Appendix: Césaire’s Cahier in Translation

Comments on the Translations

The present translation by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman has been realized after careful study of the 1939 French text. It is a substantially new translation based on the one Eshleman did with Annette Smith in the late 1970s, before revising it for Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry (1983) and the 2001 Wesleyan University Press edition of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. The Eshleman and Smith translation and its later revisions were based on the 1976 edition of Césaire’s Poésie, edited by Jean Paul Césaire for Désormeaux (Fort-de-France and Paris). René Hénane’s glossary of rare words in Césaire’s oeuvre has allowed for substantial improvement in the treatment of lexical difficulties. Germain Kouassi’s monograph on Césaire’s language and style in the Notebook has been helpful in identifying characteristic syntactical structures. Abiola Irele’s annotated edition of a version of the 1956 Présence Africaine text has frequent helpful insights. Lilyan Kesteloot published a guide to the Cahier / Notebook for student readers in 1983. Kesteloot has found biblical echoes in the text that reinforce our reading of the poem as a spiritual drama. Other references can be found following the notes.

The first English translation of Césaire’s poem, Memorandum on My Martinique, by Abel and Goll, has never been reprinted. Émile Snyder used it as the starting point for his translation, which was published as Return to My Native Land in a bilingual edition published by Présence Africaine in Paris (1971) and long out of print. The Snyder translation has the peculiarity of not corresponding perfectly to the post-1956 French text on the facing page since Snyder worked from an earlier draft. In the United Kingdom there have been two translations, the first as Return to My Native Land by Berger and Bostock for Penguin (1969); the introduction by Masizi Kunene oriented the translation sharply toward Africa. Until publication of the Eshleman–Smith translation in 1983, the Notebook was read quite consistently through an Africanist political lens. In 1995 Bloodaxe Books published a bilingual edition with a translation by Annie Pritchard and Mireille Rosello. Rosello’s introduction sets Césaire’s poem in a postcolonial perspective.

Césaire consulted with Janheinz Jahn on lexical difficulties of his German translation, which Insel-Verlag in Frankfurt published in 1962 as Zurück ins Land der Geburt. Moreover, Jahn’s activity on Césaire’s behalf from the mid-1950s to the mid-1960s did much to popularize the Martinican poet. Césaire prefaced the Paris edition of Jahn’s book Muntu, which drew Césaire into the orbit of the one-black-world ideology of the 1960s that fixed the image of Negritude for half a century.

The Lydia Cabrera translation, published in Havana as Retorno al país natal early in 1943 with illustrations by Wifredo Lam resulted directly from Lam’s meeting with Césaire in Fort-de-France in 1941. Their mutual admiration nurtured a forty-year friendship that ended with Lam’s death in 1982. The Cabrera translation enjoys the distinction of being the first edition of Césaire’s poem in book form, appearing four years prior to the original edition in French. In 2007 Lourdes Arencibia published in Zamora, Spain a hybrid text of the Havana Retorno … to which she added, in her own Spanish translation, material from the 1956 Présence Africaine edition. Enrique Lihn prepared a second Cuban translation of the Cahier for a volume of Césaire’s Poesías, prefaced by René Depestre and published in Havana at Casa de las Américas (1956). Agustí Bartra’s translation of Cuaderno de un retorno al país natal was published in Mexico City by Era in 1969. In 1995 Consuelo Gotay illustrated this translation with engravings in a limited edition published in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

Graziano Benelli, who championed Césaire in Italy, published his translation of Diario di un retorno al paese natale in Milan in 1978. In 1985 the Dutch publisher In de Knipscheer, which has specialized in titles from the Netherlands Antilles, published Simon Simonse’s translation in Haarlem under the title Logboek van een Terugkeer naar Mijn Geboorteland. This Dutch translation made Césaire’s poem available in the fourth major European language of the Caribbean region.

