Translating Culture: Reading the Paratexts to Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal, Essai de Littérature

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Ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d'auteur. L'utilisation des services d'Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d'utilisation que vous pouvez consulter à l'URI https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ Document téléchargé le 12 février 2017 03:08 Translating Culture: Reading the Paratexts to Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal1 Richard Watts From the moment of its first publication in book form in 1942 to its most recent edition, Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal has come wrapped in a great variety of paratextual skins. Whereas the 1942 edition is a slim, unassuming volume with a few illustrations and a brief preface, the paratextual apparatuses from two critical editions of the 1990s dwarf the text itself. The comparison of the mere volume of the Cahier at these two moments of publication begins to indicate just how the status of Césaire's text has changed over the last 50 years. However, the increasing popularity or even canonisation of the Cahier is not my concern here. Examining the Cahier's paratext at not just these two moments of publication but also at the many moments in between will allow me to confront a different problematic: How, over the years, have the different paratexts to the Cahier conditioned the reception of this now-canonical text? I will argue here that they have served — and continue, to some degree, to serve — as instruments of cultural translation. As Césaire's text radiated out to new publishing 1 A first version of this article was delivered on November 5, 1998 at the International Conference on Caribbean Literatures in Nassau, the Bahamas. I would like to thank those present whose comments helped shape the final version; in particular, Bernadette Cailler, Elisabeth Mudimbe-Boyi, and Richard Serrano. Unless otherwise noted in the bibliography, all translations are mine. 29 Francophone literature, especially those works written prior to the post/colonial period3, tend to present the text as culturally foreign, exotic, or different, but also as ultimately interpretable. Many of the prefaces - to cite perhaps the most important element of the paratext - to early works of Francophone colonised literature from the 1920s and 1930s contain a distinctly anthropological discourse in which a preface writer, most often from metropolitan France, recounts his travels in the colony and his contact with the "native" writer and his culture. By the time the Cahier is first published, a lot has changed. But even with texts by Césaire's contemporaries in the colonial universe, the paratext to the work of a perceived Other typically functions as an apparatus of cultural translation by evoking the work's (or its author's) difference while rendering that difference familiar or knowable. The Cahier d'un retour au pays natal and its paratexts are a particularly rich source for this type of analysis because of the text's many editions published in a number of countries and languages, and the apparent problems of cultural translatability (not to mention linguistic translatability) that the text poses. It is also a compelling object for this type of study since this itinerant text provides, in each of its publishing chronotopes, a view of the evolving ideas or epistemes of the Caribbean and of "Francophone Caribbean Literature" and the place of Césaire's poem within or outside of those categories. It is with a view to capturing these epistemological shifts that I will consider the different paratexts to the Cahier in chronological order. * * * The paratext to the first book version of the Cahier constitutes, perhaps surprisingly, one of its most successful cultural translations. It can be assumed from the elements that make up the paratext — illustrations by a Cuban painter and a preface by a French Surrealist with a background in Latin American aesthetics — that this is largely a function of the chronotope of its publication. In 1942, three years after the quiet first 31 borrow this particular version of the term from Chris Bongie who insists on the "epistemic complicity" (Bongie, 1998, p. 13) between the colonial and the postcolonia! by inserting a slash after the prefix ("post/colonial"). This idea of the epistemic complicity or continuity between these two periods is relevant to my work because many so-called Francophone texts will continue to be framed in a colonial (which is to say traditional ethnographic) manner well into the postcolonial period. 