Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land

The first bilingual edition of this radically original work

Aimé Césaire's masterpiece, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, is a work of immense cultural significance and beauty. This long poem was the beginning of Césaire's quest for négritude, and it became an anthem of Blacks around the world. Commentary on Césaire's work has often focused on its Cold War and anticolonialist rhetoric―material that Césaire only added in 1956. The original 1939 version of the poem, given here in French, and in its first English translation, reveals a work that is both spiritual and cultural in structure, tone, and thrust. This Wesleyan edition includes the original illustrations by Wifredo Lam, and an introduction, notes, and chronology by A. James Arnold.

Publication of this book is funded by the Beatrice Fox Auerbach Foundation Fund at the Hartford Foundation for Public Giving.

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.