Aimé Césaire and Léopold Senghor

[Il Penseroso]

I'm beginning a research project on the Négritude literary movement, largely focusing on these two founders and their intellectual development as writers on the subject of colonialism.

Are any of you familiar with them?

What are your impressions or thoughts?

[Il Penseroso]

Notebook of a Return to the Native Land [excerpt]
by Aimé Césaire
Translated by Annette Smith and Clayton Eshleman


At the end of daybreak. . .
Beat it, I said to him, you cop, you lousy pig, beat it,
I detest the flunkies of order and the cockchafers of hope.
Beat it, evil grigri, you bedbug of a petty monk. Then I turned
toward paradises lost for him and his kin, calmer than the face
of a woman telling lies, and there, rocked by the flux of a
never exhausted thought I nourished the wind, I unlaced the
monsters and heard rise, from the other side of disaster, a
river of turtledoves and savanna clover which I carry forever
in my depths height-deep as the twentieth floor of the most
arrogant houses and as a guard against the putrefying force
of crepuscular surroundings, surveyed night and day by a cursed
venereal sun.

. . .


At the end of daybreak, on this very fragile earth thickness
exceeded in a humiliating way by its grandiose future--the vol-
canoes will explode, the naked water will bear away the ripe
sun stains and nothing will be left but a tepid bubbling pecked
at by sea birds--the beach of dreams and the insane awakening.

At the end of daybreak, this town sprawled-flat, toppled from
its common sense, inert, winded under its geometric weight of
an eternally renewed cross, indocile to its fate, mute, vexed
no matter what, incapable of growing with the juice of this
earth, self-conscious, clipped, reduced, in breach of fauna
and flora.

[Il Penseroso]

Black Woman [excerpt]
by Léopold Senghor (I'm not sure on a translator)

Naked woman, dark woman
Ripe fruit with firm flesh, dark raptures of black wine,
Mouth that gives music to my mouth
Savanna of clear horizons, savanna quivering to the fervent
caress

Of the East Wind, sculptured tom-tom, stretched drumskin
Moaning under the hands of the conqueror
Your deep contralto voice is the spiritual song of the
Beloved.

[Riesa]

apparently you've got a bunch of milquetoast as your audience. hmm.

the second one was definitely ok. but it didn't strike me as being earth shaking, just kind of run of the mill erotic poetry, though very pretty, in its rapacious way .

as for the first one:

gotta love this.."calmer than the face of a woman telling lies," nice. :lol:

really, what it sounds like is an impassioned person who might not be speaking the language with much more than a dictionary as a weapon, or else the translation sucks, honestly it sounds like a Star Trek away team finding a group of aliens in a prayer to their "god", :)

[sofia82]

I had my project on post colonial literature based on theories of Fanon and Memy the comparison between the colonizer, the colonized and the colonizer who doesn't accept, not these two, but about which aspect of negritude do you want to work?