Notes on the Translation

[4] the volcanoes will explode: In May 1902 Mt. Pelée exploded pyroclastically, burying the old colonial capital of Martinique, St. Pierre, in volcanic ash. Metaphorically volcanoes and explosions set up a network of apocalyptic images that run through the poem.

[8] Joséphine … conquistador: Césaire presents ironically three statues that collectively represent the official history of colonization. Marie-Josèphe-Rose Tascher de la Pagerie (1763–1814), born at La Pagerie near Trois-Îlets, Martinique, was called Joséphine by her second husband, Napoleon I. Martinicans blame her for encouraging Napoleon to reinstitute slavery in 1802. Her statue has frequently been decapitated in recent years. Victor Schoelcher (1804–1893) is credited with the abolition of slavery in the French Empire by the revolutionary government in 1848. In 1939 Schoelcherism in the French West Indies was a mythic construct intended to convince blacks that freedom was given to them by magnanimous whites. Césaire opposes this passive myth to the revolutionary history of Haiti. Pierre Belain d’Esnambuc (1585–1636) was a Norman French privateer to whom Richelieu accorded the privilege of colonizing the islands of the Lesser Antilles that were then unoccupied by Europeans. He is remembered without affection as the founder of French colonialism in the Caribbean region.

[10] morne: Lafcadio Hearn, in Two Years … , defined the term as “used through the French West Indies to designate certain altitutes (usually with beautiful and curious forms) of volcanic origin …” Césaire connects this evocative term both with the poverty of the island and with the apocalyptic explosion that may one day bring it to an end.

[14] suicide: Slaves sometimes committed suicide by choking on their own tongues (the hypoglossal nerves are at the base of the tongue).

[14] The Capot River empties into the Atlantic Ocean in Basse-Terre, Martinique, where Césaire was born. Its course is Southeast of the plantation where his father served as manager before entering the colonial tax department.

[15] Queen-Blanche-of-Castille: Daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of Louis VIII of France and mother of Louis IX, Blanche (1188–1252) figured prominently in school history books. She probably appears in the poem both as a synecdoche of the irrelevance of medieval French history to colonials and as a privileged metaphor of the whiteness attaching to her name.

[21] Trinité to Grand-Rivière: From Césaire’s boyhood home, Basse-Terre, La Trinité lies to the South, Grand-Rivière to the North, along the wild Atlantic coast, which faces Africa.

[26] merci: THANK YOU; an ex-voto for an answered prayer. Césaire’s paternal grandmother, Eugénie Macni, was educated by her common-law husband. She in turn instructed her grandchildren before they entered school. Césaire maintained that she looked like the Diola people of Casamance in Senegal.

[27] Straw Street: In French, rue Paille; the poorest shacks in the colony lacked the solid roof of more prosperous houses.

[28] sand so black: These images reinforce the poverty of the black population. The sand is black because of its volcanic origin.

[31] three-souled Carib: Césaire refers to the three aspects of the person in Carib belief: anigi (vital force); iuani (immaterial being); afurugu (astral body). The astral body is an exact copy of the physical body and is located midway between materiality and spirituality.

[32] little ellipsoidal nothing: A derisive designation for Martinique, which is finger-like in shape. At only 1,100 sq. km., it is approximately six times the size of Washington, D.C. Located at 14.40 degrees North Latitude, it would appear to lie four fingers above the equator on a medium-sized wall map.

[34] where negritude rose for the first time: This is the first intimation that Negritude should be seen as a heroic opposition to the diminished sense of self inculcated by colonization. In the poem Haiti stands for all that colonized Martinique is not. When they designate the sick, corrupt society that has resulted from three centuries of colonization, images of blackness are translated using terms, however offensive, that show the unacceptable nature of present reality.

where Death scythes widely: This is probably an allusion to the Spanish Civil War, which ended in a fascist victory while Césaire was composing the “Notebook …” Franco’s armies invaded Spain from its African colonies using tanks that can be seen as “caterpillaring …”

[35] Bordeaux … San Francisco: All but the last city participated in the triangle trade: goods from French and British ports were traded for slaves on the African coast; slave ships traded their human cargo in the West Indies and the plantation economies of Atlantic America; rum and sugar were sent back to Europe from American and Caribbean ports. San Francisco seems to have been added for euphony and rhythm.

