SOURCE: "French Chronicle," in Poetry, Vol. 111, No. 2, November, 1967, pp. 124-28.

In the following excerpt, Zweig provides a mixed, but generally favorable, review of the volume Blaise Cendrars, Selected Writings. He is, however, critical of the quality of translation.

Blaise Cendrars was a monument. He spent his life crossing and recrossing the world as if it might collapse beneath him when he stopped, like those glossy insects that scoot endlessly over a pond, held up by "surface tension". Except that Cendrars drew the tension out of his own mind. In his preface to the New Directions volume, Henry Miller describes the man: "I see his slouch hat and battered mug beneath it. I see him 'revolutionizing' because there is nothing else to do…. He was not a rebel, he was an absolute traitor to the race, and as such I salute him. The salute is wasted of course, because...