Creole Echoes: The Francophone Poetry of Nineteenth-Century Louisiana (review)

Creole Echoes makes an important contribution to both American studies and French and Francophone studies by highlighting a significant body of American literature written not in English, but in French. In so doing, this collection draws attention to French as not only a European language, but an American one as well. Containing a total of 108 poems by 33 poets presented in alphabetical order, Creole Echoes makes available for an English-speaking audience, for the first time in most cases, a bilingual collection of poems in the French original with translations by Norman R. Shapiro. In an important departure from most other collections, poems by French immigrants to Louisiana, white Creoles, and Creoles of color are included in Creole Echoes side by side, which gives full meaning to the term Creole as a non-racially specific term for anyone born of the New World as opposed to the Old.

M. Lynn Weiss frames this grouping with a general introduction and individualized prefatory notes for each poet. Her introduction alone would make the collection worth reading, for it is one of the most succinct presentations of Louisiana literature in French that I have read. Indeed, as a specialist of American studies, Weiss has single-handedly done more to challenge her field through French literary studies of Louisiana than any other scholar. Weiss situates this literature in relation to Louisiana history and the literary movements and trends of France during the same period. Although making a convincing case as to why the literature of Creole writers of color should be integrated into the history of African American literature, she also highlights ways in which they rewrote the conventions of French romanticism to translate its Republican inspiration into an American context, where its revolutionary politics could be used to challenge slavery and racism.

Furthermore, Creole Echoes assembles work even the specialist might find only with difficulty. The French versions themselves of its poems are available in somewhat easy-to-find collections in the case of only less than half of those included here. And the vast majority of these are at the Bibliothèque Tintamarre website maintained by Centenary College, which has undertaken a massive retrieval of French literature from Louisiana (for the other most recent collections see Allain and Ancelet; St. Martin and Voorhies; and Cowan). For many other poems, scholars would have to undertake the painstaking task of sifting through the archives (newspaper collections in many cases). With the exception of the inclusion here and there of Creole works in anthologies of Southern, Louisiana, or African American literature, English translations of nineteenth-century Louisiana poetry are even rarer. The most notable of these exceptions is the 1979 translation of a 1845 collection of poems by Creole writers of color undertaken by Régine Latortue and Gleason R.W. Adams with the title of Les Cenelles: A Collection of Poems by Creole Writers of the Early Nineteenth Century.

Even in comparison with the English translations of poems in Les Cenelles, Shapiro's translations in Creole Echoes are more accurate and more poetic, and this, in spite of the constraints of rhyme and meter that he chose to impose on himself (unlike the translators of Les Cenelles). Compare, for example, the translation of Armand Lanusse's poem entitled "Epigramme" ["Epigram"] included in both Les Cenelles and Creole Echoes. This poem relates the annual confessions of a "bigote" [translated as "zealot" in Les Cenelles and "zealous pietist" in Creole Echoes], whom the pastor exhorts to abandon her sinful ways. She has one final request before doing so: "[A]vant que la grâce en mon âme scintille, / Pour m'ôter tout motif de pécher désormais, / Que ne puis-je, pasteur – Quoi donc? – placer ma fille?" (Creole Echoes 94). Les Cenelles translates these verses as follows: "[B]efore grace sparkles in my soul, / To remove henceforth all incentive to sin, / Why can't I, father – what? – establish my daughter?" (95). Shapiro, however...