Criterio de validación de la propuesta

This chapter will now focus on the potential of paratextual exegesis, when read cross-culturally and translationally, to deconstruct parochial readings of the Cahier and,

383 _{Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, p. 138.}

384 _{See Catherine David’s ’El monte y el mundo’ about Lam’s work, in which she argues the following:}

‘Wifredo Lam was well aware that in Cuba there was no jungle but the manigua, a dense and thorny scrub. And the figures that stand at the fringes of his dark woodland are not inhabitants of the manigua – a botanical and geographical term – they live rather in the monte, the symbolic space an ‘chronotope’ that embodies the historic memory of the Cimarrones (Maroons), the Black slaves who escaped the plantations for the bush, the eternal home of the spirits and cradle of revolt.’ Catherine David, ‘El monte y el mundo’, The EY Exhibition: Wifredo Lam, pp. 15–21 (p. 20).

385 _{See <http://coleccionreyes-veray.com/artwork/910883_Gotay_Consuelo_538a.html> [accessed 9 May}

more generally, to re-evaluate ethnographic approaches to glossaries and endnotes. Amidst the various translations of the Cahier under study, only a few include actual geographical representations of the Caribbean. The 1969 Penguin bilingual edition of the poem places a map of Martinique on the left-hand side of its title page, mentioning that it was ‘redrawn by kind permission of the French embassy, New York’. The major points of interest of the island (main roads, cities and rivers, as well as its airport) are indicated on the map which, as its source confirms, offers a rather factual, if not geostrategic account of Martinique. At first glance, the same could be said about the maps that Rosello inserts in her introduction to the Bloodaxe edition, as they show topographical variations that indicate geological relief and, for example, or stress the geopolitical positioning of

Guadeloupe, Martinique, La Réunion or Corsica toward mainland France.386 _{However, as}

Rosello observes, her strategic placing of the three maps of Martinique both in relation (or opposition) to France and to the Caribbean seeks to deconstruct the reader’s partial representations of the island (and thereby of Caribbean realities) and to address issues of identification and belonging that continue to run deep in the region.387 _{By contrast, Irele’s}

insertion of two maps, one of Guadeloupe and Martinique grouped together as ‘The French West Indies’ and of the Caribbean region, where the Caribbean rim interestingly ‘re’appears in the picture, shows a broader geographical context in connection to the poem.388 _{When read comparatively these maps generate new cartographies for the}

reception of the Cahier that go beyond territorial approaches to the text. Glossary entries, when studied comparatively, further contribute to the drawing of new contours for the poem that go beyond simple ethnographic observations of Caribbean localities. In his poem, Césaire mentions the morne in what is commonly accepted as a description of Martinique:

Au bout du petit matin, le morne oublié, oublieux de sauter. Au bout du petit matin, le morne au sabot inquiet et docile – son sang impaludé met en déroute le soleil de ses pouls surchauffés.

386 _{Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, pp. 14–15.}

387 _{‘All three representations can be read as the symptom of the lack or excess of identity with which West}

Indians are still grappling as a result of the historical background that is specific to them.’ Ibid., p. 16.

Au bout du petit matin, l’incendie contenu du morne, comme un sanglot que l’on a bâillonné au bord de son éclatement sanguinaire, en quête d’une ignition qui se dérobe et se méconnaît.389

Some of the English and Spanish translations have retained morne, at times personifying the term by capitalizing it390_{, at others leaving it unchanged}391_{. Others have}

opted for a domestication of the noun into ‘hill’392_{, ‘morro’}393 _{or ‘Heights’}394 _{which erases}

Caribbean specificities. In the versions where the French was kept, only the English translations provide the reader with a note explaining morne; out of those three variations, Rosello and Pritchard’s version is the only one that does not flag the entry in the text by placing an asterisk next to the term. The Eshleman/Smith and Arnold/Eshleman translations compile a series of ‘notes’ at the end of their respective volumes, whereas Rosello/Pritchard prefer the term ‘glossary’, which suggests a slightly different approach to the paratext. The material added in the two American editions provides extrinsic references to the translation that correspond to what Genette called ‘crutches’ in reference to foot/endnotes. Meanwhile, the glossary entries of the Bloodaxe volume invite a reading of paratext as an interlinear apparatus that offers possible glosses to some expressions encountered in the poem, yet remains discreet as the entries are not signposted as adjuncts to the text. Similarly, whilst liminal matter opening the Cahier is generally referred to as ‘preface’ or ‘introduction’, both 1969 editions of Poesías (Casa de las Américas) and

Cuaderno de un retorno al país natal (Era) present Depestre’s ‘Un Orfeo del Caribe’ and Bartra’s untitled introduction as ‘prólogos’ and not as ‘prefacios’, as is the case with Péret’s tribute to Césaire in the Sinsonte volume. Although the terms may be read interchangeably, Depestre and Bartra’s introductions could be said to dialogue with the poem, not least because they both insist on the poet’s voice and the orality of the

389 _{Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1983), pp. 10–11.}

390 _{This is the case in Cabrera/Arencibia and Lihn’s versions. See Césaire, Retorno al país natal, p. 17 and}

Césaire, Poesías, pp. 5–6.

391 _{See Eshleman and Smith’s translation, p. 37, Rosello and Pritchard’s version, p. 35 or again Arnold and}

Eshleman’s Original Notebook, pp. 5 and 7.

