The great Argentinian writer, Jorge Luis Borges, wrote this about himself and his life as a writer: ''Through the years, a man peoples a space with images of provinces, kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, islands, fishes, rooms, tools, stars, horses, and people. Shortly before his death, he discovers that the patient labyrinth of lines traces the image of his own face.''

The image of a face that accompanies this article is that of the French 20th Century poet, Blaise Cendrars, a much-travelled man with a densely-peopled imagination, and living proof that Borges knew how faces are made.

I'm not sure that I can cite a verse that would be immediately recognisable. He is not a well-known poet. In the scheme of things, he isn"t an outstanding poet, either. The men who inspired him, Walt Whitman, Arthur Rimbaud, Remy de Gourmont and, more than any other, Guillaume Apollinaire, were far better at poetry than Cendrars was.

Yet he was a really good second-tier poet, and he inspired tremendous admiration among the writers and artists of his time.

Apollinaire might well have had Cendrars in mind when he wrote these lines in 'The Song of the Poorly Loved', a long lament that is his best-known, and maybe his best-loved poem:

One misty dusk in London

A hoodlum resembling

My love came to meet me

I followed that lawless boy

Whistling his hands thrust in his pockets

Between the houses

I was Pharaoh he the Hebrews

That's Cendrars as a young man, his face was about as lawless as faces get. Modigliani painted him six or eight times. Francis Picabia painted him, and so, I believe, did his friends Fernand Leger and Marc Chagall.

He was friends with many other painters who were beginning their artistic lives in Paris in the early part of the 20th Century, like Chaim Soutine and Jacques Lipschitz. He worked with the French film maker Abel Gance. The composers Erik Satie, Arthur Honneger, Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud were his friends. He collaborated with the painters Robert and Sonia Delaunay.

The American writer Henry Miller was also a friend; their correspondence has been published in English, and Miller wrote the preface to 'The New Directions', an English translation of a selection of his writings.

Cendrars was born Frederick-Louis Sauser in Switzerland in 1887, in La Chaux-de-Fonds. He died in Paris in 1961. All his life, though, he claimed to have been born in France with the name Blaise Cendrars. His Swiss connection was uncovered very late in his life.

He was a wild child. His family moved to Naples when he was eight, then to Alexandria. Stays in England and Paris came somewhere in between. When he was 16, he broke with his parents and ran away, travelling on his own through Germany to Russia. In despair, I imagine, his father arranged for him to be apprenticed to a man called Leuba, who sold timepieces in St Petersburg in Russia.

Cendrars worked for Leuba for three years, from 1904 to 1907, during which he established a lifelong pattern of alternatively travelling and spending long periods in libraries, reading and writing. His stay in Russia coincided with the beginnings of the Russian revolution.

He was travelling on the Trans-Siberian Express when defeated Russian troops were fleeing from the Japanese after Port Arthur. In one of his best-known poems, 'The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and of Little Jeanne of France', he wrote of that terrifying journey:

At Khilok we met a long convoy of soldiers gone insane

Idiot fingers drumming on all the windowpanes

And under the pressure of fear an expression would burst like an abscess

In all the stations they had set fire to all the cars

And I saw

I saw trains with 60 locomotives streaking away chased by hot horizons and desperate crows

He was still only a teenager. He had a little nickel-plated Browning pistol in his pocket, and his business on the train was guarding boxes of jewellery for a travelling merchant. One suspects he'd have confidently taken on half the Russian army. He was also guarding little Jeanne, the young Parisienne he claimed to have rescued from "the back of a bordel" one of the many "women with vacant thighs for hire" in Russia in those troubled times.

Remembering her many years later, on the night in 1913 (he was 26) when he wrote the poem, he ended it, in part, this way:

'Tonight a great love is driving me out of my mind

It's through a sad night that I've written this poem in her honour

Jeanne

The little prostitute

I'm sad so sad

I'm going to the Lapin Agile to remember my lost youth again

Have a few drinks And come back home alone

In 1914, he joined the French Foreign Legion. He was no ambulance driver. He took part in many of the most famous battles of the First World War, eventually losing an arm on September 28, 1915, the same day his friend Remy de Gourmont was killed.