[36] a little cell in the Jura: Toussaint Louverture (1743–1803) was the foremost military hero of the Haitian revolution, which inflicted its worst defeat on Napoleon’s armies prior to the debacle of 1812 in Russia. Césaire considered the black revolution to be the dialectical end-point of a struggle that began with the revolt of the white planters, was opposed by the parliamentary struggle of the mulattoes during the French Revolution, and concluded with the proclamation of the black republic in 1804. He devoted a historical essay to Toussaint Louverture in 1960 and a play to King Henry Christophe in 1963, making Haiti a centerpiece of his depiction of Negritude, which he modified over time. In the “Notebook …” he focuses on Toussaint’s destiny as a tragic sacrifice. Toussaint was tricked by the French into coming on board a man-of-war in 1802, was imprisoned and transported to the Fort de Joux in the Jura Mountains, where he died a miserable death a year later.

the Keys: Caribbean coral reefs.

shy patyura: According to Césaire, a variation on patira, the name of a peccary found in French Guiana. According to Kesteloot, it is also thought to accompany the dying to their final resting place; in this respect it would be a Creole equivalent to the Egyptian Anubis.

[49] Amazons: The kings of precolonial Dahomey maintained a unit of women warriors who cut off one breast to facilitate archery in battle.

Askia the Great: Askia Mohammed reigned in Gao from 1493 to 1528; he founded the university at Timbuktu.

Djenne: A city of precolonial Mali famous for its Great Mosque. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth century Djenne was a major link in trading salt and gold through Timbuktu. If Césaire knew that slaves were also traded there, he doesn’t mention it.

Madhi: In Muslim eschatology, the madhi is a prophet guided by Allah who is destined to save the faithful at world’s end. In recent history Muhammad Ahmad ibn Abd Allah Al-Mahdi (1844–1885) led an insurrection in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. The state he founded survived him until 1898, when the British army under Lord Kitchener destroyed it.

Chicote: A Portuguese knotted whip used on slaves.

[52] This strophe is a tissue of allusions to the claims of so-called scientific racism, of which Joseph Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882) was the foremost exponent in France. His book The Inequality of Human Races, first published between 1853 and 1855, contributed significantly to the theory of innate European superiority that justified the subjugation of non-European peoples by the colonial powers. Measuring skull size with a craniometer was a favorite means of proving superiority or inferiority. Homo sum … may be a quotation from Terence, the Roman author who was born a slave to a senator. Kesteloot reads this quotation as an ironic rejoinder to the fate reserved for African and diasporic peoples by colonial racism.

COMICAL AND UGLY: A quotation from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “The Albatross,” which depicts this majestic bird as pathetic when confined to the deck of a ship by cruel sailors. The parallel with the black man on the streetcar is intended to show his present degradation as the direct result of his circumstances. The speaker’s ironic assumption of racist stereotypes while looking at him calls for translation of nègre as nigger. In this sequence the speaker must overcome his own racist conditioning.

[53] funereal menfenil: Any number of Caribbean raptors have been identified under this common name. Jourdain identified the menfenil (Creole: malfini) as Falco sparverius caribaearum, the sparrow hawk or kestrel. Pompilus thought it must be Accipiter stiratus, a local sharp-shinned hawk. Hénane preferred an endemic Martinican species, Buteo playtypterus rivieri, a local broad-winged hawk. Valdman may have been right to call it “chicken hawk,” which is no known bird but rather any raptor that threatens the chickens. Césaire’s metonymic purpose is clear, however. His hawk is dark (funereal) and threatening. Thibault discusses all these possibilities going back to the 1660s, without reaching a clear conclusion.

[57] postillion: A household servant dressed in fancy livery whose job it was to tell the newly-arrived slaves, in flowery language, what a fine life awaited them in Havana.

