Bourlinguer

Bourlinguer is a collection of eleven Nouvelle S published by Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) in 1948 at Denoël. After the Man struck down (1945) and the cut Hand (1946), it constitutes the third of his four volumes of Memories which, according to the word of their author, " are Memories without being of Mémoires" and he is regarded as one of his masterpieces. In 1949, the Allotment of the sky will complete the cycle of this tetralogy.

The news joined together in Bourlinguer is of very variable size and each one of them bears the name of a port: Venice, Naples, Corogne, Bordeaux, Brest, Toulon, Antwerp, Genoa, Rotterdam, Hamburg, Paris, Port-of-sea. Genoa, where Cendrars proposes a mythical account of its childhood in Naples, marks the top of the collection. In the beginning, each news was to accompany by some pages an engraving of Valdo-Barbey but the considerable development of certain texts (Antwerp, Genoa, Paris, Port-of-sea) involved the transformation of the project and finally the removal of the illustrations.

Editions

Denoël, 1948.
Gallimard, coll " Folio" , 1974.
Denoël, coll " All around aujourd' hui" , volume 9,2003. With engravings of Valdo-Barbey. Text presented and annotated by Claude Leroy.

Studies

Yvette Bozon-Scalzitti, Blaise Cendrars or the passion of the writing , Lausanne, the Age of man, 1977.
Bourlinguer in Méréville (texts joined together by Cl. Modern Leroy), Paris-Caen, Minard-Letters, series " Blaise Cendrars" n° 3,1991. With a whole file on the genesis and the evolution of the project.

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