The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire

The definitive edition of the complete work of a master Caribbean poet The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire gathers all of Cesaire's celebrated verse into one bilingual edition. The French portion is comprised of newly established first editions of Césaire's poetic ouvre made available in French in 2014 under the title Poésie, Théâtre, Essais et Discours, edited by A. J. Arnold and an international team of specialists. To prepare the English translations, the translators started afresh from this French edition. Included here are translations of first editions of the poet's early work, prior to political interventions in the texts after 1955, revealing a new understanding of Cesaire's aesthetic and political trajectory. A truly comprehensive picture of Cesaire's poetry and poetics is made possible thanks to a thorough set of notes covering variants, historical and cultural references, and recurring figures and structures, a scholarly introduction and a glossary. This book provides a new cornerstone for readers and scholars in 20th century poetry, African diasporic literature, and postcolonial studies.

"[A] voluminous work of nearly 1000 pages which should bring joy to the lovers and researchers of poetry alike."--Philippe Triay, francetvinfo, La 1ère

"The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire is a fundamental work for readers of twentieth century poetry, and those especially interested in the relationships that define a poet's response to his fraught and bloody time."--Alan Graubard, Pacific Rim Review of Books

"Césaire's poetry offers a model of artistic and political opposition that equips people with more than stress and anxiety....it deepens shallow notions of identity and suggests that a subjectivity informed by powerlessness can be useful for understanding, and overturning, power."--David B. Hobbs, The Nation

"Césaire, like Mallarmé and Whitman before him, took his poetic lines on long walks, employing all the elements at his disposal--linguistically an thematically - to craft a new language that could express his Blackness, or rather more specifically, his Africanness, his Caribbeanness."--André Naffis-Sahely, Poetry London

"The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire promises to jump start a reassessment of Césaire's importance as a twentieth-century poet. It is the only bilingual edition in any language to date."--Pluton Magazine

"This bilingual edition offers three inestimable gifts: Césaire's poetry in its original, unrevised form, rich details on the contexts of publication, and new translations into English that account for both. A treasure!"--Richard Watts, author of Packaging Post/Coloniality: The Manufacture of Literary Identity in the Francophone World

"The scholarship and talent of A. J. Arnold and Clayton Eshleman have once again firmly placed Aimé Césaire on the map of world literature and introduced us to new readings of a master poet.""--Maryse Condé, writer and professor emeritus, Columbia University

"This unobtrusively scholarly bilingual edition serves Césaire and his readers supremely well. Its forensic approach exposes the diachronic layering of Césaire's poetics, most notably the sedimentary traces of tensions and torsions between the poetic and political imperatives."--Mary Gallagher, professor of French and Francophone Studies, University College Dublin

AIMÉ CÉSAIRE (1913--2008) was best known as the co-creator of the concept of négritude. CLAYTON ESHLEMAN (1935--2021) was the foremost American translator of Aimé Césaire. He is the author of The Grindstone of Rapport / A Clayton Eshleman Reader and translator of The Complete Poetry of César Vallejo. A. JAMES ARNOLD (Staunton, VA) is an emeritus professor of French at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Modernism and Negritude: The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire.

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