The Astonished Man
Panel one — the lightning that started the tetralogy this volume deepens.
Read our take
Bourlinguer
Eleven ports and the sea-word for knocking about the world — with the great Genoa chapter, the tetralogy's buried childhood, at its heart.
- 1948
About Blaise Cendrars
The story, briefly
Spoiler-freeBourlinguer (1948) — the old sailor's verb for knocking about the world — is the tetralogy's third panel: eleven chapters, eleven ports, from Venice to Antwerp by way of the century's waterfronts, each harbor uncorking its own cargo of memory. At the center sprawls 'Gênes' — Genoa — the longest and greatest chapter, where the wandering finally digs down to childhood itself: the Italian boyhood, the first deaths, the first books. The title entered French as his flag; the book remains the tetralogy's richest single volume. (A memoir — nothing here to spoil.)
The story, in more detail
The structure is a harbor chart: Venice, Naples, Bordeaux, Brest, Toulon, Antwerp and the rest, each port a chapter and each chapter a life — smugglers, sailors' bars, cargoes, books read and burned, the merchant marine of memory. Cendrars' digression-engine runs at full sea-speed here, but the book's gravity is the immense Genoa chapter: the family's Italian years, the child Freddy's streets and terrors, a first beloved dog, a first brush with death and desire — the buried strata the legend was built to cover, finally excavated by the man the legend belonged to.[1]
Published by Denoël in 1948 (Englished later by Nina Rootes as Planus), it made the verb bourlinguer permanently his in French — to have knocked about the world, the Cendrars way. Within the tetralogy it is the volume readers keep: the widest geography and the deepest dig in one binding, the adventurer's outward myth and inward child reconciled at last in the same harbor.[1]
What's inside
Eleven ports, each a chapter and a world: wartime Venice and its spies, Naples of the emigrant ships, the Atlantic and Channel harbors of cargo runs and shore-leave underworlds — the narrator aboard, ashore, and astray, with the digressions casting off whenever a bollard of memory offers. Then Genoa: the tetralogy's longest reach, down through the family's Italian years into the child who preceded every legend — school terrors, street initiations, first grief — told with the same fraternity the other volumes spend on legionnaires and gypsies.[1]
If you read one volume of the tetralogy, most of its faithful would hand you this one — and point you to Genoa first.[1]
Themes and analysis
Eleven ports, eleven lives
Venice opens with the narrator looking out from a library, not boarding a ship. Reflections in water, glass and polished flooring prepare a shift in which a modern vessel gives way to a seventeenth-century departure. The transition happens within the act of looking: the observer stays still while the narrative carries us elsewhere. A stowaway's punishment replaces the apparently quiet view. Travel here includes entering another person's danger through a story. The port is therefore more than a stop on an itinerary; it is a meeting point between observation, reading and imagined experience.
Genoa beneath the legend
The childhood recalled in the Genoa chapter cannot be sealed off from the older narrator's knowledge. Leone's pursuit of spinning tops suddenly evokes a wartime aircraft, then the destruction of Hiroshima. A toy's shape and motion carry the prose across decades before it returns to the dog's death. The leap makes memory an encounter between different ages of the same speaker, rather than a transparent recovery of childhood. Tenderness survives in the final contact between child and animal, but the surrounding account has already exposed their play to a history neither could then imagine.
Why we recommend it
Eleven worlds for one fare
Each harbor chapter is a complete book of tales — the digression method at its most generous.
The childhood, at last
Genoa gives the adventurer a child's face — the tetralogy's deepest and most moving excavation.
The sea-borne century
Waterfronts, cargoes, emigrant ships — the world the era's literature mostly watched from café terraces, boarded.
What this book explores
Timeline
1946
The publisher René Kieffer commissions a short text to accompany eighteen harbor engravings by Valdo Barbey — a quick six-month job.
1947
Cendrars blows past the assignment into a sprawling literary epic; a disappointed Kieffer drops out, and he takes the finished text elsewhere.
1948
Denoël publishes Bourlinguer in Paris, the tetralogy's third panel, and the sailor's verb becomes permanently his in French.
1972
Peter Owen issues Nina Rootes's complete English translation, as Planus.
Book editions
Hardcover
- Hardcover
- Denoël
- 1948
Paperback
- Paperback
- Peter Owen
- Hardcover
- Peter Owen
- 1972
- 9780720603606
- Nina Rootes
Reader reviews
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The Colossus of Maroussi
The shelf's other Mediterranean rapture — Miller's Greece answering his master's Genoa.
Read our takeBourlinguer: frequently asked questions
Who wrote Bourlinguer?
Blaise Cendrars. Published in 1948, it is the third panel of his late memoir tetralogy.
What does the title Bourlinguer mean?
It is an old sailor's verb for knocking about the world. Cendrars took it as his own flag, and it entered French with him.
What is Bourlinguer about?
Eleven chapters, eleven ports — Venice to Antwerp by way of the century's waterfronts — each harbor uncorking its own cargo of memory.
What is its greatest chapter?
"Gênes" (Genoa), the longest, where the wandering finally digs down to childhood itself — the Italian boyhood, the first deaths, the first books.
Is it fiction or memoir?
Autobiographical memoir, freely reshaped — often called the richest single volume of Cendrars's tetralogy.
If you like Blaise Cendrars
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References
References
The sources below include the primary text, editions, scholarship, archival materials, and other records that informed this page. They document Bourlinguer, its publication, and its place in literary history.
2Bourlinguer — French text
WebsiteEbooks libres et gratuits, 2023Used forSelected Venise opening and Gênes childhood/Leone passages in the December 2023 Ebooks libres et gratuits French transcription. Literary analysis of the narrated time shifts, not independent historical, autobiographical, military or medical verification. No complete-volume or first-edition collation claimed.
3Blaise Cendrars — translations bibliography
Official recordSwiss National Library / Constellation Cendrars, 2019Used forThe Swiss National Library bibliography independently verifies Nina Rootes as the translator and Planus as the English title of Bourlinguer.
4Rencontres de Chaminadour — Blaise Cendrars chronology (prepared with thanks to Claude Leroy)
WebsiteUsed forUsed to place Bourlinguer within Blaise Cendrars's published work and verify its bibliographic context.
5Bibliothèque de la Ville de La Chaux-de-Fonds — dossier Blaise Cendrars : « Tout ça, c'est digne d'être vécu »
WebsiteUsed forUsed for independent biographical, archival, or historical context surrounding Blaise Cendrars's career and the period in which Bourlinguer appeared.
6Meet Blaise Cendrars: the one-armed poet who worked with Sonia Delaunay, Fernand Léger and Robert Doisneau
PeriodicalThe Art Newspaper, 2022Used forUsed to cross-check authorship, chronology, and the work's place in Blaise Cendrars's wider catalogue.
7Fonds Blaise Cendrars, supplement S-89 finding aid — press clippings, including Paris-Presse of 24 January 1961 and Arts of 16 February 1951
ArchiveArchives littéraires suisses / Swiss National LibraryUsed forUsed to verify Blaise Cendrars's bibliography and place Bourlinguer within the broader chronology of Blaise Cendrars's career.
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Why these sources are here
The primary text is the baseline reference for every book page. Additional references document publication history, interpretation, and historical context where that evidence is available.
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