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  • Césaire and the Challenge of Translation:The Example of “Strong Men” by Sterling Brown
  • Thomas A. Hale (bio)

Aimé Césaire’s place in world literature today is due in large part to the many translators who have struggled to render his often hermetic writing into other languages, including English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, and Japanese. Some of the best translations into English, those by the team of Eshleman and Smith, now appear in large collections of world literature used in courses around the world, most notably his long and explosive poem Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), first published in the journal Volontés in August 1939.1 Matching these efforts to make Césaire’s writing available to a global audience, beginning with the first translation of Cahier d’un retour au pays natal in 1947 by Ivan Goll and Lionel Abel, are Césaire’s own attempts on a micro scale to bring two poems by African American poets to the readership of the French-speaking world.2 But Césaire, like those who translated his own works, encountered great difficulty. His problems were, however, quite different from those confronting translators working on his writings. For them, little-used terms, neologisms, and words designating the tropical flora and fauna of Martinique were the obstacles. For Césaire, the challenge was African American “dialect” poetry.

Césaire became interested in African American poetry in the early 1930s. Given that he wrote his thesis for the diplôme d’études supérieures at the Ecole normale supérieure in Paris on “le theme du sud dans la poésie (or littérature) négro-americaine,” one might suppose that he would have translated the poems by African American authors that appeared under the title “ Introduction to African American Poetry” in the second issue of Tropiques, the journal he and friends launched in Martinique in 1941.3 However, the translations of these three poems are in fact the work of other people. “The Creation of the [End Page 445] World” (“La création du monde”), by James Weldon Johnson, was translated by J. Roux-Delimal. Eugène Jolas, the editor of Le nègre qui chant (The Negro Who Sings), was the translator of “Harvest Song” (“Chant de la moisson”), a poem that appeared originally in Jean Toomer’s novel Cane.4 The third poem, “To America” (“A l’Amérique”), by Claude McKay, had already appeared in a bilingual format in the short-lived journal La revue du monde noir and was probably translated by Jane or Paulette Nardal, leaders of the group that founded the journal.5 As for the translations of poems that appeared in Césaire’s thesis, we may never know who did them because no one has ever found a copy of it.

The translations of “I Have Seen Black Hands” (“Mains noires”) by Richard Wright and “Strong Men” (“Hommes forts”) by Sterling Brown appeared in 1935 in the student newspaper L’étudiant noir, a joint project of Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, Léon Damas, and other students of African and Caribbean origin who were in Paris during the mid-thirties.6 The translation of “I Have Seen Black Hands” by Richard Wright was signed by Césaire. The version of “Strong Men” by Sterling Brown was signed “A. Mauger,” a typo for “Maugée.” Aristide Maugée was one of the L’étudiant noir writers from Martinique. A modified translation of this poem signed by Césaire appeared four years later in the journal Charpentes.7

These two translations by Césaire are the only examples of the genre that have come to light in the course of research for Les écrits d’Aimé Césaire: Biobibliogaphie commentée (1913–2008), a listing with excerpts and commentary on 1,025 published texts by him—speeches, interviews, declarations, prefaces, articles, poems, plays, books, letters, telegrams, manifestos, announcements, audio and visual recordings and one film review.8

We don’t know why he started and ended his foray into the field of translation in the 1930s, but a study of...

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