Like a misunderstood salvation and other poems / Aimé Césaire ; translated from the French and with an introduction by Annette Smith and Dominic Thomas.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Césaire, Aimé

Contributor:

Smith, Annette (Annette J.)

Thomas, Dominic Richard David.

Series:

AGM collection

Standardized Title:

Poems. 1994. English

Language:

English

French

Physical Description:

xxxiv, 70 pages ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Evanston, Ill. : Northwestern University Press, 2013.

Summary:

Annette Smith and Dominic Thomas's new translations of Aimé Césaire's Like a Misunderstood Salvation and Solar Throat Slashed (poems deleted) reintroduce a pivotal figure in twentieth-century French literature. This collection presents the early and last stages of the poet's course, encapsulating in one volume Césaire's entire literary career and creative evolution as perhaps the only French poet writing simultaneously at the crossroads of the avant-garde and classical movements. This volume's inclusion of previously deleted poems from Solar Throat Slashed is politically important; despite their initial exclusion from a French republication of Soleil Cou Coupé in 1961, these thirty-one poems are crucial to understanding Césaire's legacy. They remain of tremendous pertinence today as they provide helpful ways of thinking about and contextualizing discussions on race, identity, global identities, and the links between "black consciousness" and "social consciousness." Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction

Solar throat slashed (poems deleted)

Lynch 1

Devourer

Rain

Secret society

Night crossing

Transmutation

Dwelling 1

The sun's stab in the back of unsuspecting cities

While in the heat naked monks come down from the Himalayas

Indecent behavior

Laissez-passer

Solid

Femme and flame

Compliments of history

A few miles from the surface

Scalp

Apotheosis

Undoing and redoing the sun

To the serpent

Torture

Pennon

Refinement of a mummy

Idyll

Password

The shape of things

Preliminary question

Tattooing eyes

Forfeit

To the night

Antipodal dwelling

Fresh out of a metamorphosis

Like a misunderstood salvation

Obsidian stele for Alioune Diop

Passage

References

Supreme mask

The virtue of fireflies

Rumination

Time to speak

Course

Dyali

Rapacious space

Phantasms

Laughable

Craters

Conventicles

Islands speak

Ruminatings of calderas

Through

The sleeping woman rock, or Beautiful like the exasperation of the secession

Favor from the trade winds (prose for the sun)

For a fiftieth anniversary

Configurations.

Notes:

"Originally published in French as Aime Cesaire: La poesie in 1994, 2006 by Editions du Seuil."

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9780810128965

0810128969

OCLC:

813220941