Earlier this year, I wrote a series of posts about foreign-language poets in English. The emphasis there was on the actual process of translation. In each case I presented a single canonical text in a series of different versions, and discussed the diverse emphases of the resulting poems.
I found it a very enjoyable project but, when it was over, I realised how much remained to be said about the subject: in particular, how to do justice to a few of the other fascinating poets I'd been forced to leave out by the exigencies of the exercise.
I've already put up a post about two important twentieth-century poets, Umberto Saba and Giuseppe Ungaretti, focussing (this time) on their respective politics. Saba, a homosexual Jew, was discriminated against and finally forced into hiding by the Fascist regime, as it grew ever closer to the Nazis in Germany.
The hyper-masculine Ungaretti, by contrast, welcomed Mussolini's march on Rome and was a vociferous supporter of Fascism throughout the 1920s. After living abroad in Brazil for much of the 1930s, he returned to Italy in 1942, and was given a hero's welcome by the authorities. These fascist sympathies resulted in his dismissal from the University of Rome at the end of the war, but he was reinstated shortly afterwards.
The question is, should such historical facts have an influence on our reading of these two poets? It would surely be hypocritical to claim that we can simply set them to one side. T. S. Eliot's reactionary religious conservatism may be as offensive to some as Ezra Pound's aggressive support of Fascism, but to pretend that we can read the works of either of these two major poets without bearing them in mind would be naive in the extreme.
I'm not proposing any kind of simplistic "four legs good, two legs bad" labels for the poets I'll be talking about. If, as Aristotle claimed, man is a political animal, we need to maintain a complex and nuanced view of politics to incorporate this fact usefully into our aesthetic discussions. Certainly my own politics have shifted considerably over the years, as I've seen more of life, and learned more from others.
I see it as something not to shy away from but rather to embrace.
Alexis Leger, who would later adopt the nom-de-plume Saint-John (or St.-John, or Saint John) Perse, was born in Pointe-à-Pitre, on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe, in 1887.
The Leger family owned two plantations, one of coffee (La Joséphine) and the other of sugar (Bois-Debout). Leger described his childhood on Guadeloupe as being as French "as only the colonials are French". Later on, Leger embellished his family origins by changing his surname to the more aristocratic sounding St. Léger and by claiming that his ancestors were an ancienne noblesse family who had settled in Guadeloupe in the 17th century.One gushing critic has claimed that:
Growing up surrounded by the luxurious fauna and flora of the West Indies, Alexis perhaps could not but develop an interest in nature ...Whether that's true or not, the Leger family chose to return to metropolitan France in 1899, the so-called "'year of all dangers' ... a period of racial tension on Guadeloupe, with both blacks and whites committing arson in the belief that French rule would soon be ending."
Aimé Césaire, the future French poet, essayist, and politician, was born in Basse-Pointe, Martinique, French Caribbean, in 1913. His father was a tax inspector, and his mother was a dressmaker.
Although ... he evoked his childhood as poverty-stricken and squalid, his family was part of the island's small, black middle class.His family moved to the capital of Martinique, Fort-de-France, in order for Césaire to attend the only secondary school on the island, Lycée Victor Schœlcher. "He was not happy there, and found the town's racial and class bigotry to be upsetting."
Césaire traveled to Paris to attend the Lycée Louis-le-Grand on an educational scholarship. There, ... he passed the entrance exam for the École Normale Supérieure in 1935 and created the literary review L'Étudiant noir ... with Léopold Sédar Senghor and Léon Damas. Manifestos by these three students in its third number (May–June 1935) initiated the Négritude movement later substantial in both pan-Africanist theory and the actual decolonization of the French Empire in Africa.
It is, to say the least, an interesting coincidence that two such different poets, with such different career trajectories, should have been born so close together, on virtually contiguous islands.
The Caribbean certainly has a rich literary history. Jean Rhys was born on Dominica, Derek Walcott on St. Lucia, V. S. Naipaul on Trinidad, Edward Brathwaite on Barbados, to name just a few of the more prominent names. In each case, race is a crucial factor in the nature of their writing. How could it not be?
As I work on this post, the internet and the more traditional media are seething with unrest over the case of British Sociology Professor Jason Arday, who was - depending on which view you choose to take on the matter - either the hapless victim of a digital lynching, or a mendacious plagiarist, promoted beyond his abilities by a publicity-hungry university.
