Journal of a Homecoming / Cahier d'un retour au pays natal - Softcover

Césaire, Aimé

Softcover

ISBN 10: 082236896X ISBN 13: 9780822368960

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 2017

Synopsis

Originally published in 1939, Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal is a landmark of modern French poetry and a founding text of the Négritude movement. This bilingual edition features a new authoritative translation, revised introduction, and extensive commentary, making it a magisterial edition of Césaire’s surrealist masterpiece.

About this title

Review:

“Césaire’s classic text, witnessing the performative contradiction of the postcolonial voice, has found its appropriate translator, a Caribbean classicist, as was the poet himself. The translator’s note is a rare teaching aid. This bilingual edition, introduced and annotated by a uniquely masterful critic from Africa, F. Abiola Irele, who did more to establish the Césaire canon than any other critic, brings Homecoming home. An invaluable book for student, teacher, scholar, indeed for the global citizen.” (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak)

“Nothing less than the greatest lyrical monument of our time.” (André Breton)

“Brilliant, lively, and exact, N. Gregson Davis’s translation swoops and soars through all the ambiguities, obscurities, and revelations that make Césaire’s poem a great landmark of Francophone literature. This is the definitive edition for English readers.” (Christopher L. Miller, author of The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade)

“This new translation’s directness immediately compels the reader. It is raw and poetic, and cuts to the heart of the matter. It makes me appreciate anew Césaire’s genius, rendered as it is here in his seductive language.” (Françoise Lionnet, author of The Known and the Uncertain: Creole Cosmopolitics of the Indian Ocean)

About the Author:

Aimé Césaire (1913–2008) was a Martinican poet, critic, essayist, playwright, and statesman; a founder of the Négritude movement; and one of the most influential Francophone Caribbean intellectuals of the twentieth century.

N. Gregson Davis is Andrew W. Mellon Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities at Duke University.

F. Abiola Irele (1936–2017) was Associate of the Hutchins Center at Harvard University and had previously taught at the University of Ibadan, Ohio State University, Harvard University, and Kwara State University.

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 082236896X
• ISBN 13: 9780822368960
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 328