He learned to write with the other hand, and resumed a busy artistic life in Paris, and a busy life of travel.

Three of his epic poems are comparatively well known; 'The Prose of the Trans-Siberian' quoted above, 'Easter in New York' and 'Panama', or the 'Adventures of My Seven Uncles'. The last refers to his travels to South America, often in an attempt to catch up with one or other of his mother's seven Scottish brothers, all of whom had the Scots taste for globe-trotting.

One uncle was a butcher in Galveston at the time the poem was written. One had been prospecting for gold in Alaska, but was killed in Sacramento by, perhaps, his wife. The third wrote for the last time from Papeete, where he was buying dynamite with which he apparently intended to blow up 'the English' in Bombay.

The fourth was the valet of an English general who fought in the Boer War. This uncle later died in an insane asylum in Switzerland. Cendrars's fifth uncle was a chef, working at the Club Hotel in Chicago. The sixth uncle, apparently acting as interpreter and guide to a group of astronomers on the west coast of Patagonia, sent Cendrars some money and instructions to "Wait for me at the trading post until next spring. Have a good time, take your drinks straight up and don't spare the women."

Cendrars did as instructed, waited at the trading post for a full year, but his uncle never came back. The seventh uncle started as a bartender in Panama, became rich burying victims of cholera, then disappeared and was never heard of again.

What a family! Cendrars was inspired by them to write three lines, in Panama, or the 'Adventures of my Seven Uncles' that may be the ultimate travellers' credo:

With the Milky Way around my neck

And the two hemispheres for goggles

Full speed ahead!

After about 1924, Cendrars abandoned poetry and began writing novels. He wrote Sutter's Gold, about the Swiss adventurer who founded an agricultural empire in northern California, only to have it collapse when gold was discovered on his land. Cendrars wrote 'Moravigne', his best-known novel, about early events in the century that he had witnessed, the Russian Revolution and the First World War.

A third novel, 'Dan Yack', concerned the adventures of the aforesaid Yack, first in the Antarctic, later in the French Alps.

He became a journalist in the 1930s, and worked during the Second World War as a war correspondent for a consortium of French newspapers. The last decade of his life, in contrast to the rest of it, was quiet. He lived in Paris with Raymone, an old friend whom he married in 1949.

At the end of 1958, Andre Malraux (then just about to become the French Minister of Culture) visited him and awarded him the rank of Commander of the Legion d'honneur. In 1961, he was awarded the Grand Prix Litt?raire. A few days later, he died.

Some of the poems he wrote during his life were 'found', in the sense that he was experimenting in his verse with a technique, used by Cubist painters, of using found objects to create assemblages or collages.

He and Sonia Delaunay collaborated using this technique one of their most spectacular works was acquired recently by MOMA – the Museum of Modern Art – in New York. When I was researching this article, I found a page in French about his life that I had difficulty reading, so I asked for a translation into English via the automatic translation feature now used in most search engines.

This is what I found: "Born with the Lime-of-Bottoms Switzerland on September 1, 1887, of a Scottish mother and a Swiss father of his true name Frederic Sauser, Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) was the poet of the Festival and the Adventure.

At 16 years it made a running away, and as others go to Vierzon or Bormes-the-Mimosas, took the first train met who quite simply led it to Moscow.

"Moscow briskly it left, by the Trans-Siberian one, to China, with the devil avarice (when one travels clandestinely without ticket!).

Blaise Cendrars, one sees it went to the good "school buissoni?re". Pour a share, it accomplished its fabulous voyages in company of certain Rogovine and lived with him of the products of the various sale of pacotilles (of the coffins, the pocket knifes, the corkscrews, etc...).