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Here is the legendary Notebook of a Return to the Native Land by Aimé Césaire, just released in Spanish in Mexico at Editorial Universidad Veracruzana, with a translation by José Luis Rivas.
“Aime Cesaire’s work is by far one of the most outstanding tour-de-force in French literature emanating from the Caribbean. The texture, the beauty and the centrality of the work is set in a Caribbean milieu and firmly contextualized in the concept of negritude, of which Aime Cesaire is a co-creator. The book will be appreciated for its depth, structure, and tactile renditions of the social impediments that strangled all of us whose ancestry heralds from Africa, but who were sequenced in various parts of the Caribbean.”
~S.B. Jones-Hendrickson, The Caribbean Writer
Ægitna is proud to accompany this translation thanks to Présence Africaine Editions.
The book is available on Présence Africaine’s website
The book on Editorial Universidad Veracruzana’s Catalogue
“What is mine, these few thousand deathbearers who mill in
the calabash of an island and mine too,
the archipelago arched with an anguished desire to negate itself,
as if from maternal anxiety to protect this impossibly delicate tenuity
separating one America from another;
and these loins which secrete for Europe
the hearty liquor of a Gulf Stream,
and one of the two slopes of incandescence between which
the Equator tightrope-walks toward Africa.”
(tr. C. Eshleman & A. Smith, Cesaire, the collected poetry, University of California Press, 1983)