The American scholar A. James Arnold and the poet Clayton Eshleman have joined forces to co-translate the first editions of all Aimé Césaire's poetic oeuvre. They used as their reference edition Poésie, Théâtre, Essais et Discours, published by an international team of scholars in 2014 (Paris: CNRS-Éditions).
Available at the price of 50 USD, this volume of nearly 1,000 pages is the definitive bilingual edition of the Martinique master's work. For the first time readers have access in two languages to all his most dynamic and revolutionary poetry published prior to his political turn in the mid-1950s.
A thorough set of notes to the poems will stimulate reflection on Césaire's preoccupations and his poetics at a given moment in his trajectory.
Most notably, perhaps, it will be possible for readers to formulate a more complete view of Césaire's negritude project: its point of departure, its heroic realizations in the 1940s, and the recognition of its limitations from the 1970s onward.