Return to my Native Land

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This is not a free adaptation of Césaire’s work; neither, however, is it a completely literal translation. The poem is important because of its thinking content. The thinking is both political and poetic. Politically it is a poem of revolutionary passion and irony. Poetically its images have a physical and often sexual resonance. It is always in respect to this double content that we have sought and worked upon an English version. In close reading the original poem is sometimes obscure, and necessarily this obscurity remains in the translation; but in French this obscurity is only a detail to the lucid passion of the whole. We hope that this balance, or the equivalent of it, has been preserved for the English-language reader.

We wish to thank the following whom we consulted whilst working on this translation: Dorothy Baker, Jean-Paul Clébert, Peter Levi, Adrian Mitchell, Simone Mohr, Henri Stierlin, and Alain Tanner.

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