Content area
Full text
While co-translating The Collected Poetry of Aimé Césaire with Annette Smith in the late 1970s/early 1980s, I met with Césaire twice on my own, each time with a list of words that we needed his help with. We would meet in a café near the Sorbonne in Paris. The third time the poet agreed to respond to questions; in the summer of 1982, Annette and the scholar A. James Arnold joined us, and Césaire invited us to his son's apartment where he stayed while representing Martinique in the French National Assembly. Because this would be our last discussion with him about his work, after he responded to our questions (which would occasionally send him to the bookshelves to check an arcane word he had not used for many years), we asked him to read us a poem. Sitting under a painting by Wifredo Lam, he chose "Corps perdu" ("Lost Body") and read it to us in a measured, solemn voice.
"Lost Body" is the title piece of a collection of ten poems Césaire published in 1949 (in an edition including thirty-two etchings by Picasso). As Arnold, who regards "Lost Body" as one of Césaire's most powerful poems and the finest example of his demiurgic manner, has written: "'Lost Body' is located at the watershed that slopes in one direction toward the origins of negritude and in the other toward the modifications necessitated by a hostile political and economic situation."1
Lost Body*
I who Krakatoa
I who everything better than a monsoon
I who open chest
I who Laelaps
I who bleat better than a cloaca
I who outside the musical scale
I who Zambezi or frantic or rhombos or cannibal
I would like to be more and more humble and more lowly
always more serious without vertigo or vestige
to the point of losing myself falling
into the live semolina of a well-opened earth
Outside in lieu of atmosphere there'd be a beautiful haze no dirt in it
each drop of water forming a sun there
whose name the same for all things
would be DELICIOUS TOTAL ENCOUNTER
so that one would no longer know what goes by
-a star or a hope
or an underwater retreat
raced across by the flaming torches of aurelian...