I turn Finally to what will surely be considered one of the most important translations from the French in 1983—Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith's Collected Poetry of Aimé Césaire. A number of these translations had already appeared in Paul Auster's anthology, but it takes more than a handful of short poems to give the reader a sense of Césaire's astonishing poetic power, and the new California bilingual edition puts the entire lyric corpus before us for the first time.

The black poet Aimé Césaire was born in 1913 in Martinique. Creole is the first language of all black Martinicans, but Césaire's lower middle-class parents made strenuous efforts to secure their son the best French education possible: at eighteen, he won a scholarship to the famous Lycée Louis-le-Grand in Paris which, in turn, paved the way for his entrance to the Ecole Normale. In the Paris of the thirties, two influences converged to shape Césaire's future poetry: the Surrealism of André Breton and his circle, and the new interest in African ethnography, especially the work of Leo Frobenius. As Michel Leiris put it in his 1965 essay "Qui est Aimé Césaire?" (an English translation by A. James Arnold appeared in Sulfur 5 [1982]):

Césaire found in surrealism a way of looking at the world that had to appeal to him. Wasn't surrealism in open revolt against the entire framework of western rationalism, which the European intellectuals assembled around Breton rejected as an intolerable tyranny, less tolerable still for a Black Antillean since that framework is, historically, the one the Whites superimposed, so to speak, on the slaves they imported from Africa and on their descendants?

Together with the African poet and statesman-to-be Léopold Senghor, Césaire developed the concept of négritude, which signifies not, as is often thought, "Blackness first," the belief in African superiority, but rather, as Leiris explains, the right to be what one is, the right to "remain different":

For Césaire to be conscious of his negritude and to be conscious of it as Martinican requires that he pursue from the start two objectives: politically, to free his country of forms of economic exploitation that condemn the masses to pauperism; culturally, to bring the specifically Antillean element into proper relief, which implies that without underestimating the role of western civilization one must turn toward the African heritage that is so often forgotten or denied by colored Antilleans who want only to be first-class Frenchmen.

These are precisely the themes that find their way into Césaire's first great poem, the long Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land), published in its first version in 1939, when Césaire returned to Martinique. In the years that followed, Césaire became actively engaged in politics: first as editor of the radical journal Tropiques, then as a member of the fledgling Martinican Communist party which, at the end of World War II, elected him mayor of Fort-de-France and the same year as deputy to the Première Assemblée Nationale Constituante in Paris, where he participated in the formation of the new constitution of the Fourth Republic. In the decade that followed, Césaire wrote most of his lyric poetry; he also began to turn away from Communism and officially broke with the party in 1956 when the Soviets invaded Hungary. The precise nature of his Marxist philosophy is, as Smith and Eshleman point out, a complicated question: suffice it to say here that in 1958 he founded the independent socialist Martinican Progressive party (PPM) which has been returned to the French legislature in every subsequent election. A strong supporter of the Mitterand government, Césaire continues to write—in the last two decades chiefly drama and essays—and to engage in the cause of Martinican independence.

The appeal of Césaire's poetry depends, I think, on its particular blend of a native vitalism, a violent energy that celebrates the irrational, the strange, even the bestial, with a French sophistication, wit, and learning. If, as Eshleman and Smith note, the poetry is "a perpetual scene of dismemberment and mutilation," if it goes so far as to celebrate cannibalism as that which "symbolically eradicates the distinction between the I and the Other, between human and nonhuman, between what is (anthropologically) edible and what is not, and, finally, between the subject and the object," it is also a self-consciously literary poetry, full of echoes of Rimbaud (especially the Rimbaud of the Saison en enfer), Lautréamont, Baudelaire, and Mallarmé. Again, if Césaire's rhythms are influenced by African dances and voodoo rituals, his syntax is so Latinate and his vocabulary so esoteric, that it brings to mind the reference shelf rather than the tribal dance. Sartre sums it up nicely in a comment cited on the book jacket of the Eshleman-Smith translation:

In Aimé Césaire the great surrealist tradition draws to a close, achieves its definitive meaning and is destroyed: surrealism, a European movement in poetry is snatched from the Europeans by a black man who turns it against them and assigns a rigorously defined function to it … a Césaire poem explodes and whirls about itself like a rocket, suns burst forth whirling and exploding like new suns—it perpetually surpasses itself.

