| Aime Cesaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. The long poem was the beginning of Cesaire's quest for negritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. With its emphasis on unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, manipulation of language into puns and neologisms, and rhythm, Cesaire considered his style a "beneficial madness" that could "break into the forbidden" and reach the powerful and overlooked aspects of black culture. Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith achieve a laudable adaptation of Cesaire's work to English by clarifying double meanings, stretching syntax, and finding equivalent English puns, all while remaining remarkably true to the French text. Their treatment of the poetry is marked with imagination, vigor, and accuracy that will clarify difficulties for those already familiar with French, and make the work accessible to those who are not. Andre Breton's introduction, A Great Black Poet, situates the text and provides a moving tribute to Cesaire. Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is recommended for readers in comparative literature, post-colonial literature, African American studies, poetry, modernism, and French.
Annotation:
Written in the waning days of World War II, this classic work was composed by a leader of the n?gritude movement.
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PraiseSan Francisco Chronicle Book Review
"Aime Cesaire's brooding exploration of Negritude bristles with the energetic, unique qualities of Walt Whitman's "Song of Myself."...[T]he poem moves with taut momentum. Cesaire's work deserves more attention, so this new translation is welcome." 09/16/2001Bloomsbury Review
"Eshleman and Smith have revised their original 1983 translation and given it additional power by presenting Cesaire's unique voice as a testament to a world reduced in size by catastrophic events." - Ray Gonzalez March/April 2002 Slope
"The sheer force and momentum of the poem?s language "breaks into the forbidden." C?saire?s political interest in creating a very material language world is manifest in the poem?s condensed lyricism, extended syntax, and especially in the wealth of rare and technical words. African and Creole words rub up against botanical and geographical words. Slang sits beside archaic usages and neologisms. C?saire makes powerful use of the friction between native and colonizer tongues when they are in fact the same tongue. In a kind of sur-French, C?saire?s supped up, super-electrified lexicon ?masters? and reinvents the language." - Christine Hume 15 |
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