The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire Read online

  WESLEYAN POETRY

  Wesleyan University Press

  Middletown CT 06459

  www.wesleyan.edu/wespress

  English translations, English and French annotations and notes © 2017 by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman

  Les armes miraculeuses © Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1970

  La Poésie by Aimé Césaire © Editions du Seuil, 1994 et 2006

  The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, French text © 1939 The Estate of Aimé Césaire

  All rights reserved

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Césaire, Aimé author. | Arnold, A. James (Albert James), 1939-

  translator editor. | Eshleman, Clayton translator. | Césaire, Aimé.

  Poems. | Césaire, Aimé. Poems. English.

  Title: The complete poetry of Aimé Césaire / translated by A. James Arnold

  and Clayton Eshleman ; introduction, notes and glossary by A. James Arnold.

  Description: Bilingual edition. | Middletown, CT : Wesleyan University

  Press, 2017. | Series: Wesleyan poetry | Includes bibliographical

  references. | Description based on print version record and CIP data

  provided by publisher; resource not viewed.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016049093 (print) | LCCN 2017012568 (ebook) | ISBN

  9780819577511 (ebook) | ISBN 9780819574831 (cloth : alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PQ3949.C44 (ebook) | LCC PQ3949.C44 A2 2017 (print) | DDC

  841/.914--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016049093

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  This work, published as part of a program of aid for

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  INTRODUCTION

  Aimé Césaire is a master of twentieth-century French poetry. His work gives an original new direction to the long line of predecessors that includes Hugo, Baudelaire, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Claudel, and Péguy. The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire makes available, for the first time in English, the original editions of his published œuvre. Taking a genetic or prospective approach to his work was necessary in order to make accessible the unexpurgated collections Césaire published between 1939 and 1950. When he died in Martinique in April 2008 at the age of 94, Césaire was hailed in the press as the “bard of negritude,” which placed a vague political stamp on his body of work. The long arc of his poetic career moves through several stages, only one of which has been seriously studied. Consequently the term negritude, which his poetry is presumed to reference, has been interpreted in terms of his poetics from the mid-1950s to the 1960s (ALL). Roughly three-quarters of his œuvre has been neglected, either because it was obscured by the self-censorship that presided over the rewriting of Solar Throat Slashed for the 1961 edition in Cadastre, or because—like i, laminaria. . . (1982) and the 1939 text of the Cahier/Notebook—it does not conform to the norms derived from Césaire’s political turn in the 1950s. Well-intentioned critics have long invoked Rimbaud’s claim that the poet is a seer (voyant), but rarely have they connected this trait with his equally strong prophetic stance and its frequent Old Testament overtones. Similarly, Lautréamont has been called upon to justify Césaire’s most aggressive images but without connecting them to the practice of free associative metaphor (métaphore filée) characteristic of the surrealist poetry he wrote in the 1940s. If negritude is what Césaire’s poetry was about, then that slippery term needs to be considered as a different episteme from the one that has driven political readings of his work.

  In our notes on the poems, we reference the volume that made first editions of Césaire’s poetic œuvre available in French: Poésie, Théâtre, Essais et Discours, edited by A. J. Arnold and an international team of specialists (Césaire PTED). Publication of PTED has enabled us to translate a considerable amount of new material in many of Césaire’s poems. For example, in “Batuque” (from The Miraculous Weapons) there are 269 changes from the version published in the 1983 Collected Poetry. In our new translation of the Ferraments collection, there are 1,042 changes from the 1983 version. Of the eight collections comprising The Complete Poetry (CCP), three have been translated by Arnold and Eshleman exclusively: The Original 1939 Notebook. . ., Solar Throat Slashed, and Like a Misunderstanding of Salvation. With regard to the Eshleman-Smith translation of The Collected Poetry, Eshleman was solely responsible for the final version. As he wrote in “At the Locks of the Void,” “I met with Césaire in Paris twice on my own and once, when we had our questions down to a dozen, with Annette. At the point that a final draft was possible, I holed up for two weeks in the stacks of the Cal Tech library with a typewriter and piles of reference materials” (ELV).