32 appearance of the Cahier in the Paris-based Surrealist journal Volontés*, the Cuban publisher Molina y Compania published Retorno al país natal, a translation into Spanish of the Cahier by Lydia Cabrera. This edition, destined for a local Hispanophone audience, situates the Cahier in the Caribbean while acknowledging in subtle ways the wealth of cultural influences that inform it. The most striking paratextual elements here are the sketches by the Cuban painter Wilfredo Lam that appear on the cover and throughout the book. The link between Lam and Césaire is not a gratuitous one. Not only were the two friends, they were also working on similar aesthetic and political projects in their respective domains. The appreciations of Lam (and, it should be noted, of Lydia Cabrera) in Césaire's wartime journal Tropiques (nos 6-7, Feb. 1943, pp. 61-62) only serve to confirm this allegiance. This connection is significant because the visual paratext, designed principally to catch the prospective reader's eye, proves often in the case of "colonized" literature to be a poor translation of the work to which it is attached. Lam's work, however, is a particularly potent vehicle for translating Césaire's poetry. Both make use, in their respective media, of the vocabulary and syntax of the European avant-garde of the 1920s and 1930s at the same time that they inflect this vocabulary to make it reflect Caribbean realities and to present what they consider a nascent Afro-Caribbean consciousness. The figures in Lam's drawings seem to draw strength from a communion with the natural forces of the Caribbean, imagery similar to the type that appears at various points in Césaire's epic poem. Both also infuse their works with references to the African cultural heritage that they were re-discovering at the time. For the Cuban and, more broadly, Latin American audience that this paratext addresses, Lam's drawings situate the Cahier precisely in the Caribbean, and create resonance with the afro-cubanismo and negrismo movements taking hold of the island in those years. Other elements of the paratext point to the emergence of a diasporic consciousness in the Caribbean. Even the name of the translator, Lydia Cabrera, on the cover of the book reinforces this particular situating of the text. Cabrera, the Cuban author and 4 Of this publishing event (or non-event, as was the case), Abiola Irele writes, "Césaire left Paris for Martinique shortly after the publication of the poem, which went unnoticed in the tense situation that prevailed in Paris on the eve of the Second World War..." (Irele in Césaire, 2000, p. xxviii). 33 ethnographer, had already done significant work on the place of Yoruba language and culture in Cuba. Conducted at a time when most Cuban intellectuals still refused to acknowledge Cuba's African heritage, Cabrera's pioneering research, like Lam's radically original drawings, helped to point the Caribbean's cultural compass at least partially away from Europe and toward Africa, all the while insisting on the Caribbean particularity of the mixture of these influences. At the time of publication, such a cultural congruence between several elements of the paratext and the text itself is indeed remarkable. But as the cover also indicates, this is in some sense a culturally-divided paratext, with, on the one hand, Lam's drawings translating the Cahier's Afro-Caribbeanness, and, on the other, a preface by the French Surrealist poet Benjamin Peret pulling the text in a different direction. For the cosmopolitan audience targeted by this edition, the name "Peret" undoubtedly signified French Surrealism. However, it also signified in the early 1940s a properly recontextualized Surrealism. Peret, André Breton, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and, incidentally, Wilfredo Lam, had all fled France in 1941 on the same ship, the Capitaine-Paul-Lemerle, and had all passed through Martinique on their way to their respective homelands or lands of exile: Breton and Lévi-Strauss to New York, Lam to Cuba, and Peret to Mexico5. Peret, along with the other Parisian intellectuals in exile, became known as an admirer of Caribbean and Latin American culture. While in Mexico, Peret began compiling some of the myths, legends, and popular narratives of the Americas that he would eventually publish in French upon his return to France some eight years later6. As a result of this literary anthropology, as well as earlier work by Peret on Brazil, the name "Peret" could also signify links to a pan-Caribbean or Latin American aesthetic practice. The one-page preface itself is a restrained piece by the standards of the period. These are, after all, the years of the totalising preface embodied by Jean-Paul Sartre's 50-page preface ("Orphée noir") to Leopold Sédar Senghor's Anthologie de la poésie nègre et 5 The most complete narration of the passage to the Antilles and the quarantine of the ship's passengers in Vichy-occupied Martinique appears in Claude Lévi- Strauss's Tristes tropiques (Lévi-Strauss, 1955, pp. 16-34). 