The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire

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The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire Page 52

by Césaire, Aimé; Eshleman, Clayton; Arnold, A. James


  à crever

  pour toute aire

  l’épaisse prunelle du crime

  contraband

  you barely restrain a god who is forever escaping

  your smoke, my famine, your feast

  Freedom

  contrebande

  vous tenez mal un dieu et qui toujours s’échappe

  ta fumée, ma famine, ta fête

  Liberté

  A Blank to Fill on the Travel Pass of Pollen

  Blanc à remplir sur la carte voyageuse du pollen

  Were there in the desert

  but one drop of water dreaming very quietly,

  in the desert were there

  but one flying seed dreaming very loudly,

  it would be enough,

  rust of weapons, cracks in stones, refuse of gloom

  desert, desert, I endure your challenge

  a blank to fill on the travel pass of pollen

  N’y eût-il dans le désert

  qu’une seule goutte d’eau qui rêve tout bas,

  dans le désert n’y eût-il

  qu’une graine volante qui rêve tout haut,

  c’est assez,

  rouillure des armes, fissure des pierres, vrac des ténèbres

  désert, désert, j’endure ton défi

  blanc à remplir sur la carte voyageuse du pollen.

  A Little Song for Crossing a Big River

  Petite chanson pour traverser une grande rivière

  after the Yoruba

  d’après le Yoruba

  I saw myself crossing a river.

  For crossing you river, of the river here is

  the King, Oh! of the sun here is the King!

  There, in that land, of lofty palm trees I saw

  some, collapsing with fruit, right to the humus bending

  their sumptuous strength, beneath the burden, slain.

  Je me vis franchissant un fleuve.

  À te franchir fleuve, de la rivière voici

  le Roi, Oh ! du soleil voici le Roi !

  Là, dans ce pays-là, de grands palmiers je vis

  qui, effondrés de fruits, jusqu’à l’humus courbaient

  leur fastueuse force, sous le fardeau, tuée.

  In Truth. . .

  En vérité…

  the stone crumbling itself into clods

  the desert sifting itself into wheat

  the day spelling itself into birds

  the convict the slave the pariah

  the stature harmoniously fulfilled

  the night fecundated the end of hunger

  la pierre qui s’émiette en mottes

  le désert qui se blute en blé

  le jour qui s’épelle en oiseaux

  le forçat l’esclave le paria

  la stature épanouie harmonique

  la nuit fécondée la fin de la faim

  of spit in the face

  and this history I walk around in better than during the day

  du crachat sur la face

  et cette histoire parmi laquelle je marche mieux que durant le jour

  the night on fire the night unbound the dream coerced

  the fire that from the water restores to us

  the outrageous horizon of course

  a child will half-open the door. . .

  la nuit en feu la nuit déliée le songe forcé

  le feu qui de l’eau nous redonne

  l’horizon outrageux bien sûr

  un enfant entr’ouvrira la porte…

  i, laminaria. . .

  poems

  moi, laminaire…

  poèmes

  The collection i, laminaria. . . resulted from two sets of contingencies: the death of Wifredo Lam, who collaborated with Césaire on the series of engravings entitled Annonciation that Giorgio Upiglio published in Milan in 1982 (CDP); and the intervention of Daniel Maximin, who proposed collecting Césaire’s work of the previous twenty years as a poetic testament. After trying out several versions of the title “Gradient,” Césaire abandoned it in favor of moi, laminaire. . ., which Maximin glossed as “the assimilation of the poet and the man he was to the laminarian alga” (MFV, 150). Several ms. versions of the fifty-three numbered poems point to an organization different from the one finally adopted. (In our notes on the poems, we have included in square brackets after each title the number found on the set of thirteen manuscripts and typescripts in the Kesteloot collection of the Bibliothèque Littéraire Jacques Doucet.) According to Maximin, on reading the first proofs, Césaire “applied himself to meticulously changing a line or a word here and there. Once all the poems were well arranged by number, he finally decided that it would, however, be preferable to assign a title to each one” (ibid.). Thus, the poems’ titles did not precede, but followed, the organization of the collection. Likewise, the systematic use of lower-case fonts in the titles and the text of most poems was a belated decision, as the earlier versions show.1 Taken together, these choices testify to a scaling back of the poet’s persona as Césaire prepared what he intended in 1982 to be his final poetic statement. With respect to the heroic vision of negritude we find in Solar Throat Slashed, Césaire expressed his disillusionment in “mangrove”: “it is not always a good idea to lose oneself / in gnoseological contemplation / at the most fruitful hollow of genealogical trees.”