The facts remain controversial, but it seems to be the case that the allegations of plagiarism against Arday were first chronicled in a 63-page report by Times Higher Education Supplement reporter Jack Grove in 2025. The specific complaints about his PhD thesis were evaluated by a panel at Liverpool John Moores University, which awarded the degree. They concluded:
that the similarities between Arday's thesis and an earlier PhD thesis by another academic were the result of "honest and reasonable error", not deliberate plagiarism, and were "well within the accepted range of compliance with the academic standards of the time".
This is where self-styled "race realist" Nathan Cofnas enters the story. Cofnas was at the time a postdoctoral researcher at Ghent University in Belgium, having been previously dismissed from his position as a a research associate at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, over a 2024 blog post in which he claimed that in a meritocratic system, black people:
would disappear from almost all high-profile positions outside of sports and entertainment ... [and] Harvard faculty would be recruited from the best of the best students, which means the number of black professors would approach zero per cent.Cofnas wrote in a July 2026 Substack post that he had run Arday's PhD thesis through plagiarism detection software and discovered that:
many passages are lifted with minimal editing, sometimes retaining copy-editing mistakes from the original source.Despite the earlier findings of the Liverpool misconduct panel, the case was now relitigated extensively in the press and online. Hundreds of articles appeared scrutinising every detail of Arday's life and achievements. He was denounced as a "liar and fantasist", and his memoir Great and Unfortunate Things was described alternately as "mawkish, self-aggrandising and hard to believe" and "painfully, mind-numbingly dull". The Telegraph reviewer, however, conceded that
The final impression, perhaps, isn't chiefly that of a serial fabulist who filled a professorship he was unqualified for, but of a profoundly lonely and psychologically troubled man who is unable to quench his thirst for respect and recognition.Perhaps the most telling point was made by Arday himself, quite early in the process:
He argued that if other academics' work was similarly scrutinised it would show similar errors, and that there was a racially motivated campaign to remove him from his Cambridge position:I hold myself accountable and other people should hold me accountable. We're talking about academia here. I didn't murder somebody. I think the cruelty that I've experienced ... is totally unacceptable.
It's worth stressing here that all of this was trial by media. The only actual formal investigative process Arday ever faced exonerated him. Since his death by suicide, attention has been called to the numerous lists which have been compiled over the years of Academics who've been convicted of sexual harassment, plagiarism, and neglect of their duties, and have either kept their jobs or been allowed to resign quietly. None of them appear to have faced the same public witch hunt as Professor Arday.
Alexis Léger first came to the attention of English-speaking readers when his book-length poem Anabase (1924) was published by Faber & Faber in a translation by T. S. Eliot. This is the only time Eliot did such a thing, and given that it's hard to exaggerate the sway he held over the world of poetry at the time, it certainly had quite an effect.
He said of Perse's poem in his introduction:
I believe that this is a piece of writing of the same importance as the later work of James Joyce, as valuable as Anna Livia Plurabelle.High praise indeed, to be welcome into the same Modernist pantheon as Joyce by Eliot himself! The poem itself begins as follows:
Chanson Il naissait un poulain sous les feuilles de bronze. Un homme mit des baies amères dans nos mains. Etranger. Qui passait. Et voici qu’il est bruit d’autres provinces à mon gré... « Je vous salue, ma fille, sous le plus grand des arbres de l’année. » * Car le soleil entre au Lion et l’Etranger a mis son doigt dans la bouche des morts. Etranger. Qui riait. Et nous parle d’une herbe. Ah ! tant de souffles aux provinces ! Qu’il est d’aisance dans nos voies ! que la trompette m’est délice, et la plume savante au scandale de l’aile !... « Mon âme, grande fille, vous aviez vos façons qui ne sont pas les nôtres. » * Il naquit un poulain sous les feuilles de bronze. Un homme mit ces baies amères dans nos mains. Etranger. Qui passait. Et voici d’un grand bruit dans un arbre de bronze. Bitume et roses, don du chant ! Tonnerre et flûtes dans les chambres ! Ah ! tant d’aisance dans nos voies, Ah ! tant d’histoires à l’année, et l’Etranger à ses façons par les chemins de toute la terre !... « Je vous salue, ma fille, sous la plus belle robe de l’année. » - St.-John Perse (1924)• A foal was born under the bronze leaves a man put bitter bay leaves in our hands a stranger passing by now pleasing rumours from distant provinces greetings daughter under the grandest tree of the year * The sun enters Leo the stranger thrusts his hand in the mouths of the dead a stranger laughing telling us of a herb so many winds cross the provinces how easy our ways how the trumpets ring pens peddle scandal under its wing daughter of my soul your ways were not ours * A foal was born under bronze leaves a man pressed bitter bay leaves in our hands a stranger passing by now the bronze tree resounds tar and roses the gift of song thunder and flutes in the rooms so easy our ways so many stories told throughout the year the stranger traversing the ways of the earth greetings daughter in your brightest dress of the year
