Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 194682 (CARAF Books: Caribbean and African Literature Translated from French)

Aime Cesaire has been described by the Times Literary Supplement as likely to figure alongside the EliotPoundYeats triumvirate that has dominated official poetic culture for more than fifty years. He was a cofounder and exponent of the concept of negritude and is a major spiritual, political, and literary figure.Cesaire has been read politically as a poet of revolutionary zeal since the 1960s. This collection, the only one in existence in any language to give a truly comprehensive retrospective of Cesaires poetic production, demonstrates the narrowness of earlier readings that grew out of the climate of Black Power influenced by the essays of Frantz Fanon, another Martinican, who was largely responsible for the ambient view of Csaire a generation ago. It is the first collection to translate And the Dogs Were Silent and i, laminaria. Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, 194682 goes beyond anything else in print (in French or in English) in that it locates the issues of Cesaires struggle with an emerging postmodern vision. It will place Cesaire in a strategic position in the current debate in the U.S. over emergent literature and will show him to be a major figure in the conflict between tradition and contemporary cultural identity.