  In conversation with Daniel Maximin in 1982, Césaire said of his poetic career: “We are men of the sacred. I am not an initiate, or I have been initiated through poetry, if you like, and I believe that I am a man of the sacred. . . So I believe that the sacred exists in us, but it is a sacred that has been profaned, that has been clichéd. . . To find the sacred again means to restore its energy; in other words, to restore to the sacred its revolutionary dimension, in the strict sense of the word” (MFV, 242, 243). Most readers in the English-speaking world have approached Césaire through one or another of the post-1956 editions of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, and his Discourse on Colonialism. They quite understandably see Césaire as a political poet whose work is tied tightly to the struggle to decolonize the African continent in the 1960s. It is true that from 1956 onward, Césaire encouraged this view by allowing Présence Africaine to present it as an “African” poem: “[Previous editions] are far from satisfying the needs of the African public. Does the public at large know that this song whose style and vocabulary have discouraged so many well-intentioned French readers, this avant-garde song, whole passages of which are recited by young people in French Africa who sometimes have had little schooling but hunger ardently for it?” (CCR). The phrase “each of us” Africans suggests on the same page that the author of this publicity material may have been the Angolan poet Mario Pinto de Andrade, who served as secretary to the publisher during this crucial period (PCH, 15-16). The Orphic descent into hell that many readers had already noted in Césaire’s long poem was characterized in 1956 as specifically African: “Some readers admire a virile and harsh descent to the infernal regions, a unique experience in modern African culture.” Finally, the 1956 version of the poem is justified by the fact that “the author modestly considers it as a simple stage in his evolution.” In 1960, Présence Africaine printed a second edition with minor modifications, demonstrating that the 1956 version was in no way definitive. Moreover, the 1956 edition was implied to be the first; this claim was both commercially and ideologically motivated. By making the Présence Africaine edition of 1956 appear to be the terminus ad quem of Césaire’s long poem, it was henceforth possible to ignore the three versions that preceded it. From 1939 to 1947, each subsequent edition appeared in a different cultural and historical context and was modified accordingly, a fact that has led L. Pestre de Almeida to stress the instability of the text of the Notebook (PCH, 14). In the headnote to the 1939 version printed here, we include a brief descrip
tion of the major alterations and their formal and ideological purpose in 1947 and 1956. The 109 stanzas of the original edition were maintained in the same order in every subsequent version of Césaire’s long poem.

  We include headnotes for the Cahier/Notebook and each of the collections edited in The Complete Poetry. They situate both Césaire’s poetic accomplishment and his principal references when he published the original edition of a given collection. We believe the experience will be revelatory, as indeed it has been for us as translators. This is especially true as regards our understanding of the vexed term negritude. From the 1939 “Notebook” and The Miraculous Weapons (1946) to Solar Throat Slashed (1948), the poems trace a mythic transformation of the colonized nègre to what Alain Locke called the New Negro. In 1960, Ferraments introduced references to colonial Africa consonant with the Africanization of the Notebook in the 1956 Présence Africaine edition, thus reinforcing the assessment of Césaire as a political poet. During the decade of decolonization of France’s African colonies, Césaire published no new collections, preferring to write for the theater. Two decades were to elapse between Ferraments and i, laminaria. . . (1982), which took a decidedly nostalgic and elegiac view of Césaire’s heroic posture as prophet of negritude in the 1940s. Moreover, when one knows that the original goal of Césaire’s negritude project was spiritual, the meaning of the title Like a Misunderstanding of Salvation becomes practically transparent. In 1994, it was his poetic last will and testament.

  The chronology that closes our introduction to The Complete Poetry draws parallels between Césaire’s activity as a poet and practical politician. As mayor of Fort-de-France and deputy in the French National Assembly, he participated in the crucial debates on decolonization and its aftermath. We have also been attentive to his position as a spokesman for the African diaspora, a role that put him at odds with the African-American intelligentsia in 1956. Notes on the poems can be found in the critical apparatus, along with an extensive glossary of difficult and problematic terms starred in the text.

  CHRONOLOGY

  1913-1924: Early life in contact with Martinique’s plantation economy

  On June 26, 1913, Aimé Césaire was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, the second of seven children, to Fernand (1888-1966) and Éléonore Hermine (1885-1983). Fernand was then a plantation steward.

  During his elementary school years (1918-24) in Basse-Pointe, Aimé and his siblings had their homework supervised by their paternal grandmother, whose African traits they associated with the Jola people of Senegal. Fernand read the French classics aloud to his children.

  1924-1931: From middle through secondary school, Aimé excelled at the Lycée Schoelcher in Fort-de-France, where Fernand had become a civil servant in the colonial tax department. Aimé’s geography and English teachers noticed his exceptional promise. His friendship with L. G. Damas, from French Guiana, dates from this period.

  On May 6, 1931, the Paris Colonial Exposition opened in the Parc de Vincennes. During its six-month run between 7 and 9 million visitors enjoyed “natives” in traditional costume demonstrating typical occupations in human zoos.

  1931-1935: A competitive scholarship allowed Aimé to prepare for the École Normale Supérieure at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris. There, he met L. S. Senghor from Senegal, who was several years his senior; their friendship lasted until Senghor’s death in 2001. Memorable teachers were A. Bayet (French and Latin) and R. Le Senne, whose courses in philosophy stressed an idealist dialectic.

  In 1935, the tricentennial celebration of colonial status in the French West Indies included special editions of magazines and commemorative postage stamps. Local celebrations by the Catholic Church reinforced the legitimacy of colonial rule. Frequent references to “300 years” in Césaire’s poetry allude to these events.

  In February 1935, Césaire published “L’Étudiant noir” in L’Étudiant martiniquais, praising Imagination and Nature at the expense of Reason and Culture. The title of the mimeographed student paper was changed to L’Étudiant noir the following month. Césaire, as new editor, had preferred L’Étudiant nègre, which was overruled as too aggressive.