- trans. JR (1-10/9/2026)
There's undoubtedly a sort of heraldic magnificence to Perse's lines. It's not hard to see why they appealed so much to T. S. Eliot: all those references to the Zodiac; to the distant provinces of the empire (which empire? Alexander's, perhaps - or Caesar's: perhaps any or all of them); to herb-lore (is the herb the stranger asks about the sacred moly, perhaps - the herb that Odysseus is given by Hermes to defend him from Circe's magic? Is the stranger Hermes? Or Odysseus himself?).
All that is very much the stock-in-trade of The Waste Land. Perse's stranger might have been taken straight from that poem, in fact:
Then there are all the seasonal references:Who is the third who walks always beside you? When I count, there are only you and I together But when I look ahead up the white road There is always another one walking beside you Gliding wrapt in a brown mantle, hooded I do not know whether a man or a woman - But who is that on the other side of you?
tant d’histoires à l’année,
et l’Etranger à ses façons par les chemins de toute la terre
Aimé Césaire, too, owes much of his worldwide fame to a single long poem. The story goes that arch-surrealist André Breton was in a grocer's shop one day, and happened to see a copy of the first, hastily printed, 1939 edition of Cahier d'un retour au pays natal [Notebook of a return to my native land] lying on the counter. He picked it up, and was immediately struck by its incandescent vigour. He ended up writing a preface to the 1943 reprint of the poem where he hailed the author as "Un grand poète noir" [a great black poet]:
Ce qui est fêté ici, c'est une des plus grandes réussites de la poésie de langue française de ce temps. [...] Le poème est une ascension vers la pleine conscience de la liberté.
What we are celebrating here is one of the greatest successes in contemporary French poetry ... The poem is an ascension to the full consciousness of freedom.
Cahier d'un retour au pays natal 1 Au bout du petit matin bourgeonnant d’anses frêles les Antilles qui ont faim, les Antilles grêlées de petite vérole, les Antilles dynamitées d’alcool, échouées dans la boue de cette baie, dans la poussière de cette ville sinistrement échouées. 2 Au bout du petit matin, l’extrême, trompeuse désolée eschare sur la blessure des eaux ; les martyrs qui ne témoignent pas ; les fleurs du sang qui se fanent et s’éparpillent dans le vent inutile comme des cris de perroquets babillards ; une vieille vie menteusement souriante, ses lèvres ouvertes d’angoisses désaffectées ; une vieille misère pourrissant sous le soleil, silencieusement ; un vieux silence crevant de pustules tièdes 3 l’affreuse inanité de notre raison d’être. 4 Au bout du petit matin, sur cette plus fragile épaisseur de terre que dépasse de façon humiliante son grandiose avenir – les volcans éclateront, l’eau nue emportera les taches mûres du soleil et il ne restera plus qu’un bouillonnement tiède picoré d’oiseaux marins – la plage des songes et l’insensé réveil. 5 Au bout du petit matin, cette ville plate – étalée, trébuchée de son bon sens, inerte, essouflée sous son fardeau géométrique de croix éternellement recommençante, indocile à son sort, muette, contrariée de toutes façons, incapable de croître selon le suc de cette terre, embarrassée, rognée, réduite, en rupture de faune et de flore. - Aimé Césaire (1939)• 1 in the wee hours budding with frail coves the hungry Antilles Antilles pockmarked with smallpox Antilles dynamited by alcohol stranded in the mud of this bay in the dust of this city malevolently stranded 2 in the wee hours the extreme deceptive desolate scab on the wound of the waters the martyrs who can’t bear witness the flowers of blood that wither and scatter in the wind useless like the prating of parrots an old life lying through smiles its lips open with anxieties disaffected an old misery rotting under the sun in silence old silences bursting with tepid pustules 3 the dreadful inanity of our reasons for being alive 4 in the wee hours on this most fragile weight of earth whose grandiose future humiliatingly overtops the volcanoes will erupt the naked water will carry away the ripe spots of the sun and all that will remain is a tepid bubbling pecked by seabirds the beach of dreams and inchoate awakening 5 in the wee hours these city wastes sprawling stumbling over their own common sense inert breathless under their geometric weight of crosses eternally recurrent defiant of their fate mute relentlessly thwarted incapable of growth through the sap of this land hampered clipped diminished devoid of fauna and flora
- trans. JR (2-11/9/2026)
You can see why it made such an immediate impression. The opening of Aimé Césaire's may be full of echoes - of Rimbaud's Une Saison en Enfer; of the dark wood in Dante's Divine Comedy; even, perhaps, of Perse's Anabasis - but this visonary awakening in the hellscape of a modern Caribbean city struck an entirely new note in French poetry.