392 _{See the 1971 bilingual edition of the poem published by Présence Africaine, p. 36.}

393 _{Césaire, Para leer a Aimé Césaire, p. 35 and Césaire, Cuaderno de un retorno al país natal, p. 29.} 394 _{Césaire, Return to My Native Land, p. 40.}

Cahier395_{, thus foregrounding the notion of discourse underlying the term ‘prólogo’.}

Similarly, Rosello/Pritchard’s glossary entry for morne (re)situates the noun in a cross- cultural dialogue:

morne: In the West Indies, the word ‘mornes’ designates hills of volcanic origins. Metropolitan French people would not be familiar with the term. Symbolically, the ‘morne’ is linked with marooning because runaway slaves usually tried to hide there. Sometimes groups of maroons managed to establish more permanent settlements. In Caribbean literature, a paradigm exists opposing the plain, cane fields, submissiveness and the ‘morne’, marooning, revolt and the woods.396

Here morne is identified not only as a topographic reality of the West Indies, it is also recognized as a potent symbolic site of resistance. In addition, the Francophone reader is presented as not being necessarily familiar with the term, which indicates that a gloss may equally be valid for a native speaker of French who might feel estranged in his/her own language.397 _{Conversely, the note added to the Eshleman/Smith translation}

focuses solely on topological, almost anatomical characteristics of the morne: the term morne, “used throughout the French West Indies to designate certain altitudes of volcanic origin, is justly applied to the majority of Martinican hills, and unjustly sometimes even to its mightiest elevation — Mont Pelée. Mornes usually have beautiful and curious forms: they are more often pyramidal or conoid up to a certain height, but have rounded or truncated summits. Green with the richest vegetation, they rise from valleys and coasts with remarkable abruptness.” (Two Years, pp. 254– 55.) In Césaire’s time, they were often the hillocks on the outskirts of Martinican towns on which slum areas were located.398

395 _{Bartra speaks of Césaire’s chant or ‘canto […] de fraternindades’ (Césaire, Cuaderno de un retorno al país}

natal, p. 20).

396 _{Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, p. 144.}

397 _{Rosello provides a rich reflection in connection to this point in her introduction: ‘This text estranges both}

metropolitan and Martinican readers. And it is a remarkably ironic reversal to put metropolitan French readers in a position of incompetence in front of a text which supposedly alienates the colonised. This poem subtly makes the case that linguistic ‘incompetence’ is a relative notion indistinguishable from the cultural.’ Ibid., p. 56.

If the above information helps relocate the text within an identifiable Caribbean setting, it nonetheless omits to add the symbolic dimension of marronnage in its definition. The note provided to the reader in The Original 1939 Notebook adds yet another layer of explanation:

[10] morne: Lafcadio Hearn, in Two Years…, defined the term as “used through the French West Indies to designate certain altitudes (usually with beautiful and curious forms) of volcanic origin…” Césaire connects this evocative term both with the poverty of the island and with the apocalyptic explosion that may one day bring it to an end.399

Here, as in the aforementioned quote, a reference is made to Lafcadio Hearn’s

Two Years in the French West Indies, which is referenced in the works cited following the notes, and presents an account of his time in Martinique, among other Caribbean islands. The reference recalls paratextual practices often encountered in travel writing, which consist in presenting and explaining to the receiving audience what may be of interest and yet unknown to them about a specific, presumably unknown location. In this example, the direct quote from Hearn adds a non-scientific, personal remark on morne, ‘(usually with beautiful and curious forms)’, which manifests the relativity of notions such as norm and beauty. The endnote also incorporates an element of exegesis absent from the previous entries, suggesting an intention on the part of the author that may well be contested. Yet, when read translationally, that is, as Rosello has argued, when ‘comparing translations [as] another way of keeping frictions alive and of identifying crucial issues or areas of marginality’400_{, the glossaries and (end)notes provided by}

generations of scholars and translators invite a cross-cultural reading of the Cahier that not only constantly relocates the content of the poem, but also dislocates any form of fixed meaning attached to it. Once again, as translational genetic studies have started to show, the original is not an a-temporal textual entity that should ultimately be opposed to a time-bound translation, doomed to expire.401 _{The Cahier is a case in point, as the poem}

399 _{Césaire, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, p. 61.} 400 _{See note 62.}

401 _{See Elena Basile’s article on Annie Brossard’s Un désert mauve on that point: ‘Le fait de montrer qu’un}

texte publié n’est qu’un point d’arrivée instable dans la vie d’une œuvre (peut-être même l’effet de compromis éditoriaux non visibles au public) ne peut que produire une perception plus démocratique et dynamique de

continues, in fact, to be subject to a number of contentions and (re)contextualisations. Its retranslations, when approached not as a series of individual texts that rewrite former versions, could be viewed as a non-reductive, organic mode of appreciating literature that ultimately helps erudite and lay readers alike, each at their own level, to further engage with Césaire’s cry for decolonisation.

canons littéraires hérités, de leurs hiérarchies et des modalités dont la circulation dans l’espace et dans le temps des textes est toujours caractérisée par des transformations qui ne peuvent ni ne doivent être ramenées toujours et seulement à l’autorité d’un texte d’origine. Texte qui est lui-même mobile, fuyant. Assumer de creuser en profondeur la force inédite de ces conséquences épistémologiques est sans doute une tâche qui peut contribuer à une conception renouvelée du rôle de la traduction au travers de la génétique textuelle.’ Elena Basile, ‘Traduction comme témoignage: quelle fidélité ? Quelques considérations sur la traduction italienne du Désert mauve, de Nicole Brossard, in Chiara Montini, Traduire: Genèse du choix, C. Montini and M.-H. Paret Passos eds. (Paris: Editions des archives contemporaines, 2016), pp. 13–22 (p. 22).

5. Caribbean self-translations: relocating thresholds of (self) legitimation and