Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (review)

Aimé Césaire's Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, first published in book form in 1947, marked the beginning of his quest for—and subsequent defining of—negritude, the concept of Black consciousness he founded with Léopold Senghor and Léon Damas. This translation, a revision of Eshleman and Smith's 1983 translation for their edition of Césaire's collected poems, offers a fresh and vibrant version of this landmark long poem.

Although Césaire was profoundly influenced by surrealism, the structure and content of Notebook of a Return to the Native Land are both concrete and comprehensible. Instead of using the flashier methods of surrealism, Césaire's frequent shifts in direction and tone, together with the raw power of his language—highly emotional, and masterfully conveyed in the translation—keep the reader off-kilter:

Vainly in the tepidity of your throat you ripen for the twentieth time the same indigent solace that we are mumblers of words

Words? while we handle quarters of earth, while we wed delirious continents, while we force steaming gates, words, ah yes, words! but words of fresh blood, words that are tidal waves and erysipelas and malarias and lava and brush fires, and blazes of flesh, and blazes of cities . . .

The poem has an epic scope and a heroic narrator, but it resists epic traditions, veering instead between poetry and prose and maintaining a consistent sense of wonder and surprise throughout. Instead of glorifying the past, Césaire juxtaposes the present with the past, sometimes exploding the present through the past:

So much blood in my memory! In my memory are lagoons. They are covered with death's-heads. They are not covered with water lilies. In my memory are lagoons. No women's loincloths are spread out on their shores.

My memory is encircled with blood. My memory has a belt of corpses! and machine gun fire of rum barrels brilliantly sprinkling our ignominious revolts, amorous glances swooning from having swigged too much ferocious freedom

Césaire makes constant reference to the Caribbean landscape, and the poem brims with a wondrous catalogue of names: rivers, flowers, trees, and so on, even words the poet coined himself. His is an anti-romantic Caribbean, a world of natural plenitude whose very names evoke a painful history. It's interesting to read his blunt language against or alongside the more familiar evocations of that landscape by Anglophone poets such as Derek Walcott:

Islands cheap paper shredded upon the water
Islands stumps skewered side by side on the flaming sword of the Sun

Eshleman and Smith's vivid and skillful rendering of Césaire's work provides us with a revitalized edition of a classic work, one that will be relished by readers, both those who are familiar with other translations of this work and those who are encountering it for the first time.