Whether or not Perse's poem, published in 1924, was directly influenced by Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) is debatable. But both poets were certainly responding to the same sense of post-war malaise, the threat of a crumbling civilisation waiting, as C. P. Cavafy had put it some twenty years earlier, for the Barbarians.
Again, whether either Perse or Eliot had read (or taken to heart) Yeats's prophetic poem "The Second Coming" (1920), it certainly expressed same kind of feeling:
somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
Here, for example, is the new opening stanza of the first official Parisian edition of his great poem:
Au bout du petit matin ... Va-t’en, lui disais-je, gueule de flic, gueule de vache, va-t’en je déteste les larbins de l’ordre et les hannetons de l’espérance. Va-t’en mauvais gris-gris, punaise de moinillon. Puis je me tournais vers des paradis pour lui et les siens perdus, plus calme que la face d’une femme qui ment, et là, bercé par les effluves d’une pensée jamais lasse je nourrissais le vent, je délaçais les montres et j’entendais monter de l’autre côté du désastre, un fleuve de tourterelles et de trèfles de la savane que je porte toujours dans mes profondeurs à hauteur inverse du vingtième étage des maisons les plus insolentes et par précaution contre la force putréfiante des ambiances crépusculaires, arpentée nuit et jour d’un sacré soleil vénérien. - Aimé Césaire (1947)• feck off I told him flat-foot arse-licker feck off I hate grovelling toadstools obsequious cockroaches feck off bad juju bedlice of a monk then turned to paradises lost for him and his loved ones calmer than the face of a lying woman and there lulled by the effluvia of a nagging maggot I fed the wind untied the monsters and heard rising from the other side of the disaster the river of doves and savannah pollen which I still hold in my inverse depths as high as the twentieth floor of the most insolent houses as a charm against the putrefying force of twilight air patrolled night and day by a dose from the cursed sun
- trans. JR (2-10/9/2026)
But whichever version you read - the 1939 offprint, the 1947 first edition, or the radically revised 1956 text - the sheer verbal energy and hallucinatory power of his vision of Martinique remains paramount. It's a disenchanted snapshot of the backside of modern colonialism, rather than an Eliotic lament for the downfall of some ancient courtly order.
The viewpoint of a descendant of slaves is unlikely to coincide with that of the scions of their owners.
To continue this theme, it's interesting to compare the nostalgic vision of a West Indian childhood eulogised in Alexis Leger's first book of poems, Éloges (1911), with the rather more embattled cultural pantheon portrayed in Aimé Césaire's elegy for the older poet, "Voodoo Ceremony for Saint John Perse" (1976).