[66] Eia … Cailcedra: Eia is an imperative that is found both in ancient Greek drama and in the Latin missal. “Eia Mater” occurs in the prayer “Stabat Mater dolorosa.” Either association reinforces the solemnity of the context in the poem. In the Wolof language of Senegal, Cailcedra designates an African mahogany tree. Senghor also used the word in his poetry.

[67] but who yield, seized, to the essence of all things: Césaire here gives central importance to a fundamental thesis of his mentor in the morphology of cultures, Leo Frobenius. In the first issue of Tropiques (April 1941) Suzanne Césaire explained these characteristics of the so-called Ethiopian peoples of Africa with whom she and her husband identified. See Suzanne Césaire, The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941–1945), ed. by Daniel Maximin, trans. by Keith L. Walker (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2012), 3–10.

[78] the time has come to gird one’s loins like a brave man: In the Book of Job (38:3) Jehovah enjoins Job: “Gird up now thy loins like a man” (King James trans.). The context is God’s laying the foundations of the earth.

[82] the wounds cut in its trunk: A probable allusion to the rubber tree, which survives the incisions made in its trunk for collection of latex sap.

[87] I am only a man (no degradation, no spit perturbs him): Echoes the scourging of Christ; Matthew and Mark stress spitting; John (19:5) has the expression “Behold the man!” (Ecce Homo in the Vulgate).

I accept … I accept … totally, without reservation …: Kesteloot sees here an allusion to the gospel according to Luke (22:42): “not my will, but thine, be done.”

my race that no ablution of hyssop mixed with lilies could purify: The line echoes Psalm 51:7 (“Purge me with hyssop, and I shall be clean: wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow.”) Irele sees a more elaborate network of metaphors: “hyssop is an aromatic plant mentioned in the Latin chant (beginning with the words Asperges me) that accompanies the ritual sprinkling of the congregation with holy water before High Mass in the Catholic Church …” He adds that the lily is “the emblem of the Bourbon monarchy in France. An intimate connection is thus established between the general system of references within Western culture and the symbolism of the Church which, as its principal component, the symbolism helps to sustain” (p. 127).

my race ripe grapes for drunken feet: In Isaiah 63:3 Jehovah declares: “I have trodden the winepress alone; and of the people there was none with me: for I will tread them in mine anger, and trample them in my fury …”

(oh those queens … chestnut trees!): Quite possibly an allusion to the statues of French queens in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris, one of whom is Blanche of Castille. The parenthetical ejaculation is reminiscent of the style of Saint-John Perse.

the twenty-nine legal blows of the whip: Here and in naming instruments of torture below Césaire draws upon the Code Noir (Black Code) written by Colbert, Louis XIV’s minister, in 1685 and revised many times down to the abolition of slavery in 1848. Césaire documented the names of slaveholders who exacted particularly cruel punishments in the writings of Victor Schoelcher. In 1948 for the centennial of abolition Césaire prefaced Esclavage et Colonisation (Slavery and Colonialism), which collected Schoelcher’s principal essays on the subject. The chapter on “La condition servile” (The servile state) is particularly apposite here.

and the fleur de lys: Branding irons bearing this symbol of the monarchy were used to mark runaway slaves who had been recaptured.

[89] and the determination of my biology: All these measures of racial purity up to “but measured” refer to the tests established by “scientific” racism and which were, all too often, interiorized by black and mulatto families in plantation society.

[92] the body of my country miraculously laid in the despair of my arms: Replication of the biblical scene in which Joseph of Arimathaea takes the body of Christ down from the cross (Luke 23:52–53).

and I revive Onan: In Genesis 38:9 Onan refused to impregnate his dead brother’s widow. When Jehovah saw that Onan had disobeyed the divine injunction, He killed Onan. As he does elsewhere, Césaire keeps the vehicle of the metaphor (the speaker will copulate with Mother Earth) but provides a new tenor (a nature religion that harks back to Africa).

