Poetry
Two
translated by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman.


A Note On The Two Aimé Césaire Poems
Aimé Césaire published Soleil cou coupé (Solar Throat Slashed) with K éditeur in Paris in 1948. The collection contained 72 poems. Over the following decade, as he became more and more politically focused he apparently came to distrust the dense animistic, erotic and blasphemous richness of this collection and in the late 1950s eliminated 31 poems, and edited (either lightly or severely) another 29, leaving only 12 poems from the original edition untouched. To the edited version of the book, he added the 10 poems that make up the short collection Corps perdu (Lost Body), and now entitled Cadastre this new collection was published in 1961. For years Cadastre has represented Soleil cou coupé. When Annette Smith and I published Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry (University of California Press, 1983), we included a translation of Cadastre. A little over a year ago, A. James Arnold and I decided to translate the unexpurgated Soleil cou coupé and we have now completed our translation which will be published in 2011 by Wesleyan University Press. A.James Arnold is the author of Modernism & Negritude / The Poetry and Poetics of Aimé Césaire (Harvard University Press, 1981). Besides The Collected Poetry, Clayton Eshleman has co-translated with Annette Smith Lost Body (Braziller, 1986), Aimé Césaire / Lyric and Dramatic Poetry 1946-1982 (The University Press of Virginia, 1990), and Notebook of a Return to the Native Land (Wesleyan, 2001).
Contributor
Aimé Césaire
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES

Exposé·es
By Norman L KleeblattMAY 2023 | ArtSeen
While recently in Paris, I saw a curious, complex, and riveting exhibition titled Exposé·es at the Palais de Tokyo. It was inspired by and named after art historian, critic, and activist Elisabeth Lebovicis highly personal book What AIDS Did to Me (Exposées: Dapres Ce que le sida ma fait dElisabeth Lebovici).

Juan Francisco Elso: Por América
By Jonathan GoodmanFEB 2023 | ArtSeen
Juan Francisco Elso: Por América at El Museo del Barrio not only includes the limited work Elso produced before passing away, but also the art of more than thirty artists from Cuba, the Caribbean, and the Americas.
Thérèse Mulgrew: Room 126
By Madison FordAPRIL 2023 | ArtSeen
Thérèse Mulgrew developed her new solo exhibition at Freight + Volume by engaging with the tenets of cinema, conceiving of the whole as a short film caught in oil on canvas. What results is an exhibition experience unafraid to employ exactness in service of emotional resonance. To step into the gallery is to concede to a directorial pursuit and submit to the voyeurs perch.
Benoît Platéus: Other Percolators
By Ann C. CollinsFEB 2023 | ArtSeen
While the pictures retain distinct traces of the images from which Platéus works, his titles nudge viewers to riff on the visual and textual clues he presents, freely allowing their own associations to bubble up. It is his hope that new possibilities of interpretation will arise with each encounter as viewers interact with the works, revealing the ways in which seeing is a deeply personaland perhaps a bit magicalact.