Éloges begins with an out-and-out paean to the joys of colonialism:
Éloges: Écrit sur la porte J'ai une peau couleur de tabac rouge ou de mulet, j'ai un chapeau en moelle de sureau couvert de toile blanche. Mon orgueil est que ma fille soit très-belle quand elle commande aux femmes noires; ma joie, quelle découvre un bras très-blanc parmi ses poules noires ; et qu'elle n'ait point honte de ma joue rude sous le poil, quand je rentre boueux. ⁂ Et d'abord je lui donne mon fouet, ma gourde et mon chapeau. En souriant elle m'acquitte de ma face ruisselante; et porte à son visage mes mains grasses d'avoir éprouvé l'amande de kako, la graine de café. ⁂ Et puis elle m'apporte un mouchoir de tête bruissant; et ma robe de laine; de l'eau pure pour rincer mes dents de silencieux : et l'eau de ma cuvette est là; et j'entends l'eau du bassin dans la case-à-eau. ⁂ Un homme est dur, sa fille est douce. Qu'elle se tienne toujours à son retour sur la plus haute marche de la maison blanche, et faisant grâce à son cheval de l'étreinte des genoux, il oubliera la fièvre qui tire toute la peau du visage en dedans. ⁂ J'aime encore mes chiens, l'appel de mon plus fin cheval, et voir au bout de l'allée droite mon chat sortir de la maison en compagnie de la guenon... toutes choses suffisantes pour n'envier pas les voiles des voiliers que j'aperçois à la hauteur du toit de tôle sur la mer comme un ciel. - St.-John Perse (1911)• My skin’s red as tobacco or a mule my dusty pith helmet’s white my daughter’s fair as she bosses around the black women I’m glad that she preens her white arms against the black hens and that she’s not ashamed to feel my rough cheeks under the stubble when I come home flecked in mud ⁂ first I give her my whip my flask and my hat she smiles in my sweaty face puts her face in my hands stained brown by cocoa and coffee beans then she wraps my head in a bandanna brings me my dressing gown water to rinse my teeth the water in the basin feels cool I can hear the water below us in the cistern ⁂ a man is hard his daughter soft she comes out to welcome him on the top step of our blank house the horse is glad to be free of the grip of his knees he forgets the pain that tightens the skin of his face ⁂ I love my dogs the neigh of my horse seeing at the end of the straight path my cat step out of the house beside the monkey ... plenty of things here to stop me longing for the winged ships I can glimpse from the tip of the tin roof on that sea blue like the sky
- trans. JR (2-11/9/2026)
At least some of that must have been intended satirically. This vision of the colonial idyll was surely a bit out-of-date already in those halcyon, pre-war days ... But though it may have been meant partly tongue-in-cheek, there's still a bedrock of pure evocation under it.
After all, such celebratory passages abound in the poems included in this, his first collection, many of them linked to the unfortunately not-so-pure joys of childhood:
Pour fêter une enfance: II Et les servantes de ma mère, grandes filles luisantes ... Et nos paupières fabuleuses ... O clartés! ô faveurs! Appelant toute chose, je récitai qu'elle était grande, appelant toute bête, qu'elle était belle et bonne. O mes plus grandes fleurs voraces, parmi la feuille rouge, à dévorer tous mes plus beaux insectes verts! Les bouquets au jardin sentaient le cimetière de famille. Et une très petite soeur était morte: j'avais eu, qui sent bon, son cercueil d'acajou entre les glaces de trois chambres. Et il ne fallait pas tuer l'oiseau-mouche d'un caillou ... Mais la terre se courbait dans nos jeux comme fait la servante, celle qui a droit à une chaise si l'on se tient dans la maison. ... Végétales ferveurs, ô clartés ô faveurs ! ... Et puis ces mouches, cette sorte de mouches, vers le dernier étage du jardin, qui étaient comme si la lumière eut chanté! ... Je me souviens du sel, je me souviens du sel que la nourrice jaune dut essuyer à l'angle de mes yeux. Le sorcier noir sentenciait à l'office: «Le monde est comme une pirogue, qui, tournant et tournant, ne sait plus si le vent voulait rire ou pleurer ...» Et aussitôt mes yeux tâchaient à peindre un monde balancé entre des eaux brillantes, connaissaient le mât lisse des fûts, la hune sous les feuilles, et les guis et les vergues, les haubans de liane, où trop longues, les fleurs s’achevaient en des cris de perruches. - St.-John Perse (1911)• And my mother's maids tall lustrous girls our eyelids open wide O lights O gifts reaching for everything around me I testified that it was great naming each creature that it was beautiful and good chief among them the voracious flowers hidden in the red leaves devouring the most beautiful of my green insects but the bouquets in the garden smelled of the family graveyard a very little sister had died I felt her fragrant mahogany coffin poised between the mirrors of three rooms nor should you kill the hummingbird with a pebble the earth bent over our games as the maid does the one who’s allowed to sit down when you’re in the house green excess O lights O gifts and then those flies that kind of fly in the dizzy heights of the garden which felt as if the light had sung I remember the salt I remember that salt scurf the yellow nurse had to wipe from the corners of my eyes the black magician prophesied the world is like a canoe it spins around no longer knows if the wind wants to laugh or cry and at once my eyes could see a world poised between bright planes of water I felt the smooth heft of the barrels the crow's nest under the leaves the spars and yards the shrouds of vines where the flowers run out at last in the calls of the parakeets
- trans. JR (2-9/9/2026)
•
You can certainly understand, reading this, why Perse's work had such a great effect when it first appeared in print. The patterns of his free verse owed a lot of Rimbaud and the Symbolists, but his subject-matter was so fresh and new. Those other poets - Baudelaire, Mallarmé - had journeyed far in their imaginations, but Perse had actually been there. He had only to open the eyes of his French readers on the world he'd lived in as a child to astonish them with fresh visions of paradise.
