SOURCE: "Cendrars," in Poetry, Vol. XXXIX, No. IV, January, 1932, pp. 224-27.

In the essay below, Zabel discusses Dos Passos's translations of Cendrars and Cendrars's place in the evolution of French literature.

The enthusiasm of Mr. Dos Passos' project is well warranted. although his Foreword succeeds in being little more than an exhibition of sore-headed commiseration to which its sprinkle of misprints and historical lapses does little injustice. He has, at the outset, an inheritor's fitness to be Cendrars's translator: the rapid verbal and imaginative impulse of Les Pûques à New-York, La prose du Transsibérien, Panama, and Kodak documentaire is likewise the fever in the nerves of Orient Express, Rosinante, and Manhattan Transfer, and it remains largely intact in these lucid versions from three of Cendrars's books. Dos Passos has also retained from the years of his own apprenticeship a keen memory of the ardor of discovery that...