  In March, his “Nègreries: Jeunesse noire et assimilation” in the first issue of L’Étudiant noir stressed the danger to “assimilated” black students by the rising tide of fascism in France.

  In the May-June issue, his “Nègreries: Conscience raciale et révolution sociale” for the first time used négritude to express an ethnic ideal: “to plant our negritude like a beautiful tree until it shall bear its most authentic fruits.”

  In the same issue, Césaire translated Richard Wright’s “I Have Seen Black Hands” and Sterling Brown’s “Strong Men.”

  1935-1939: Césaire succeeded against general expectation in the entrance examination for the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) but experienced exhaustion and depression over the summer, which he spent with Petar Guberina on the Adriatic coast of Croatia. View of the island of Martiniska triggered memories of home that Césaire began to transfer to a notebook.

  On October 2, 1935, Italy announced its intention to invade Ethiopia, the only independent African state.

  At the ENS, Césaire revolted against intellectual cramming and began writing as therapy. Several friends considered him depressed during this period.

  On May 3, 1936, Léon Blum of the French Section of the Workers International (S.F.I.O.) was elected Prime Minister; first paid vacations for French workers.

  Summer 1936: Césaire returned to Martinique for the first time in five years.

  1937: On July 10, Aimé Césaire and Suzanne Roussi were married in the city hall of Paris’s 13th arrondissement. Their first son, Jacques, was born the following year.

  1939: Césaire failed the competitive agrégation exam but completed an advanced studies diploma (D.E.S.) on the Role of the South in Black Literature in the United States.

  On July 18, Césaire received a military deferment, presumably on grounds of health; soon thereafter he was named professor in the Lycée Schoelcher.

  In late August, the Césaires returned to Martinique; Suzanne was pregnant with their second son, Jean-Paul. Francis was born in 1941, Ina in 1942, Marc in 1948, and Michèle in 1951.

  On September 1, Hitler invaded Poland; two days later France and England declared war on Germany.

  On September 14, Admiral Paul Robert arrived in Martinique as commandant of France’s Western Atlantic theater of war. After the fall of France in June 1940, he administered the colony in the name of Vichy, exercising a racial oppression previously unknown in Martinique.

  1940-1943: Aimé Césaire’s courses on modern poetry were received enthusiastically by students, who included E. Glissant. Although he was not Césaire’s student, F. Fanon considered his innovative teaching to be a watershed in awakening Martinican identity.

  Censors enforcing the Vichy government’s administration of Martinique kept a close watch on the Césaires’ and their colleagues’ publications in Tropiques from April 1941 to mid-1943.

  In April 1941, André Breton, Wifredo Lam, and Claude Lévi-Strauss arrived as refugees from Marseille on a ship chartered by Varian Fry for the Emergency Rescue Committee; André Masson joined them one week later. Breton, who chanced upon the first issue of Tropiques while looking for a ribbon for his daughter, was introduced to the Césaires. They gave the surrealists a tour of Martinique; Tropiques declared itself surrealist shortly thereafter.

  One year later, the fifth issue of Tropiques included “En guise de manifeste littéraire” (By Way of a Literary Manifesto) dedicated to Breton. With a few cuts and modifications, Césaire inserted it into the bilingual edition of Memorandum on My Martinique (title of the Goll and Abel translation), completed in 1943 but published only in January 1947 by Brentano’s in New York.

  In January 1943, Retorno al país natal (Return to the Native Land) was published in Havana. Lidia Cabrera translated the 1939 text; Benjamin Péret prefaced it; and Wifredo Lam illustrated the volume wi
th three line drawings.

  In May 1943, Aimé and Suzanne Césaire co-signed, with a score of exiled surrealists, the preface to La Parole est à Péret (Péret Has the Floor), published in New York.

  1944: From mid-May to mid-December, Césaire was in Haiti at the invitation of Pierre Mabille (surrealist, doctor, and researcher in the occult) as a representative of the Gaullist Free French provisional government of the French West Indies. His first encounter with Vodun dates from this visit, during which he met A. Métraux.

  On September 28, at an international philosophy conference on epistemology in Port-au-Prince, Césaire read a paper on “Poésie et connaissance” (Poetry and Knowledge) in which he attacked the foundations of European reason (from Aristotle to Pascal and Kant) and praised the superior powers of anarchistic imagination, bolstering his argument with quotes from Freud, Claudel, Lautréamont, Breton, Mabille, Bachelard, and Jung.

  1945: At war’s end, Césaire found himself unexpectedly elected to two local posts with the help of his friends in the Martinique section of the French Communist Party.

  On May 27, 1945, Césaire was elected mayor of Fort-de-France on the Communist ticket, although he was not a member of the party.

  In September, Césaire joined the Communist Party; on November 4, he was elected deputy for the first district of Martinique to the Constituent Assembly in France.

  On November 12, the Césaires left Martinique for Paris by way of Haiti, Miami, and New York. At Miami International Airport, they were obliged to use “colored” facilities, and in New York, the service elevator to Peggy Guggenheim’s apartment for a reception in his honor.