Revue Italienne d'Etudes Françaises (Nov 2022)
Une traduction contrapuntique du Cahier d’un retour au pays natal d’Aimé Césaire (1939)
Abstract
This essay recounts an experiment in collective online translation initiated by co-authors Kaiama L. Glover and Alex Gil, both Caribbeanists, translators, and digital scholars. Glover and Gil discuss their recent public engagement with the 1939 version of Aimé Césaire’s Cahier through a practice of dialogic translation, wherein an interdisciplinary community of scholars thought together about the many possible paths to rendering Césaire’s landmark prose-poem in English. Working collaboratively and in sustained conversation, Glover, Gil, and their cohort of collaborators ultimately generated a new translation, producing a multi-valent and multi-disciplinary artifact that does justice to and enhances, even, the richness of Césaire’s singular work.
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