Writing roughly two decades ago on the evolution of the poem from its 1939 appearance in a Paris journal to the 1956 Présence Africaine “édition définitive,” Thomas Hale acknowledged, with a finder’s glee, that it had become “increasingly apparent that the Cahier d’un retour au pays natal is the product of a complex dialectic between the poet and his text, between the poet and his experience.” The story of how this complexity became “increasingly apparent” serves as a paradigm for the critical attention that the history of the text has received. Pestre de Almeida, “La cosmogonie césairienne, fête d’Eros” “Sans une étude génétique du Cahier qui n’a cessé de se modifier le long des ans jusqu’à sa forme définitive, on ne peut prétendre à une lecture approfondie du poème” A brief history of the history of the text. This examination will provide a more precise account of the changes in the Cahier from Volontés to Brentano’s than we have found so far in the literature. Finally, I will look at the trajectory of the poem from Paris to Martinique to Cuba to New York, comparing the different versions which appeared in print during that period in order to paint a clearer picture of Césaire’s involvement in the international surrealist movement during what, for all intents and purposes, we can call its inter-American phase. In the second part, I will argue for the centrality of the 1939 Volontés text, both in its role as the first text that introduced Césaire to his American audience and as the textual center from which all other versions derive their coherence. In the first section, I will rehearse the history of the text as it has been handed down to us, correcting several misconceptions that have accrued along the way. In the following study, I will look at these dynamic American beginnings with particular attention to the textual variations that define the Cahier during this period. This American life can be characterized by many changes to the poem, which became increasingly static, almost monumental, by the time it enjoyed international fame. 20 of the Paris journal Volontés, where the poem appeared for the first time, was also making the rounds in the Caribbean and the United States -much more so than in France, where it was originally published in 1939. The evidence also suggests that issue no. An important addition to the poem also appeared in Tropiques in the April, 1942 issue, later appearing in Haïti journal, on May 25, 1944. In fact, the poem was published in book form for the first time in America, first in Spanish translation in Havana in 1942, and then in English and French in New York in 1947.
Though there has not been much discussion on the subject, Aimé Césaire’s Cahier d’un retour au pays natal had an American life before it had an international or an African life.
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