As has been shown repeatedly, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal is not a stable text, as its numerous (re)editions in French alone attest to. Yet, when undertaking the task of translating Césaire’s poem, translator and publisher traditionally have to opt for one original text from which an ensuing version comes out in yet another language. In the case of the Cahier, such a choice generally entails ideological framing on the part of the translator (and, often, of the publisher), who decide to situate their version within a certain tradition or school of thought. Most of the (re)translations under study have therefore at least indicated which ‘set’ version of the poem they chose to work from. In the appendix to their Notebook, more specifically in a section that they devote to ‘Comments on the Translations’, Arnold and Eshleman (re)emphasise their decision to use the 1939 text for their bilingual edition, whilst offering to the reader a chance to delve into a history of the translations of the Cahier across time, as well as space:
322 Édouard Glissant, Traité du Tout-Monde (Paris: Gallimard, 1997), p. 36.
323 See in particular the oxymoronic last verse, ‘c’est là que je veux pêcher maintenant la langue maléfique de
la nuit en son immobile verrition’. Irele’s analysis of the line, although it acknowledges the contradictions present in ‘immobile verrition’ is more optimistic: ‘The import of Césaire’s image comes to this: the universal pulse becomes incarnated in the poet, whose turbulent progress through history leads to an encounter with the cosmic realm, his agitated existence, which has been the subject of the poem, thus comes to hold the promise of fulfilment in a higher mode of experience, of an integration into the Absolute.’ Césaire, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, p. 150.
The first English translation of Césaire’s poem, Memorandum on My Martinique, by Abel and Goll, has never been reprinted. Émile Snyder used it as the starting point for his translation, which was published as Return to My Native Land in a bilingual edition published by Présence Africaine in Paris (1971) and long out of print. The Snyder translation has the peculiarity of not corresponding perfectly to the post-1956 French text on the facing page since Snyder worked from an earlier draft. In the United Kingdom there have been two translations, the first as Return to My Native Land by Berger and Bostock for Penguin (1969); the introduction by Masiki Kunene oriented the translation sharply toward Africa. Until publication of the Eshleman-Smith translation in 1983, the Notebook was read quite consistently through an Africanist political lens. In 1995 Bloodaxe Books published a bilingual edition with a translation by Annie Pritchard and Mireille Rosello. Rosello’s introduction sets Césaire’s poem in a postcolonial perspective.324
Although this extract focuses solely on English translations of the poem, Arnold and Eshleman also provide information on German, Spanish, Italian and Dutch versions of the Cahier, in an attempt to show that Césaire’s work is available to most Caribbean readers (at least in theory, assuming that the text circulates unimpeded from its publishing centre(s) to peripheral readers based in the Caribbean).325 The passage therefore also
highlights the vagaries of the publishing industry and hints at the practical need for retranslations beyond matters of exegesis, as translations can disappear over time, especially when the original print run is low and copyright is not secured. The additional mention of concomitant, if not competing English versions of the poem, published on each side of the Atlantic, also reinforces the idea that the text acquires dual lives (hence, another form of ‘di-genèse’) depending on its place of birth. Be that as it may, paratextual material proves to be of high value when it comes to (re)assessing the multiple genealogies of the Cahier. It can help legitimize a poetics of translation based on ‘digenèse’, as Rosello’s introductory remarks suggest: ‘Poetic father, ideological father,
324 Césaire, The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, pp. 59–60.
325 The translators emphasize the importance of the Dutch translation of the poem: ‘In 1985 the Dutch publisher
In de Knipscheer, which has specialized in titles from the Netherlands Antilles, published Simon Simonse’s translation in Haarlem under the title Logboek van een Terugkeer naar Mijn Geboorteland. This Dutch translation made Césaire’s poem available in the fourth major European language of the Caribbean region.’
political father, Césaire could not escape the loaded family metaphor if he wanted to: history is trying to reduce him to one mythic original moment’.326 In fact, her ensuing
‘Translator’s Note’ lays emphasis on the importance of reading the Cahier in an archipelagic, comparative way that allows (and even privileges) the co-existence of translations that, each in their own terms, offers a constantly renewed genesis for the text:
Comparing translations is another way of keeping frictions alive and of identifying crucial issues or areas of marginality in the
Notebook. One potential problem is the translation of old- fashioned epithets used to refer to Black people. […] Some of the issues raised by John Berger and Anna Bostock’s Penguin translation, by Emile Snyder’s Présence Africaine bilingual edition, and by Clayton Eshleman’s and Annette Smith’s
excellent 1983 Césaire: The Collected Poetry are mentioned in
the following glossary.327
Perhaps, the edition which best exemplifies how translation contributes to recreating the inherent ‘digenèse’ of the poem is the hybrid Spanish version published by Fundación Sinsonte where Arencibia’s version is superimposed onto Cabrera’s. The opening page of the volume is a case in point:
Al morir el alba…
Lárgate, le dije, jeta de policía, cara de vaca, lárgate, odio a los lacayos del orden, y a los abejones de la esperanza. Lárgate malévolo « gris-gris », chinche de monaguillo. Después me volví hacia los paraísos perdidos para él y sus pariguales, más sereno que el rostro de una mujer que miente, y allá, medico por los efluvios de un pensamiento inagotado, alimentaba el viento, desataba los monstruos, y escuchaba subir del otro lado del desastre, un río de tórtolos y tréboles de la sabana que siempre llevo dentro a la altura invertida del vigésimo piso de las más insolentes casas y por precaución contra la fuerza putrefactora de los ambientes crepusculares que recorre noche y día un sagrado sol venéreo.
Al morir el alba, de frágiles ensenadas retoñando, las Antillas hambrientas, las Antillas perladas de viruelas, las Antillas
326 Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, p. 9. 327Ibid., p. 139.
dinamitadas de alcohol, varadas en el fango de esta bahía, siniestramente fracasadas en el polvo de esta ciudad. […]328
The successive layers of the two French variations taken into account for the Spanish translation(s) are easily distinguishable for the reader, thanks to the use of different text colours (Arencibia’s version appearing in orange). As already mentioned, Arencibia’s echo of Cabrera’s leitmotiv ‘al morir el alba’ suggests a sense of filiation between the two translations, rather than an attempt to do away with the pre-existing version. This hybrid edition also adds a touch of unpredictability for the reader (informed, it should be granted, of the meaning of the dual color code thanks to a note placed before the actual translation(s)) who discovers in the space of one volume what had heretofore traditionally led to separate publications. In that regard, the Sinsonte edition could be said to perform the sense of ‘digenèse’ that Glissant presents in his Traité du Tout-Monde, as it visually translates a creolised rendering of Césaire’s poem, or more explicitly stages its own ‘creolization’:
La créolisation est la mise en contact de plusieurs cultures ou au moins de plusieurs éléments de cultures distinctes, dans un endroit du monde, avec pour résultante une donnée nouvelle, totalement imprévisible par rapport à la somme ou à la simple synthèse de ces éléments.329
In her ‘Translator’s Note’, Rosello insists, too, on the unpredictable nature of the
Cahier, which has led her to pursue a poetics of écart when dealing with the task of translating the poem.330 As those examples attest, (re)translating Césaire’s masterpiece
involves uncovering the layers of ‘digenèse’ present in the original(s), a task that further manifests itself in the transposition of the poet’s voice.