  When Miguel Angel Asturias disappeared is both an individual poem and a division of the collection, placed between the fifty-three numbered poems and the Wifredo Lam division. Césaire first memorialized the Guatemalan poet-diplomat (1908–74) in Senghor’s magazine Éthiopiques (January 1976). It is therefore safe to place the date of composition between 1974 and late 1975, although no draft of the poem has been found; it was included in “Noria” in 1976.

  Wifredo Lam is the last of the three internal divisions of i, laminaria. . . . It draws together works from several sources: the poem “Wifredo Lam” was published in “Noria” in 1976; seven poems written to “illustrate” as many engravings in Lam’s limited-edition portfolio Annonciation (1982); an epigraphic prose that suggests Lam’s godmother initiated him into santería; and a “conversation” that fills in that relationship as Césaire imagined it.

  * * *

  1. The presence of some interior punctuation followed by capitalization testifies to the belatedness of the decision to use lower case letters more or less systematically.

  i, laminaria. . .

  moi, laminaire…

  Non-time imposes on time the tyranny of its spatiality: in every life there is a north and a south, and the orient and the occident. At the extreme limit or, at the least, at the crossroads, as one’s eyes fly over the seasons, there is the unequal struggle of life and death, of fervor and lucidity, albeit one of despair and collapse, the strength as well to face tomorrow. So goes every life. So goes this book, between sun and shadow, between mountain and mangrove, between dawn and dusk, stumbling and binary.

  Le non-temps impose au temps la tyrannie de sa spatialité : dans toute vie il y a un nord et un sud, et l’orient et l’occident. Au plus extrême, ou, pour le moins, au carrefour, c’est au fil des saisons survolées, l’inégale lutte de la vie et de la mort, de la ferveur et de la lucidité, fût-ce celle du désespoir et de la retombée, la force aussi toujours de regarder demain. Ainsi va toute vie. Ainsi va ce livre, entre soleil et ombre, entre montagne et mangrove, entre chien et loup, claudiquant et binaire.

  Time also to settle the score with several fantasies and a few phantoms.

  Le temps aussi de régler leur compte à quelques fantasmes et à quelques fantômes.