The rocket analogy is a good one: Césaire's is nothing if not an explosive poetry. The Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, for example, is a 1,055-line exorcism (part prose, part free verse) of the poet's "civilized" instincts, his lingering shame at belonging to a country and a race so abject, servile, petty and repressed as is his. A paratactic catalogue poem that piles up phrase upon phrase, image upon image, in a complex network of repetitions, its thrust is to define the threshold between sleep and waking—the sleep of oppression, the blind acceptance of the status quo, that gives way to rebirth, to a new awareness of what is and may be. Accordingly, it begins with the refrain line, repeated again and again in the first section of the poem, "Au bout du petit matin …" ("At the end of the little morning," a purposely childlike reference to dawn, which Eshleman and Smith awkwardly render as "At the end of the wee hours"), followed by a strophe that characterizes the poet's initial anguish, an anguish always laced with black humour:

Va-t'en, lui disais-je, gueule de flic, gueule de vache, va-t'en, je déteste les larbins de l'ordre et les hannetons de l'espérance. Va-t'en, mauvais gri-gri, punaise de moinillon. Puis je me tournais vers des paradis pour lui et les siens perdus, plus calme que la face d'une femme qui ment, et là, bercé par les effluves d'une pensée jamais lasse je nourrissais le vent, je délaçais les monstres et j'entendais monter de l'autre cõté du désastre, un fleuve de tourterelles et de trèfles de la savane que je porte toujours dans mes profondeurs à hauteur inverse du vingtième étage des maisons les plus insolentes et par précaution contre la force putréfiante des ambiantes crépusculaires, arpentée nuit et jour d'un sacré soleil vénérien.

Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it, I detest the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope. Beat it evil grigri, you bedbug of a petty monk. Then I turned toward paradises lost for him and his kin, calmer than the face of a woman telling lies, and there, rocked by the flux of a never exhausted thought I nourished the wind, I unlaced the monsters and heard rise, from the other side of disaster, a river of turtledoves and savanna clover which I carry forever in my depths height-deep as the twentieth floor of the most arrogant houses and as a guard against the putrefying force of crepuscular surroundings, surveyed night and day by a cursed veneral sun.

Here we have the hallmarks of Césaire's style: impassioned direct address ("Va-t'en"), name-calling ("gueule de flic," "gueule de vache"), parallel constructions that aren't quite parallel ("les larbins de l'ordre et les hannetons de l'espérance"), hyperbole ("la force putréfiante des ambiances crépusculaires"), oxymoron ("dans mes profondeurs à hauteur inverse du vingtième étage des maisons les plus insolents"), violent imagery ("sacré soleil vénérien"), and above all the chant-like rhythm created by the repetition of word and sound, as in "je nourrissais … je délaçais … j'entendais" or in "de l'autre côté du désastre, un fleuve de tourterelles et de trèfles."

There is really nothing comparable to this mode in American poetry. In the long catalogue poems of Allen Ginsberg and Imamu Baraka, we find similarly impassioned repetition, parallelism, hyperbole; again, in a sequence like Galway Kinnell's The Book of Nightmares, we meet imagery of perhaps equal violence and stringency. But Césaire's poetry is quite different from Ginsberg's on the one hand or Kinnell's on the other in its curious conjunction of an intense realism (in the course of the Notebook, the topography of Martinique, its climate, architecture, and inhabitants are graphically described) with a surrealism that seems so inevitable it may almost escape our attention.

Who is it, for instance, that the poet meets "Au bout du petit matin"—a cop or a "bedbug of a petty monk"? Or both? If the former, then the paradise lost he cannot attain is one of a primitive society that had not learned the need for law-enforcement. If the latter, the enemy is primarily Christianity. These are, of course, part and parcel of the same complex for Césaire, but the point I am trying to make is that his is a language so violently charged with meaning that each word falls on the ear (or hits the eye) with resounding force. On "the other side of disaster," we read, there is "a river of turtledoves and savanna clover" which the poet carries so deep within himself that it surpasses the height of the most insolent twenty-floor house. But what is the disaster that has occurred? It will take the whole length of the poem to find out. And in the course of the poem, the town, "plate-étalée" ("sprawled-flat") like Van Gogh's little town in The Starry Night, must explode:

Elle rampe sur les mains sans jamais aucune envie de vriller le ciel d'une stature de protestation. Les dos des maisons ont peur du ciel truffé de feu, leurs pieds des noyades du sol, elles ont opté de se poser superficielles entre les surprises et les perfidies. Et pourtant elle avance la ville. Même qu'elle paît tous les jours outre sa marée de corridors carrelés, de persiennes pudibondes, de cours gluantes, de peintures qui dégoulinent. Et de petits scandales étouffés, de petites hontes tues, de petites haines immenses pétrissent en bosses et creux les rues étroites où le ruisseau grimace longitudinalement pari l'étron …

It crawls on its hands without the slightest desire to drill the sky with a stature of protest. The backs of the houses are afraid of the sky truffled with fire, their feet of the drownings of the soil, they chose to perch shallowly between surprises and treacheries. And yet it advances, the town does. It even grazes every day further out into its tide of tiled corridors, prudish shutters, gluey courtyards, dripping paintwork. And petty hushed-up scandals, petty unvoiced guilts, petty immense hatreds knead the narrow streets into bumps and potholes where the waste-water grins longitudinally through turds …

What strikes me as especially remarkable here and in Césaire's surrealist lyrics in Les Armes Miraculeuses (The Miraculous Weapons) of 1946 is the total absence of sentimentality or self-pity. He can see himself as:

