bruges-the-Dead
The electric bells of the New York Public Library
The campaniles of Venice
And the bells of Moscow ringing, the clock at Red Gate that kept time
   for me when I was working in an office
And my memories
The train thunders into the roundhouse
The train rolls along
A gramophone blurts out a tinny Bohemian march
And the world, like the hands of the clock in the Jewish section of
   Prague, turns wildly backwards.

. . .

O Paris
Main station where desires arrive at the crossroads of restlessness
Now only the paint store has a little light on its door
The International Pullman and Great European Express Company has
   sent me its brochure
It’s the most beautiful church in the world
I have friends who surround me like guardrails
They’re afraid that when I leave I’ll never come back
All the women I’ve ever known appear around me on the horizon
Holding out their arms and looking like sad lighthouses in the rain
Bella, Agnès, Catherine, and the mother of my son in Italy
And she who is the mother of my love in America
Sometimes the cry of a whistle tears me apart
Over in Manchuria a belly is still heaving, as if giving birth
I wish
I wish I’d never started traveling
Tonight a great love is driving me out of my mind
And I can’t help thinking about little Jeanne of France.
It’s through a sad night that I’ve written this poem in her honor
Jeanne
The little prostitute
I’m sad so sad
I’m going to the Lapin Agile to remember my lost youth again
Have a few drinks
And come back home alone

Paris

City of the incomparable Tower the great Gibbet and the Wheel

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