  1

  lagoonal calendar

  calendrier lagunaire

  i inhabit a sacred wound

  i inhabit imaginary ancestors

  i inhabit an obscure will

  i inhabit a long silence

  i inhabit an irremediable thirst

  j’habite une blessure sacrée

  j’habite des ancêtres imaginaires

  j’hab
ite un vouloir obscur

  j’habite un long silence

  j’habite une soif irrémediable

  i inhabit a thousand-year voyage

  i inhabit a three-hundred-year war

  i inhabit a secularized cult

  between bulb and bulbil i inhabit the untapped space

  i inhabit not a flow of basalt

  j’habite un voyage de mille ans

  j’habite une guerre de trois cents ans

  j’habite un culte désaffecté

  entre bulbe et caïeu j’habite l’espace inexploité

  j’habite du basalte non une coulée

  but the tidal wave of the lava

  that runs back up the gulch at full speed

  and burns all the mosques

  i do the best i can with this avatar

  of an absurdly botched version of paradise

  mais de la lave le mascaret

  qui remonte la valleuse à toute allure

  et brûle toutes les mosquées

  je m’accommode de mon mieux de cet avatar

  d’une version du paradis absurdement ratée

  — it is much worse than a hell —

  i inhabit from time to time one of my sores

  each minute i change apartments

  and all peace frightens me

  – c’est bien pire qu’un enfer –

  j’habite de temps en temps une de mes plaies

  chaque minute je change d’appartement

  et toute paix m’effraie

  fiery whirlwind

  ascidium like no other for dust

  of wayward worlds

  a volcano having spat out my freshwater entrails

  i remain with my loaves of words and my secret minerals

  tourbillon de feu

  ascidie comme nulle autre pour poussières

  de mondes égarés

  ayant craché volcan mes entrailles d’eau vive

  je reste avec mes pains de mots et mes minerais secrets

  i inhabit therefore a vast thought

  but most often i prefer to confine myself

  to the littlest of my ideas

  or again i inhabit a magic formula

  only its opening words

  j’habite donc une vaste pensée

  mais le plus souvent je préfère me confiner

  dans la plus petite de mes idées

  ou bien j’habite une formule magique

  les seuls premiers mots

  all the rest being forgotten

  i inhabit the ice block

  i inhabit the debacle

  i inhabit the surface of a great disaster

  i inhabit most often the driest udder

  tout le reste étant oublié

  j’habite l’embâcle

  j’habite la débâcle

  j’habite le pan d’un grand désastre

  j’habite le plus souvent je pis le plus sec

  of the skinniest piton—the she-wolf of these clouds—

  i inhabit the halo of the cactaceae

  i inhabit a flock of goats pulling on the teat

  of the most desolate argan tree

  truth to tell i no longer know my precise address

  bathyal or abyssal

  i inhabit the octopus hole

  i fight with an octopus over an octopus hole

  du piton le plus efflanqué – la louve de ces nuages –

  j’habite l’auréole des cactacées

  j’habite un troupeau de chèvres tirant sur la tétine

  de l’arganier le plus désolé

  à vrai dire je ne sais plus mon adresse exacte

  bathyale et abyssale

  j’habite le trou des poulpes

  je me bats avec un poulpe pour un trou de poulpe

  brother drop it

  wrack rubbish

  hooking myself on like devil’s guts

  or uncoiling like a porana

  it’s all the same

  and whether the wave rolls

  or the sun suctions

  or the wind flogs

  sculpture in the round of my nothingness

  frère n’insistez pas

  vrac de varech

  m’accrochant en cuscute

  ou me déployant en porana

  c’est tout un

  et que le flot roule

  et que ventouse le soleil

  et que flagelle le vent

  ronde bosse de mon néant

  the atmospheric pressure or rather the historic

  immeasurably increases my pains

  even as it renders sumptuous certain of my words

  la pression atmosphérique ou plutôt l’historique

  agrandit démesurément mes maux

  même si elle rend somptueux certains de mes mots

  2

  annunciations

  annonciades

  the good news shall have been brought to me through the throng of yellow and red stars in bloom for the first time by a flight of drunken fillies

  la bonne nouvelle m’aura été portée à travers la cohue d’astres jaunes et rouges en fleurs pour la première fois par une volée de pouliches ivres

  they tell me that the stick insects have been converted to foliage and accept to organize themselves as autonomous forests

  that white smoke rises from the council of grackles to announce that in the darkest zones of the heavens skylights have been lit

  elles me disent que les phasmes se sont convertis en feuillage et acceptent de se constituer en forêts autonomes

  qu’une fumée blanche monte du concile des quiscales pour annoncer que dans les zones les plus sombres du ciel des lucarnes se sont allumées

  that the current has been connected between the superfine sun and the collaret of salamanders keeping watch over tunnels

  that rust fell like hail liberating a whole unforeseen of butterflies

  que le courant a été établi depuis le surfin du soleil jusqu’à la collerette des salamandres montant la garde aux tunnels

  que la rouille est tombée en grêle libérant tout un imprévu de papillons

  that manatees covered with precious stones

  climb back up the banks

  that the entire ceremony in short has been punctuated by the solemn firing of the volcanoes installing on their own authority lakes in their craters

  growings my mad surge

  leafings my just dwelling

  que les lamantins couverts de pierreries

  remontent les berges

  que toute la cérémonie enfin a été ponctuée par le tir solennel des volcans installant de plein droit des lacs dans leur cratère

  poussants mon fol élan

  feuillants ma juste demeure

  roots my survival

  a drop of blood rises from the depths

  by itself tilts the landscape

  and at the summit of the world

  fascinates

  an irreducible memory

  racines ma survie

  une goutte de sang monte du fond

  seule incline le paysage

  et au faîte du monde

  fascine

  une mémoire irréductible

  3

  epacts. . .

  épactes…

  the hill with a limp gesture scattered dust

  over the confines of bitter mangroves.

  Immediately the quicksanding: i could hear it clacking

  its beak and settling more silently

  into the scandal of its mandibles.

  la colline d’un geste mou saupoudrait

  les confins des mangroves amères.

  Aussitôt l’enlisement : je l’entendais claquer

  du bec et reposer plus silencieusement

  dans le scandale de ses mandibules.

  A complicity installed its slime in a remorse

  of leeches and roots.

  Too quickly did they malign dragons: from time to time

  one emerges from the muck,

>   shaking its wings sprinkling its surroundings and hardly

  Une complicité installait sa bave dans un remords

  de sangsues et de racines.

  On a tôt fait de médire des dragons : de temps en temps

  l’un d’eux sort de la gadoue,

  secouant ses ailes arrosant les entours et le temps

  had it dispersed barques and hookers than it retreats

  to the open sea in a dream of monsoons.

  If unbeknownst to myself i walk choking on childhoods

  let it be clear to all that calculating the epacts

  i’ve always refused the pact with this lagoonal calendar

  de disperser barques et hourques se retire

  au large dans un songe de moussons.

  Si de moi-même insu je marche suffocant d’enfances

  qu’il soit clair pour tous que calculant les épactes

  j’ai toujours refusé le pacte de ce calendrier lagunaire

  4

  Léon G. Damas somber fire always. . . (in memoriam)

  Léon G. Damas feu sombre toujours… (in memoriam)

  promises that burst into tiny rockets

 

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