New Day Jazz

Justin Desmangles

 Aimé Césaire, pictured at right, (June 26, 1913 – April 17, 2008)

Returning to New Day Jazz this afternoon, on the 5 o'clock hour, Professor A. James Arnold, discussing his most recent translation, in collaboration with Clayton Eshleman, of Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land.)

 

Aimé Césaire’s masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire’s quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire’s work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric—material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.


The first bilingual edition of this radically original work


AIMÉ CÉSAIRE (1913–2008) was best known as the cocreator of the concept of négritude. CLAYTON ESHLEMAN is a professor emeritus at Eastern Michigan University and the foremost American translator of Aimé Césaire. He is the author of The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader and translator of The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo. A. JAMES ARNOLD is an emeritus professor of French at the University of Virginia. He is the lead editor of Césaire’s complete literary works in French (in progress) and author of Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire.

Genre

Blues & Classical & Experimental & Jazz & Poetry & Literature

Missed the Show?

MP3 320kbps, broadband