6 See Anthologie des mythes, légendes et contes populaires d'Amérique, éd. Benjamin Peret. 34 war. Even prior to the war, Breton had spent much time in Mexico and therefore brought to the preface an understanding of the culture of the Caribbean basin. More importantly, though, his voyage of exile to New York in 1941 took him through Martinique. It is there that he met Césaire and first read the Cahier, an encounter he makes much of in his preface. Unlike Peret, though, Breton does not focus in his preface on the poem's Caribbeanness. For Breton, the Cahier's singularity is more the result of the poet's race than of his cultural/geographical situation: "(DJéfiant à lui seul une époque où Von croit assister à l'abdication de l'esprit, [...] le premier souffle nouveau, revivifiant, apte à redonner toute confiance est l'apport d'un Noir. Et c'est un Noir qui manie la langue française comme il n'est pas aujourd'hui un Blanc pour la manier" (Breton in Césaire, 1947 [1983], p. 80)10. This translation of Césaire's specificity that focuses on the poet's race can perhaps be faulted for being excessively vague (i.e., what does it mean to be "noir"?). Still, unlike many of the prefaces to works of Caribbean literature that precede it, Breton's preface does not reduce the Cahier to an imitation of a European style or its author to an acolyte of a European literary movement. Likewise, to insist on the poet's négritude in the preface is entirely compatible with a poem that not only insists on its négritude, but also coined the term. Although Peret and Breton define Césaire's difference in slightly different terms, they both translate the text by introducing the prospective reader to the poem or poet's cultural difference in a non-reductive fashion. In this way, the paratext to the 1942 edition and the two 1947 editions constitute partially successful translations. It will be more difficult to argue for the "accuracy" of the translation in the paratexts from the decades that followed, paratexts whose translational equivalences are so dynamic as to constitute complete cultural and geographical displacements of the Cahier. The last assertion in that quotation elicits this reaction from Mireille Rosello: "Breton's enthusiasm is marred by his paternalistic allusion to a Black's astonishing mastery of French..." (Rosello in Césaire, 1995, p. 33). The accusation of paternalism is perhaps misdirected here. Breton seems to be suggesting that Césaire's ability to "handle" or "use" the French language — which is different than Rosello's inference that "manier" means "to master" — exists not in spite of his being black, but because of it. Like Sartre, Breton sees Césaire's poem as a site of the renewal of the French language, a renewal not possible in creatively impoverished wartime and postwar metropolitan France. Breton's is still a debatable assertion, but not for the reason identified by Rosello. 37 * * * The paratexts to the Cahier from the 1940s underscore or at least suggest the importance of Africa and African culture in the poem, as well as the importance of the poem to Africa. However, Africa is not presented as the preponderant thematic element, and even less so as the cultural background of the poem. In the years immediately preceding the end of the colonial period, the paratext to the Cahier undergoes a transformation. Because Césaire was passionate about Africa and, more significantly, Africa was deemed throughout these years more culturally and geopolitically important than one small island in the Caribbean ("a bedsore on the sea," as Césaire calls it), the paratexts to subsequent editions downplayed or completely ignored the Caribbean content. As a result, the Cahier gets translated as an African text. The 1969 English-language edition published in New York by Penguin for a North American audience performs precisely this kind of displacement, although the book cover does so less than the rest of the paratext. Gracing the cover is Picasso's famous Tête de nègre, a painting that in this context renders the text's provenance unclear. Picasso's painting shows the profile of a black man, but his precise identity remains unclear and, in a certain way, irrecuperable. Tête de nègre makes the Cahier the product of an indeterminate context: the text could be African, but it could just as easily be Caribbean or even North American. This ambiguous black figure who stares into the distance with apparent determination stands as