Serious readers of this poem have for decades struggled with the palimpsest effect of these multiple rewritings. In the 1980s we concluded that the Cahier resulted in the myth of the birth of the hero of Negritude (Arnold 1981) or “a parthenogenesis in which Césaire must conceive and give birth to himself while exorcising his introjected and collective white image of the black” (Eshleman 1983). Kesteloot had earlier read the final movement as “participating in the creative power of the Cosmos,” and in a footnote she suggested a rite of possession that is “indispensable to African ceremonies and to Vodun in particular” (Kesteloot 1963). Condé, commenting on the same passage, wrote that “it’s a miracle in the strictest sense that we are dealing with here, a transformation born of Faith that Reason could not account for” (Condé 1978). Others have gone in a distinctly cosmogonic direction (Pestre de Almeida 2010) or have embraced an esoteric mysticism (Paviot 2009). Fonkoua, on the other hand, has attended exclusively to the political overtones that were added belatedly (Fonkoua 2008).
Our intention in offering the 1939 French text of the “Notebook,” translated for the first time into English (with strophe numbers added to both the French and the English), is to strip away decades of rewriting that introduced an ideological purpose absent from the original. We do not claim to reveal what the poem ultimately means but rather how it was meant to be read in 1939. Reading with the poem’s first audience, so to speak, will finally permit a new generation to judge its enduring power a century after the poet’s birth.
Notes
1. The alexandrine is a twelve-syllable line with a major division or caesura in the middle. On either side of the caesura two further rhythmic divisions are freer in form, varying from 3/3 to 5/1 (rare) with all the combinations in between at the disposal of the poet.
2. The edited typescript and the letter to the editor of Volontés can be consulted in the library of the French National Assembly. The letter is dated May 28, 1939.
3. This process will be much more apparent in the Paris edition of Césaire’s Poésie, Théâtre, Essais, scheduled for publication in the Planète Libre collection at CNRS-Éditions. The four historic editions of the poem will be printed sequentially with annotations.
Works Cited
Arnold, A. James. Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981. 318 pages.
———. “Beyond Postcolonial Césaire: Reading Cahier d’un retour au pays natal Historically.” Forum for Modern Language Studies 44, no.3 (2008): 258–75. (Pages 272–75 present a table of deleted material organized by type: spiritual, sexual, racial.)
Breton, André. “Martinique charmeuse de serpents: Un grand poète noir.” Tropiques 11 (May 1944): 119–26. (A footnote assures readers that this text would preface the bilingual edition of the Cahier, which was to be published imminently by Hémisphères in New York. An announcement on page 98 of VVV, no. 4 [1944], published in New York, confirms this claim. In 1947 Breton’s preface accompanied both the Brentano’s and the Bordas editions of Césaire’s poem.)
Césaire, Aimé. “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal,” Volontés, no. 20 (August 1939): 23–51.
———. “En guise de manifeste littéraire.” Tropiques, no. 5 (April 1942): 7–12.
———. 1943a. “Isidore Ducasse, comte de Lautréamont.” Tropiques, nos. 6–7 (April 1943): 10–15.
———. 1943b. “Maintenir la poésie.” Tropiques, nos. 8–9 (October 1943): 7–8.
———. 1947a. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal / Memorandum on My Martinique. Translated by Lionel Abel and Yvan Goll. Preface by André Breton. New York: Brentano’s, 1947. 145 pages. (The English text followed the French. The precise date of publication was January 7, 1947.)
———. 1947b. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Preface by André Breton. Frontispiece by Wifredo Lam. Paris: Bordas, 1947. (The text of the poem runs from page 25 to page 96.)
———. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956. Preface by Petar Guberina. (The text of the poem can be found on pages 25–91. Substituting a preface by a professional linguist in a Yugoslav university for André Breton’s removed the surrealist label from the poem and oriented it toward nonaligned socialism.)
———. Poésie. Vol. 1 of Oeuvres complètes. Paris and Fort-de-France: Désormeaux, 1976. 325 pages.
———. The Collected Poetry. Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983.
———. “Poetry and Knowledge.” Translated by A. James Arnold, xlii-lvi. In Lyric and Dramatic Poetry (1946–82). Translated by Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith. CARAF Books. Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1990.
———. La Poésie. Edited by D. Maximinin and G. Carpentier. Paris: Seuil, 1994. 550 pages.
———. Solar Throat Slashed / Soleil cou coupé. Translated and edited by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman. Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2011. 183 pages.
Césaire, Suzanne. “Léo Frobenius et le problème des civilisations.” Tropiques 1 (April 1941): 27–36. (She underlined the link between Frobenius and the “Notebook” by ending her article on a quotation from her husband’s 1939 poem.)
Condé, Maryse. Césaire: Cahier d’un retour au pays natal. Profil d’une oeuvre. Paris: Hatier, 1978.
Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches. Chicago: McClurg, 1903. 264 pages. (First French edition, Paris: Présence Africaine, 1959.)
Edwards, Brent Hayes. “Aimé Césaire and the Syntax of Influence.” Research in African Literatures 36, no. 2 (2005): 1–18.
Eshleman, Clayton. “The Collections.” In Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1983.
Fonkoua, Romuald. Aimé Césaire. Paris: Perrin, 2008. 392 pages. (Fonkoua minimized the role of Breton and the surrealists in the Notebook. Taking the post-1956 texts as the norm, he concluded that “if Césaire’s poetics and style are free of any and all surrealist influence, it is quite simply due to the fact that surrealism had no attraction for the students preparing for the École Normale Supérieure between the two world wars” (62). Clearly the rewriting of the 1956 Cahier had achieved its goal. For this critic and many others the palimpsest was perfectly invisible.)
Kesteloot, Lilyan. Les Écrivains noirs de langue française: Naissance d’une littérature. Brussels: Disputats, 1963. (Reprinted in 1963 by the Solvay Institute of Sociology of the Free University of Brussels. Arguably the most influential reading of the Cahier / Notebook as a political poem.)
———. Comprendre le Cahier d’un retour au pays natal d’Aimé Césaire. Versailles: Les Classiques Africains, 1983. 127 pages. (Reprinted in 1990, it includes a brief glossary.) Kouassi, Germain. La Poésie de Césaire par la langue et le style: l’exemple du “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal.” Paris: Publibook, 2006. 134 pages.
Ngal, Georges (M.aM.) Aimé Césaire: Un homme à la recherche d’une patrie. Dakar and Abidjan: Nouvelles Éditions Africaines, 1975. 293 pages. (In 1994 Présence Africaine brought out a reprint edition.)
Paviot,