Of all the poets of his time, Blaise Cendrars concerned himself to the most extreme degree with the life of adventure and with the recounting of that adventure. The rough surface of his writing is an uncalculated witness to the rapidity and variety of his experience and to his genuine passion for life, often at the expense of what we usually call literature. The question which arises at various times in his work as to why in fact it should be important to transcribe the events one lives or observes is less interesting than the question as to what sort of transcription might be valid. For the poet of movement, only words in motion are acceptable; for the man of adventure, a cinematic language is more fitting than a language of mere picture. (p. 345)

The epic "Prose du Transsibérien et de la petite Jeanne de France" (1913) encompasses...