Translated
by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman
Series: Wesleyan
Poetry Series, Hardcover: 994
pages
Publisher: Wesleyan;
Bilingual French-English ed. edition (September 5, 2017)
ISBN-10: 081957483X
Exploding and
Whirling: The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire, Translated by A. James Arnold and Clayton
Eshleman, Reviewed by Nathan Spoon
*
The
poetic journey of Aimé Césaire, a Black Francophone, begins in 1939 with the
appearance of Notebook of a Return to the
Native Land, a long poem demonstrating the extent to which he has already internalized
the poetic energies of predecessors as eminent as Rimbaud, and then continues
until the 1994 publication of the twenty-two poems that comprise Like a Misunderstanding of Salvation…,
his last book. Between these two works, is the oeuvre of a remarkable
surrealist poet and founder (along with Léopold Senghor) of Négritude, a
literary movement that united Black writers anywhere in the world based on their
shared African ancestry.
*
With
Notebook Césaire strikes forcefully,
in a poem, made up of one-hundred and nine sections, that at first offers protracted
descriptions, laying bare the collective hardships of life in colonized
Antilles,
At the end of
the small hours burgeoning with frail coves the hungry Antilles, the Antilles
pitted with smallpox, the Antilles dynamited by alcohol, stranded in the mud of
this bay, in the dust of this town sinisterly stranded.
This
is a reader’s introduction to a sweeping, spiraling voice very different from
the sweeping, spiraling voice American readers of poetry know:
I celebrate myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
As
the translators of this volume note, the narrator of Notebook is not introduced until the twenty-fifth stanza. This
gives a firm sense of what becomes more pronounced as Césaire moves along
through his years and decades. The concern for others expressed in his poems,
especially for other Black people, and the intense descriptions of the world
beyond the individual self, are prominent to the degree that the self is best understood
in relation to others and the otherness of society and world. If Whitman can
afford to be cosmic, as he is in the opening lines to “Song of Myself”, Césaire,
by contrast, cannot.
*
This
leads into what is most unique about Césaire. For all his incendiary
experimentation, subversiveness and even blasphemy, he is constantly pressing
the vision of the eminent end of colonialism. Here is another contrast: in
relation to his predecessors, which also include Baudelaire, Lautréamont,
Mallarmé, and Péguy, Césaire can be blasphemous, but not entirely blasphemous. While
Rimbaud says of Hell, “I swallowed a monstrous dose of poison,” “How nicely I
burn” and “The air of Hell will tolerate no hymns,” Césaire describes a living hell, with hope
for a better future threaded though it:
I say hurray! The old negritude progressively cadavers
itself
the horizon breaks, recoils and expands
and through the shredding of clouds the flashing of a
sign
the slave ship cracks from one end to the other… Its
bell convulses and resounds… The ghastly tapeworm of its cargo gnaws the fetid
guts of the strange suckling of the sea!
Solar Throat
Slashed & Other Poems of Note
Despite
Césaire’s differing circumstances and concerns, his seminal collection is, as
the translators of this volume present it, Solar
Throat Slashed (touched on in my note at the end of this post). It is a
collection of seventy-two short poems (no poem runs beyond two pages, and many
take up less than half a page) that offers a far more comprehensive line than the
line of Notebook of a Return to the
Native Land. To provide a sense of range, here are excerpts from several
poems, along with a description of the gist of each.
Some
poems are elliptical like “Intercessor”
O torn sun
blind peacock magical and cool
with arched test tube hands
futile eclipse of space
and
some are simple like “The Wheel” (appearing immediately after “Intercessor”):
The wheel is man’s most beautiful and sole discovery
there is the sun that turns
there is the earth that turns
there is your face turning on the axle of your neck
when you weep…
Some
are joyous like “Samba”
All that from a cove combined to form your breasts all
the hibiscus bells all the pearl oysters all the jumbled tracks that form a
mangrove all the sun that is stored in sierra lizards all the iodine needed to
make a marine day all the mother-of-pearl needed to delineate the sound of a
submarine conch
If you wanted them to
the drifting tetraodons would move hand in hand
Some
are whimsical like “Solid”
holy shit they have secured the universe and
everything weighs―every-thing―the plumb line of gravity having been installed
at the facile bottom of solidity―the uranium deposit the garden statutes the
perverse loves the street that merely pretends to be the fluid stream don’t
mention it whose pace more sluggish than my feet there is nothing up to and
inclu-ding the sun that has not stopped its clouds forever fixed.
Some
poems, as already mentioned, are blasphemous, while others are more devoutly
religious. Some are by this point in Césaire’s writing expected, and some are
entirely unexpected. Still, the poems are shot through with the poet’s central
concerns, but these poems carry that concern into a larger arena, as does the
poem “Torture” (and, although it is tempting to quote this brief poem entirely,
here is the second half):
All those who know how to show on imperial purple
great blots of dark sperm accompanied by a diagram of their fall
all those whose fingers are an unprecedented
sumptuousness of butterflies curved according to the earth’s axis
O all those whose gaze is a carousel of birds born of
a superhuman balance of sponges and of fragments from a galaxy extinguished
beneath a small railway station’s heel
*
Going
into and then on from Solar Throat
Slashed, and through the rest of the poet’s oeuvre, a reader discovers expansions
and contractions of vision, as well as a general movement into and then away from
spiritual potencies, allowing the poet to address political concerns, before
again embracing the spiritual. Through it all Césaire remains intensely imaginative, proving himself master
of a poetic voice that is, as Jean-Paul Sartre describes it, “beautiful like
nascent oxygen.” With The Complete Poetry
of Aimé Césaire, A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman have produced a
seminal achievement in the translation history of Aimé Césaire unlikely to ever
be surpassed.
Endnotes
Leaves of Grass, 150th
Anniversary Edition, Edited and with a New Afterward by David S. Reynolds,
Oxford University Press, 2005
A Season in Hell
& the Drunken Boat, Arthur Rimbaud, Translated by Louise Varèse, Preface
by Patti Smith, New Directions, 2011
Poetry Editor’s Blog,
March 2018
