Cesaire's Notebook as Palimpsest: The Text before, during, and after World War II

No other text among Aimé Césaire's works was destined to have greater influence than the Cahier d'un retour au pays natal / Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. If we accept the date of 1939, when the pre-original text appeared in the Paris review Volontés, the Cahier/ Notebook inaugurates his published works as well. This is then a fitting moment, during the celebration of the great poet's ninetieth birthday, for us to take a fresh look at the evolution of this long poem that had the most profound effect on the development of his work. In order to delineate a framework for my remarks, I will begin with a few preliminary questions:

In which city was the Notebook first published in volume form? You will respond "Paris," of course, but the first edition of the poem appeared in Havana, during the war, in a Cuban translation by Lydia Cabrera and with an introduction by the surrealist poet Benjamin Péret, entirely in Spanish. We will bear in mind two facts: the Caribbean vocation of Césaire's poetry at this time and the role of the surrealist group in its diffusion.

In which city did the Cahier first appear in a French-language edition? This time you may hesitate, thinking that I've offered another red herring. You are right. The original edition of the Cahier appeared in 1947 in New York, presented in a bilingual edition translated by Lionel Abel and Ivan Goll. André Breton's presence in New York during the last years of the war was a determining factor in this new avatar of the "American" vocation, in the widest sense, of Césaire's work. Between 1942 and 1944, several poems from the collection The Miraculous Weapons (Les armes miraculeuses) had appeared in surrealist-inspired publications in New York. We will return shortly to the contributions of surrealists to the evolution of the Notebook.

In which version of the Notebook do we first find the free associated metaphors that caused so much ink to be spilled, during the 1970s and '80s, over the poetic relations between Césaire and the surrealist group? If you've already grasped the orientation of this presentation, you will long hesitate before answering "1939." In this case, I congratulate you. The text published in the literary review Volontés, just before Césaire's return to Martinique, does not contain a single free associated metaphor, which many respected minds consider the primordial characteristic of surrealistic poetics. These metaphors in the Notebook result from Césaire reworking his lyric expression between 1941 and 1947, after André Breton visited Martinique.

I hope that these few questions and their paradoxical but perfectly accurate answers will have convinced you that we will benefit from examining the history of this long poem by Césaire. You will have already understood my perspective on the acclamations of the Cahier which attribute to the young poet of 1939 the poetics of the editions that have appeared since 1956. Two researchers have attentively studied the editions of the Cahier already: Liliane Pestre de Almeida contributed to Césaire 70, the volume edited by Ngal and Steins for the seventieth birthday of the poet, a study of the variations of the Cahier between 1939 and the Désormeaux edition of 1976; Abiola Irele published an English-language annotated edition of the Cahier in Nigeria in 1994. These two colleagues begin with the principle that the text of the Cahier given by Présence Africaine in 1956 is the definitive edition of the poem and they treat all the differences, sometimes major ones, which we find occurring between 1939 and 1976, as variations of this version. The study of the Cahier Maryse Condé did in 1978 for Hatier's Profil d'une...