The parts that stick out for us - those "luisantes" [lustrous] maids, the "nourrice jaune" [yellow nurse] who had the job of picking out his eye-gunge, the one special servant who had the right to sit down in the house - would hardly even have been noticeable then. This was still, after all, a feudal world - where every middle-class family had their own set of servants if they wanted to be considered respectable.
He might even be said to have put his best foot forward in this early work of his. Much still lay in the future - the dazzling diplomatic career in the world's capitals; the resolute stance against fascism and the Vichy regime; eventually, the Nobel Prize - but for pure lyric exuberance it's hard to get past these early poems, obscurely troubling though they may be for us.
This sense of being in two minds about him is perhaps best expressed in the rather equivocal elegy for him composed by his fellow Antillean Aimé Césaire:
Cérémonie Vaudou pour Saint-John Perse ... celui qui balise l’aire d’atterissage des colibris celui qui plante en terre une hampe d’asclépias de Curaçao pour fournir le gîte aux plus grands monarques du monde qui sont en noblesse d’exil et papillons de pasage celui pour qui les burseras de la sierra suant sang et eau et plus de sang que d’eau et pelés n’en finissent pas de se tordre les bras grotesques dans leur parade de damnés celui qui contemple chaque jour la première leerte génétique qu’il est superflu de nommer jusqu’à parfait rougeoiement avec à recueillir le surplus de forces hors du vide historique le chercheur de sources perdues le demèleur de laves cordées celui qui calcule l’étiage de la colère dans les terres de labour et de mainbour celui quid u sang reencontré la roue du temps et du contretemps mille fois plus gémissante que norias sur l’Oronte celui qui remplace l’asphodèle des prairies infernales par – sacrale - la belle coiffure afro de l’haemanthus -Angela Davies de ces lieux- riche de toutes les épingles de nos sangs hérissés (le vit-il le vit-il l’Etranger Plus rouge pourtant que le sang de Tammouz et nos faces décebales le vit-il le vit-il l’Etranger?) phlégréennes oiseaux profonds tourterelles de l’ombre et du grief et que l’arc s’embrase et que l’un à l’autre océan les magmas fastueux en volcans se répondent pour de toutes gueules de tous fumants sabords honorer en route pour le grand large l’ultime Conquistador en son dernier voyage - Aimé Césaire (1976)• he who marks out the hummingbird landing strip who plants a stalk of Curaçao milkweed in the earth guarding the world's most gaudy monarchs nobility in exile errant butterflies he for whom the aromatic tree resin of the Sierra sweating blood and water more blood than water never ceases to writhe its grotesque stump in a blind parade of the damned he who meditates day by day on that first genetic letter superfluous to name till history stains it red with the excess force excreted by the void the seeker of lost springs the disentangler of ropy lava he who reckons the low point of rage in the ploughed lands and measures the wheel of time and anti-time in domains a thousand times more harsh than the man-trodden waterwheels of the Orontes he who replaces the asphodel of the infernal meadows with the sacred consecrated Afro of the haemanthus Angela Davis of the underworld rich with the pricks of our inflected blood did he see it did he see the Stranger redder than Tammuz’ blood and our Dacian decebalic faces did he see it did he see the Stranger? Phlegraean lava fields knee-deep in birds doves of shadow and grief that the bow ignites and from one sea to the other the mater magma in volcanoes answers to honour each mouth each smoking pothole on the way to the open ocean the ultimate Conquistador on his last voyage
- trans. JR (2-10/9/2026)
Two marvellous poets, two impressive careers: the first one of them ended in a Nobel Prize and a specially designed Pléiade volume designed to preserve the poet's own choice of texts, letters, and accompanying materials: a truly authorised edition of his works to be enshrined among the other leading lights of French literature.
