Introduction

      In August 1939 Paris readers of the avant-garde literary magazine Volontés opened issue 20, which they could not know would be its last, to find a long poem by a student who had just left the École Normale Supérieure to return to Martinique. Aimé Césaire’s “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal” (“Notebook of a Return to the Native Land”) was laid out in 109 strophes of mixed prose and verse. The rhythms of the strophes recalled the long lines Paul Claudel had pioneered in his Cinq grandes Odes (Five Great Odes) at the beginning of the last century. Claudel had laid claim to a physiological grounding of his rhythms in the diastolic/systolic rhythm of the human heart. The linking devices between the strophes suggest Charles Péguy’s insistent use of repetition, anaphora, and paratactic construction in poems much longer than Césaire’s that were highly praised between the two world wars. Passages in the later sequences of the 1939 “Notebook” indicate that Césaire had taken Rimbaud’s goal of visionary poetry to heart. His reliance on “the blowtorch of humor” in denouncing the effects of colonialism on his Caribbean island home is a clear indication that Césaire had also understood the corrosive poetics of Lautréamont (Césaire 1990).

      The Volontés text of the “Notebook” has a more direct and less elaborated internal structure than its successors, all of which added considerable material at strategic points. Césaire presents a speaker (“I”) who undergoes a four-part trial resulting in profound transformation. The first sequence extends to strophes 30–31, which provide a transition to the second. Strophes 63–64 divide the first from the second half of the poem. The third sequence begins the process of transformation of the speaker and involves both dramatic strain and internal contradiction. At strophe 92 the final, more rapid movement begins. The long meandering strophes that marked the early sequences give way to shorter lines divided into verse stanzas. They signal the poem’s resolution in a transcendence whose purpose has been reoriented by later modifications. A remarkable characteristic of the text is Césaire’s use of the French alexandrine line of verse. French prosody is arithmetically, rather than metrically, conventional. It does not rely on classical meter derived from Greek or Latin. The alexandrine is so culturally ingrained that the French ear picks it up unselfconsciously.¹ In the 1939 text the interjection of an isolated alexandrine line of verse signals an important shift in focus through rhythmic modulation. Alexandrines can be found at strophes 37, 53, and 63 (twice in the second sequence and at the beginning of the third). We have attempted to approximate this effect by using a greater solemnity, more formal lexical choices, or unusual syntax in translating those same lines. There is no conventional meter we can use to achieve the identical effect.

      In 1939 Césaire postpones identifying his speaker. The first twenty-four strophes are a panoramic presentation of the island—poor, diseased, lacking a real identity—in which personification allows the hills (mornes), the shacks, and the unsanitary conditions of the little towns that grew up around the sugar plantations to express the physical degradation and the moral ugliness resulting from three centuries of colonial neglect. The population is present in the aggregate, an undifferentiated “one” or “you” that is then disarticulated into body parts—mouths, hands, feet, buttocks, genitals—in the Christmas festivity section. Punctuation is typical of parataxis: commas, semicolons, colons, which serve to pile up effects until they overwhelm the reader’s senses (Edwards 2005, Kouassi 2006). The “I”