an ideal of independence, but one that is not specific to any particular context. The fact that Tête de nègre is a painting by Picasso does something to mitigate the image's irrecuperability. The painter, who had shown himself on many occasions to be sympathetic to the politics of black liberation, nonetheless cast a large shadow in the art world and his presence in the paratext was still capable at that time of implying the text's indebtedness to the European avant-garde. Nonetheless, the cultural translation occurring in the visual paratext to this edition of the Cahier is broad enough to allow the contexts with which Césaire is the most concerned to be suggested: Africa, the Americas, and Europe. As with Breton's preface, it is racial difference in the text that is translated by the cover. Whatever contextual ambiguity exists in the visual paratext to this edition is absent from the rest of the paratext. The promotional 38 copy on the back cover refers to the Cahier as a "revolutionary African text" (Césaire, 1969, back cover [italics mine]), but does not mention the Caribbean. The preface, written by the South African poet Mazisi Kunene, also situates the Cahier squarely in the context of African decolonization and cultural renewal. This way of situating the text for a North American audience constitutes the erasure of another, more significant, element in the text: the Caribbean. Although this 1969 edition repositions the Cahier more forcefully than many other editions from the same period, a similar gesture appears in a French edition from 1956. The text is described as having been written for an African audience, and as dealing principally with African themes: Sait-on que [...] ce chant d'avant-garde, une jeunesse à peine scolarisée parfois, mais ardente et affamée, en récite des passages entiers en Afrique Française? Sait-on la ferveur et l'espoir suscités par cet étrange chef d'œuvre parmi les élites locales en Afrique? [...] Comment s'explique ce succès? [...] [Ses lecteurs] admirent une virile et âpre descente aux enfers, expérience unique dans la culture africaine moderne. (Césaire, 1956, back cover) The same gesture appears in a 1971 bilingual edition of the Cahier published by Présence Africaine. The anonymous copy on the back cover reads as follows: "A literary milestone, Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal not long ago burst upon the world like an advent. This considerable poem, which first appeared in 1939, will always inspire those from Africa and elsewhere who are thirsting for mankind's better future and just victories" (Césaire, 1971, back cover [italics mine]). That the Caribbean is relegated to the status of an elsewhere in the dust-jacket copy to this edition and is absent from the paratexts to the 1956 and 1969 editions is significant. The large thematic part of the poem in which Césaire describes the abjection and possible redemption of the pays natal, Martinique, is elided and becomes, implicitly, a prelude to the Cahier's assertions of Africanness. Why this is the case is not unclear: In the years immediately following decolonization in Africa, there was an intense interest on the part of Europeans and North Americans in the renewal of the African continent. These are also the years of Malcolm X's black nationalism, an ideology that promoted a return to African values. A 1960s U.S. readership that followed "black literature" was more concerned with origins than with diaspora, and more interested in African "roots" than in Caribbean "rhizomes." Whereas the 1942 edition immediately establishes the Cahier as a text that stands at the crossroads of Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, the paratexts to the 39 However, we should not, as Clifford reminds us, neglect the partial successes that precede the inevitable moment of failure. The pairing of Wilfredo Lam's drawings with Césaire's text constitutes just such a success, creating and fostering Caribbean aesthetic and even political connections that are relevant to the text12. Breton's preface, a bit too quickly dismissed by Mireille Rosello, should also be considered among the partial successes, for it translates part of the text's specificity (négritude) without reducing it to that specificity. Examining the paratext diachronically is useful even in the cases where the paratextual material has, in some way or other, been superseded. (Breton's preface feels dated as a work of criticism of Césaire's poem because it is dated; it does not respond adequately to our present concerns regarding the text.) The paratext is compelling, rather, for the story it tells about how cultural gaps were crossed, if not bridged, at certain historical moments. Of course, the meaning