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Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Wesleyan Poetry)
by Aime Cesaire

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Wesleyan Poetry) Cover

Synopses & Reviews

Publisher Comments:

Cesaire's masterpiece that reaches the powerful and overlooked aspects of black culture.

Synopsis:

Aime Cesaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. The long poem was the beginning of Cesaire's quest for negritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. With its emphasis on unusual juxtapositions of object and metaphor, manipulation of language into puns and neologisms, and rhythm, Cesaire considered his style a beneficial madness that could break into the forbidden and reach the powerful and overlooked aspects of black culture.

Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith achieve a laudable adaptation of Cesaire's work to English by clarifying double meanings, stretching syntax, and finding equivalent English puns, all while remaining remarkably true to the French text. Their treatment of the poetry is marked with imagination, vigor, and accuracy that will clarify difficulties for those already familiar with French, and make the work accessible to those who are not. Andre Breton's introduction, A Great Black Poet, situates the text and provides a moving tribute to Cesaire.

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is recommended for readers in comparative literature, post-colonial literature, African American studies, poetry, modernism, and French.

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Average customer rating based on 2 comments:
Andrew Daily, April 20, 2008 (view all comments by Andrew Daily)
Aimé Césaire died on Thursday, at the age of 94. Discussions are ongoing about transferring his remains to the Pantheon in Paris - France' s highest honor to her poets, statesmen and heroes (others buried there include Victor Hugo, Voltaire, Rousseau, Zola, Jaurès, Schoelcher). This book will remain his lasting testament, a long prose poem, simultaneously enigmatic and topical, that more than any other captured the vicissitudes of being both French and black, of existing at that liminal space between Europe and the America. This poem overflows with imagery, coined words, long lines and unique meters, thunderous ideas: the whole of life, of Martinique, of France, of the great dilemmas of the 20th century are in here. André Breton thought it might be the greatest poem of the 20th century. I have no doubts. A thousand years from now, when our civilization fades to a distant memory, Césaire, alongside Picasso and Schoenberg, will, I believe, be remembered as capturing the true predicament of our 20th century lives.
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ishe, August 29, 2006 (view all comments by ishe)
Aime Cesaire is a threller in the hands of all the blacks
which left no stone unturned in the quest to dig dipper
the black cultural oasis.i realy enjoyed the recipe and piece is so a traper to catch our dignity,our culture away from the lions mouths.Cesaire i really enjoy your superb brew.
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Product Details

ISBN:
9780819564528
Translator:
Eshleman, Clayton
Translator:
Smith, Annette Gail
Translator:
Smith, Annette Gail
Author:
Cesaire, Aime
Author:
Eshleman, Clayton
Publisher:
Wesleyan University Press
Location:
Middletown, Conn.
Subject:
Caribbean & Latin American
Subject:
Poetry
Subject:
Continental european
Subject:
Translations into english
Subject:
Martinique
Subject:
Poety
Series:
Wesleyan Poetry
Series Volume:
v. 4
Publication Date:
August 2001
Binding:
Paperback
Language:
English
Pages:
66
Dimensions:
8.32x5.40x.37 in. .28 lbs.
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