Forfeiture

FORFEITURE

As soon as I press the little pawl that I have
under my tongue at a spot that escapes all
detection all microscopic bombardment all dowser
divination all scholarly prospecting beneath it
triple layer of false eyelashes of centuries
of insults of strata of madrepores of what
I must call my niagara cavern in a burst
of cockroaches in a cobra twitch a tongue
like a cause for astonishment makes the leap
of a machine for spitting a mouthful of curses
a rising of the sewers of hell
a premonitory ejaculation a urinary spurt
a foul emission a sulfuric rhythm feeding
an uninterruption of interjections—
and then right there pushing between
the paving stones the furious blue eucalypti
that leave far behind them the splendor of veronicas,
skulls smack in the delirium of dust
like the jaboticaba plum and then right there
started up like the loud buzzing of a hornet
the true war of devolution in which all means
are justified right there the passenger pigeons
of the conflagration right there the crackling
of secret transmitters and the thick tufts
of black smoke that resemble the vaginal
vegetation thrust into the air by rutting loins.
I count. Obstructing the street a honey-colored
armillaria lying dwarf-like on its side
a church uprooted and reduced by catastrophe
to its true proportions of a public urinal.
I cross over collapsed bridges.
I cross under new arches.
Toboggan eye at the bottom of a cheek amidst
woodwinds and well-polished brasses
a house abutting an abyss with in cut-away
view the violated virginity of the daughter
of the house the lost goods and chattels
of the father and the mother who believed
in the dignity of mankind and in the bottom
of a wool stocking the testicles pierced
by the knitting needle of an unemployed workman
from distant lands.

I place my hand on my forehead
it’s a hatching of monsoons.
I place my hand on my dick.
It fainted in leaf smoke.
All the deserter light of the sky
has taken refuge in the red white and yellow
heated bars of snakes attentive to the wasting
away of this landscape sneered at by dog piss.
For what?
The planets are very fertile birds that constantly
and majestically disclose their guano silos
the earth on its spit alternatively vomits
grease from each of its facets
fistfuls of fish hook their emergency lights
to the pilasters of stars whose ancient slippage
crumbles away during the night in a thick
very bitter flavor of coca.

Who among you has never happened to strike
an earth because of its inhabitants’ malice?
Today I am standing and in the sole whiteness
that men have never recognized in me.


Aime Cesaire

Translation from French by Clayton Eshleman & A. James Arnold

Posted over on Jerome Rothenberg's site Poems & Poetics

These three poems are from Aimé Césaire’s unexpurgated 1948 text of Soleil cou coupé (Solar Throat Slashed), cotranslated by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman, to be published by Wesleyan University Press in 2011. In the late 1950s, at the same time that he was increasingly politically focused, Césaire, in effect, gelded Soleil cou coupé, cutting out 31 of the 72 poems in the collection, and editing out a significant amount of material from another 29, leaving only 12 poems untouched. To this revised text was added the 1949 10 poem collection, Corps perdu (Lost Body). This material was then published in 1961 as Cadastre (looking at this word now, I always see the shadow of “castration” in it). For decades, Cadastre has represented Soleil cou coupé.

However, in 1994, with the publication of Césaire’s La Poésie, the eliminated poems, along with the lines cut from the revised ones, were reprinted as "Soleil cou coupé: poèmes non repris dans la version définitive.” Arnold and I are in agreement that the unexpurgated 1948 Soleil cou coupé is probably Césaire’s MOST substantial and powerful collection of poems. Concerning the three poems printed here: “To the Serpent” and “Forfeiture” were both eliminated from Cadastre. In the case of “At the Locks of the Void,” a dozen lines were cut, and what was left of the poem appeared in Cadastre.