    —moi sur une route, enfant, mâchant une racine de canne à sucre
    —trainé homme sur une route sanglante une corde au cou
    —debout au milieu d'un cirque immense sur mon front noir une couronne de daturas voum rooh
 
    —me on a road, a child chewing sugar cane root
    —a dragged man on a bloodspattered road a rope around his neck
    —standing in the center of a huge circus, on my black forehead a crown of daturas voum rooh

without casting about for a scapegoat. For, as the "I" comes to realize in the course of the poem, "Nous vomissure de négrier" ("We the vomit of slave ships") must exorcise our own cowardice, fear, and hypocrisy before change can take place:

Et voici ceux qui ne se consolent point de n'être pas faits à la ressemblance de Dieu mais du diable, ceux qui considèrent que l'on est nègre comme commis de seconde classe: en attendant mieux et avec possibilité de monter plus haul; ceux qui battent la chamade devant soi-même … ceux qui disent à l'Europe: "Voyez, je sais comme vous faire des courbettes, comme vous présenter mes hommages, en somme, je ne suis pas différent de vous; ne faites pas attention à ma peau noire: c'est le soleil qui m'a brûlé."

And there are those who will never get over not being made in the likeness of God but of the devil, those who believe that being a nigger is like being a second-class clerk; waiting for a better deal and upward mobility; those who beat the drum of compromise in front of themselves, those who live in their own dungeon pit … those who say to Europe: "You see, I can bow and scrape, like you I pay my respects, in short, I am no different from you: pay no attention to my black skin: the sun did it."

Césaire, as the classical scholar Gregson Davis, himself a black Caribbean, argued in an essay of 1977, is notoriously difficult to translate. The use of arcane diction, technical vocabulary, Creole and African terms, homonyms, and neologisms, presents the translator with formidable problems, but, what is worse, Césaire's syntax seems to be, in Davis' words, "disordered and lubricous; and the lubricity, real or apparent, is partly a function of the total absence of punctuation." (This is less the case in Notebook than in the later work). It is often difficult to know whether a given adjectival modifier belongs to one noun or another; again, so Davis argues, Césaire's "specialized lyric vocabulary," especially his sequences of metaphors, cannot be tampered with without destroying the whole poetic structure. "Interpretation," he insists, "should take into account the total symbolic system of the lyric oeuvre."

Eshleman and Smith, who refer to Davis' cautionary statements in their own "Translators' Notes," have clearly taken his lessons to heart. They affirm their desire to preserve Césaire's odd syntax as fully as possible and to reproduce his verbal patterns. Indeed, so careful are they to be literal, that they embed certain of the West Indian or technical terms in the English translation, for example:

      Au bout du petit matin, le morne oublié, oublieux de sauter.
 
      At the end of the wee hours, the morne forgotten, forgetful of leaping.

where morne, so the Notes tell us, "is a term used throughout the French West Indies to designate certain altitudes of volcanic origin" and hence "justly applied to the majority of Martinican hills." Or again, we read:

      terre grande délire de la mentule de Dieu
 
      earth great delirium of God's mentula

mentule being "probably a gallicization of the Latin 'mentula' (penis) based on an Indo-European stem designating a stick agitated to produce fire."

I find this practice of reproducing the foreign word irritating, for it destroys the continuity as well as the fiction of the text, reminding us that the English version is only, so to speak, a reproduction of the original. Even more irritating is the often dogged attempt to reproduce the exact syntax of the original as when, in the extract about the exploding town cited above. "Et pourtant elle avance la ville" is translated as "And yet it advances, the town does." In English, this sounds silly: "And yet the town advances" or "And yet the town moves forward" would have been quite sufficient.

Even at its best, this can hardly be called an elegant translation. "Pas un bout de ce monde qui ne porte mon empreinte digitale," which an earlier translator, Emile Snyder, rendered as "not a bit of this earth not smudged by my fingerprint," becomes "not an inch of this world devoid of my fingerprint," thus erasing the force of the "empreinte digitale" which Césaire wishes to convey. Again, it is hard to understand why "Ce qui est à moi / c'est un homme seul emprisonné de / blanc" is translated as "What is mine / a lonely man imprisoned in / whiteness," for an "homme seul" need not be lonely and Césaire's understatement is surely intentional.

"What is desperately needed in an enterprise so important and far-reaching as a translation of Césaire's lyric verse," says Gregson Davis, "is an interpreter who has a profound knowledge of Caribbean history and culture, on the one hand, and European literary history, ancient and modern, on the other." Davis is himself such an interpreter and I understand he will soon publish his own translation of Césaire. In the meantime, we have Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith's brave attempt to come to terms with this difficult and brilliant poet. Smith's scholarship is impressive: the introduction, history of editions, translator's notes, and bibliography are very helpful. Eshleman, who won the National Book Award for his translation with José Rubia Barcia of César Vallejo (1978), seems less at ease with the surrealist complexities of Césaire than with the more direct emotive thrust of the Peruvian poet. But perhaps at this early stage of Césaire translation, it is ungrateful to ask for more than the California translators have given us. It is a genuine gift.