You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read?

Hi, this is Michael Silverblad, and welcome to Bookworm.

Today, my guests are Ron Paget and Garrett White.

They are both of them translators of the French poet Blaise Sandr.

I've invited them here because, in a sense, their books represent two-thirds of the work of Sandrard valuable now in America.

People who have begun to discover Sandrard don't step very far before you find Henry Miller's quote about him.

And I'm going to read it to begin.

Henry Miller says, everything is written in blood, but a blood that is saturated with starlight.

Cendrar 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 corpusals moving in the bloodstream. You can look clean through

him and see the planet's wheeling. The silence he creates is deafening. It takes you back to

the beginning of the world, to the push which is engraved on the face of mystery.

Ron Padgett has translated the complete poems of Blaise Sondrars.

We have Garrett White, who's translated some of Sondrars' odd reportage, the book Hollywood Mecca of the Movies. Both of these books

have come out from the University of California Press, and it is the opportunity to discover

an extraordinary writer. I wanted to begin by asking you, who was Blaisandr?

Well, Blasandr was a writer from the early part of this century.

He was born in 1887 in Switzerland, actually.

People often think he was French because he wrote in French,

...