My first taste of [Cendrars] in his own language came at a time when my French was none too proficient. I began with Moravagine, a book by no means easy to read for one who knows little French. It was like reading a phosphorescent text through smoked glasses. I had to divine what he was saying, Cendrars, but I got it. If he had written it in Tegalic I would have gotten it. Everything is written in blood, but a blood that is saturated with starlight. Cendrars is like a transparent fish swimming in a planetary sperm; you can see his backbone, his lungs, his heart, his kidneys, his intestines; you can see the red corpuscles moving in the blood stream. You can look clean through him and see the planets wheeling. The silence he creates is deafening. It takes you back to the beginning of the world...