of the text is largely a product of its signifying practices. Still, there is no experience of the text, of any text, that is unmediated. The text is inseparable from the text-object since the text is inevitably framed by paratextual material of some kind. The text is therefore always partially translated before it is read. Although this is true of all texts, the translation that occurs in the paratext of texts belonging to a minority discourse is always more intense, since those necessarily contain a higher quotient of "foreignness," and it is this foreignness that translations must resolve. Examining the uncharacteristically dense paratext to the many editions of the Cahier demonstrates how the impulse to frame this culturally different text changes over time and across cultures. It also shows how each new edition creates new versions — or new translations — of the poem, and how those translations respond to certain ideological imperatives. Sherry Simon writes that following the "cultural turn" in translation studies, we now tend to see "translation as a process of mediation which does not stand above ideology, but works through it" (Simon, 1996, p. 8). The same can be said of the translation effected by the paratext, which can become a lens for viewing the complex ideological struggles within which the text is situated, as well as the ideological appropriations to which it was subject. It is only in circulation that a 12 It should come as no surprise that other literary texts from the Caribbean have come wrapped in Lam's work, from the re-edition of Césaire's journal Tropiques (1978) to Daniel Maximin's L'Isolé Soleil (1981), a work that, not coincidentally, pays hommage to Césaire and his generation. 42 text assumes its significance, and the paratext is perhaps the most useful site for understanding how, for whom, and at what potential cost that significance was constructed. Tulane University References Editions of Aimé Césaire's Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (listed chronologically): (1942). Retorno al país natal. Pref. Benjamin Peret. Trans. Lydia Cabrera. Cover and illustrations by Wilfredo Lam. Havana, Cuba, Molina y Compañía. (1947). Cahier d'un retour au pays natal/Memorandum on my Martinique. Pref. André Breton. Trans, and pref. Ivan Goll and Emile Snyder. New York, Brentano. (1947). Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Pref. André Breton. Frontispiece by Wilfredo Lam. Paris, Bordas. (1956). Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Pref. Petar Guberina. Paris, Présence Africaine. (1968). Return to my Native Land. Pref. Mazisi Kunene. Trans. John Berger and Anna Bostock. Cover by Pablo Picasso. Harmondsworth, Penguin Books. (1969). Return to my Native Land. Pref. Mazisi Kunene. Trans. John Berger and Anna Bostock. Cover by Pablo Picasso. New York, Penguin Books. (1971). Cahier d'un retour au pays natal/Notebook of a Return to my Native Land. Paris, Présence Africaine. (1983). Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Afterword by André Breton. Frontispiece by Wilfredo Lam. Paris, Présence Africaine. (1994). Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Edited, with Introduction, Commentary, and Notes by Abiola Irele. Ibadan, Nigeria, New Horn Press. 43 (1995). Notebook of a Return to my Native Land, Pref. Mireille Rosello. Trans. Rosello with Annie Pritchard. Cover by Wilfredo Lam. Newcastle upon Tyne, Bloodaxe Books. (2000). Cahier d'un retour au pays natal. Edited, with Introduction, Commentary, and Notes by Abiola Irele. 2nd edition. Columbus, OH, Ohio State University Press. Other texts: (1948). Anthologie de la poésie nègre et malgache. Ed. Leopold Sédar Senghor. Pref. ("Orphée noir") Jean-Paul Sartre. Paris, Presses Universitaires de France. (1960). Anthologie des mythes, légendes et contes populaires d'Amérique. Ed. Benjamin Peret. Paris, Albin Michel. BONGIE, Chris (1998). Islands and Exiles: The Creole Identities of Post/Colonial Literature. Stanford, CA, Stanford UP. CÉSAIRE, Aimé, Éd. (1978). Tropiques : 1941-1945. Paris, Jean- Michel Place. CLIFFORD, James (1997). Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press. GENETTE, Gérard (1997). Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation. Trans. Jane E. Lewin. New York, Cambridge University Press. LÉVI-STRAUSS, Claude (1984). Tristes tropiques. Paris, Librairie Pion. LIONNET, Françoise (1995). Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity. Ithaca, Cornell University Press. MAXIMIN, Daniel (1981). L'isolé soleil. Paris, Seuil. MILLER, Christopher (1985). Blank Darkness: Africanist Discourse in French. Chicago, The University of Chicago Press. OYONO, Ferdinand (1990). Une vie de boy. Paris, Presses Pocket. 44