The other one ended with an impressive-looking hardback in the CNRS [Centre national de la recherche scientifique] series, edited by an American scholar a few years after the author's death. It was a wonderful memorial, certainly, but not yet the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade.
There were some rumours back in 2007 regarding a Pléiade volume (or volumes) devoted to the founders of Négritude (Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor, and Léon-Gontran Damas), but they don't seem to have come to anything. If you search for black authors in the Pléiade, the only one you'll be directed to - at present - is Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870).
It's not that any of this is exactly surprising. The new Aimé Césaire edition is very fine, and has already revolutionised the study of his texts. Nor is the Nobel Prize of nearly as much significance in the eyes of posterity as those who award it presumably imagine it to be: the list of the writers who didn't get it (Chekhov, Conrad, Ibsen, Proust, Tolstoy) is rather more impressive than the list of those who did.
It's just that it's hard to deny that the rewards came more easily to Alexis Leger than they did to his younger compatriot. He was, after all, "one of us" (in Conrad's phrase) - a member of the club, in a way that none of his black contemporaries could ever hope to be.
Like Jason Arday, Aimé Césaire never expected a free pass, or even the benefit of the doubt. Both of these poets may have struggled, but Césaire was held back, continues to be held back, by the colour of his skin. It's hard to accept that that's still the case, but the Arday case has revealed some uncomfortable truths in that respect.
Putting them side by side like this, as I've done in this post, is all very well, but in life it's unlikely they ever moved in the same circles. So if you're tempted to write off any of Césaire's poetry as surrealist automatic writing, take a closer look - and see if you can see through the camouflage his meaning is hiding behind:
A L'heure ou dans la Chaleur les Moines Nus Descendent de L'himalaya Très fort pendant les moustiques montés des volutes chargées à mitraille des maremmes joli cœur de la brutalité à la patte moricaude des bouges de sangliers Très fort pendant les grands fleuves qui à la vermine débranchent leurs cuisses très immondes lèvres bleues giclant un rire cru de vagin Très fort pendant la face molle des pollens s'écrasant dans la conspiration du vent et les cheminées qui fument sous le tunnel des épaules des fauves en escarboucles d'yeux plus tendres que leur alentour de graminées Très fort monstre contre monstre le tien dont le corps est une statue de suc de bois rouge dont le crachat est un pissat de fofa le mien dont la sueur est un jet de bile de caïman que je les sorte enfin comme une nuit pluvieuse de cris d'alouates de ma poitrine si tendre de fausse oronge - Aimé Césaire (1946)• very strong mosquitoes rising from the swirls loaded with shrapnel from the marsh smart heart of brutality in the swarthy paw of the wild boars' den very strong great rivers disconnect their soiled thighs from vermin blue lips disgorge a raw laugh of vagina very strong the soft mask of pollen crushing conspiracies of the wind the smoking chimneys under the tunnel of the wild beasts’ shoulders carbuncled eyes sweeter than the surrounding grass very strong monster against monster yours whose body is a statue of redwood sap whose spittle is a spurt of piss mine whose sweat is a jet of caiman bile till I whip them out at last like a rainy night of lark’s cries from my breast so soft in their mock orange
- trans. JR (2-10/9/2026)
Books I own are marked in bold:
-
Poetry:
- Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (1939)
- Cahier d’un retour au pays natal / Return to My Native Land. Préface de André Breton. 1943. Paris: Présence Africaine, 1973.
- Return to My Native Land. 1956. Trans. John Berger & Anna Bostock. Introduction by Mazisi Kunene. Penguin Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.