[93] the penetrance of an apocalyptic wasp: A probable allusion to the book of Revelation (Apocalypse in French), in which the end-times are announced by locust armies having the power of scorpions to cause men pain and suffering (Revelation 9:3–10). Kesteloot sees the aural image as referencing the trumpet of the angel of the Last Judgment.

[96] the “lance of night” of my Bambara ancestors: Kesteloot glosses this tutelary image as the sutama, a spear blessed by a sorcerer who sprinkled it with the blood of a man or a black goat. Without the blessing the spear would retract toward the haft so as to be ineffective. The Bambara or Bamana are a Mandé people whose range extends from Mali to Senegal. A subgroup of the Mandé founded Djenne around 250 bc. Other subgroups founded the Ghana Empire prior to 1100 ad and the songhai empire, which dissolved around 1600 ad. Césaire’s image then conveys both warlike and imperial connotations.

pseudomorphosis: When Césaire published the preoriginal of the “Notebook …” in 1939, debates over Oswald Spengler’s notion of pseudomorphosis were common. Spengler found the term in Frobenius, who had used it in a discussion of the mysterious force of Païdeuma, which seized cultures and transformed them. Spengler interpreted pseudomorphosis as the cultural crippling of a young society by an older one. Césaire in the “Notebook …” imputes the physical and moral ills of Martinican society to the imposition of Western institutions on a diasporic people he sees as African. Césaire’s use of biblical images to suggest a narrative of spiritual salvation may owe something to Spengler’s claim that “everywhere ‘he,’ the son of man, the savior who has descended into the underworld and who must himself be saved, is the hoped-for goal.… Apocalyptic thought … henceforth fills his consciousness entirely” (vol. 2, 197–98).

pay no attention to my black skin: the sun did it: In the Song of Solomon (1:6) one reads: “Look not upon me, because I am black, because the sun hath looked upon me …” In the context of pseudomorphosis, this is a denial of blackness, which Fanon was to theorize in Black Skin, White Masks.

[109] still verticity: In the French text verrition is a Latinism that Césaire explained to Eshleman and Smith as coined from the verb verri: to sweep, scrape a surface, to scan. Kesteloot, who had also consulted Césaire, claimed the root was vertere, to turn. André Claverie was given the same etymology by Césaire. Hénane found verrition as a culinary term in Brillat-Savarin’s Physiologie du goût (1825) and interpreted the image as the tongue sweeping bits of food in the mouth. We agree with Kesteloot that the poetic sense of the image is an arrested turning motion. We have settled on the translation “still verticity” to render that meaning while suggesting the powerful upward sweep of the final passage.

Works Cited

Hearn, Lafcadio. 1890. Two Years in the French West Indies. New York: Harper and Brothers.

Hénane, René. 2004. Glossaire des termes rares dans l’oeuvre d’Aimé Césaire. Paris: Jean-Michel Place.

Irele, Francis Abiola, ed. 1994. Cahier d’un retour au pays natal by Aimé Césaire. Ibadan, Nigeria: New Horn Press; 2nd edition 2000. Columbus: Ohio State University Press.

Jourdain, Élodie. 1956. Le vocabulaire du parler créole de la Martinique. Paris: Klincksieck.

Kesteloot, Lilyan. 1983. Comprendre Cahier d’un retour au pays natal d’Aimé Césaire. Versailles: Les Classiques Africains.

Kouassi, Germain. 2006. La Poésie de Césaire par la langue et le style: l’exemple du “Cahier d’un retour au pays natal.” Lettres & Langues. Paris: Publibook.

Spengler, Oswald. 1932. The Decline of the West, trad. de C.F. Atkinson.Vol. 2. Perspectives of World-History. London; New York: Allen & Unwin; Knopf [1928].

Thibault, André. 2008. “L’oeuvre d’Aimé Césaire et le français régional antillais.” In Aimé Césaire à l’oeuvre, ed. Marc Cheymol and Philippe Ollé-Laprune, 47–85. Paris: Archives Contemporaines.