An "edited" version of Blaise Cendrars such as this poses many problems. The original of Planus was Bourlinguer, the third volume of the four "autobiographies" which Cendrars—poet, adventurer, business man and marvellous writer—published between 1945 and 1949. Bourlinguer is the one that combines real or fantasied autobiography with travelogue. The titles of its eleven sections are all great sea or river-ports: Naples, Antwerp, Rotterdam, etc, and finally Paris—"Port-de-Mer." Nina Rootes's editing has, at her publishers' request, reduced Bourlinguer from the 440 pages of its French (paperback) edition to a mere 220 pages in English. Is this wise? Is it justified? In a frank and useful "Translator's Note" she tells us the principles on which she did this hatchet-job, apologizes to the ghost of Cendrars for tampering with his work, and hopes that "this shortened version will introduce many readers to the delights of his writing, who perhaps would have been deterred by a longer and more discursive book."

It is true that Cendrars did tend to go on and on, to diverge, to divagate, to meander, but this is part of his charm and our interest. Miss Rootes tells us that she has "tried to omit whole sections which are self-contained in the French original rather than nibble piecemeal at the text." In general, she has indeed omitted what might be considered the less interesting sections (though this means that "Venice," "Bordeaux," "Brest," "Toulon" and the original "Naples" are lost)—but she has also indulged in quite extensive nibbling. Two or three lines disappear here, odd parentheses there (particularly in "Hamburg"). Cendrars's grandfather is left out of the comic description of his relations (again: real or imagined—for how many of the seven uncles in Panama ou la véritable histoire de mes sept oncles ever saw the light of non-fiction?) We lose also the droll paragraphs about the Eiffel Tower which, Cendrars claimed, was so rotten that it was about to collapse on the Parisians at any moment. These brought him an indignant letter from La Société de la Tour Eiffel, in answer to which Cendrars wrote, in November 23, 1948:

c'est bien l'aventure la plus incroyable qui pouvait m'arriver que de subir aujourd'hui les foudres de la Société de la Tour Eiffel … moi, que les journaux de Paris ont surnommé depuis bientôt quarante ans "le poète de la Tour Eiffel."

In producing what amounts almost to a work of popularization, Miss Rootes has to a certain extent ironed out the boastful, lying, exaggerating, but immensely human, humorous and erudite Cendrars, and made his writing follow an atypically logical pattern. What we surely need is an English biography of Cendrars—Henry Miller's short, lyrical appreciation, published in 1951, is not nearly enough—and then perhaps the reading public here will be more than eager to accept him in his entirety.

In general Miss Rootes has succeeded extraordinarily well in the extraordinarily difficult task of translating Cendrars. She has reproduced his style much more exactly than she did in her translation of his "L'Homme foudroyé, though there is still the odd phrase where French slang simply won't turn into English slang. There is the occasional enormity—a woman likened to a truie informe (a shapeless sow) turns into a "knowing sow"—but one or two such examples seem, without exception, to be inevitable in every translation. Miss Rootes fails with the poems, but her choice of title cannot be faulted. Bourlinguer, as she tells us, means "to knock about the world, to lead an adventurous life." She gives us Planus. Cendrars, on page forty-five of the present edition, tells us that, according to "the scholarly Canon Cristiani," Pliny uses the word in the sense of a buffoon, but it also means vagabond or adventurer. This is Cendrars tout craché.