- Les armes miraculeuses (1946)
- Soleil cou-coupé (1948)
- Corps perdu (1950)
- Ferrements (1960)
- Cadastre (1961)
- Moi, laminaire (1982)
- Comme un malentendu de salut ... (1994)
- ... Et les chiens se taisaient (1943)
- La Tragédie du roi Christophe (1963)
- The Tragedy of King Christophe (1969)
- Une saison au Congo (1966)
- A Season in the Congo (1968)
- Une Tempête: adaptation pour un théâtre nègre (1969)
- A Tempest (1986)
- "Poésie et connaissance", Tropiques 12 (1945): 158–70.
- Discours sur le colonialisme (1955)
-
Discourse on Colonialism. Trans. Joan Pinkham. Introduction by Robin Kelley. Rev. ed. (2003)
- Lettre à Maurice Thorez (1956)
- Toussaint Louverture: La Révolution française et le problème colonial (1960)
- The Collected Poetry. Trans. Clayton Eshleman & Annette Smith. Prints by Wilfredo Lam (1983)
- Poésie, Théâtre, Essais et Discours : édition critique. Ed. Albert James Arnold. CNRS Editions (2014)
- The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire: Bilingual Edition (2017)
- The Complete Poetry of Aimé Césaire: Bilingual Edition. Trans. A. James Arnold & Clayton Eshleman. 2017. Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2024.
Theatre:
Prose:
Works:
Books I own are marked in bold:
-
Poetry:
- Éloges (1911)
- Trans. Eugène Jolas (1928)
- Included in: Collected Poems. Trans. Louise Varèse (1944, rev. 1956)
- Trans. Eleanor Clark & Roger Little (1965)
- Trans. King Bosley (1970)
- Poème pour Valery Larbaud (1922)
- Included in: Collected Poems. Trans. Richard Howard (1969)
- Anabase (1924)
- Anabasis: A Poem. Trans. T. S. Eliot. 1931. Rev. ed. 1959. Faber Paperback. London: Faber, 1985.
- Included in: Collected Poems. Trans. T. S. Eliot (1931, rev. 1959)
- Trans. Roger Little (1970)
- Exil (1942)
- Included in: Collected Poems. Trans. Denis Devlin (1949)
- Pluies (1943)
- Included in: Collected Poems. Trans. Denis Devlin (1944)
- Poème à l'étrangère (1943)
- Included in: Collected Poems. Trans. Denis Devlin (1946)
- Neiges (1944)
- Included in: Collected Poems. Trans. Denis Devlin (1945)
- Trans. Walter J. Strachan (1947)
- Vents (1946)
- Included in: Collected Poems. Trans. Hugh Chisholm (1953)
- Amers [Seamarks] (1957)
- Included in: Collected Poems. Trans. Wallace Fowlie (1958)
- Trans. Samuel E. Morison (1964)
- Chronique (1960)
- Included in: Collected Poems. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald (1961)
- Poésie (1961)
- Included in: Collected Poems. Trans. W. H. Auden (1961)
- Oiseaux (1963)
- Trans. Wallace Fowlie (1963)
- Included in: Collected Poems. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald (1966)
- Trans. Roger Little (1967)
- Trans. Derek Mahon (2002)
- Pour Dante (1965)
- Included in: Collected Poems. Trans. Robert Fitzgerald (1966)
- Chant pour un équinoxe [Four Poems] (1968-74))
- Sécheresse (1974))
- Chant pour un équinoxe (1971)
- Nocturne (1972))
- Chanté par celle qui fut là (1968)
- Included in: Collected Poems. Trans. Richard Howard (1977)
- Collected Poems. Bollingen Series (1971)
- Collected Poems: Complete Edition. Trans. W. H. Auden, Hugh Chisholm, Denis Devlin, T. S. Eliot, Robert Fitzgerald, Wallace Fowlie, Richard Howard & Louise Varèse. 1971. Rev. ed. 1983. Bollingen Series LXXXVII. Princeton Legacy Library. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016.
- Œuvres complètes (1972), Bibliothèque de la Pléiade (1972)
- Oeuvres complètes. 1972. Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 240. 1982. Paris: Gallimard, 2004.
- St.-John Perse: Letters. Bollingen Series (1979)
- St.-John Perse: Letters. 1972. Trans. & ed. Arthur J. Knodel. Bollingen Series LXXXVII: 2. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1979.
Works:
Letters:
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