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It is a little-known fact that Aimé Césaire's first book was Cuban.1 In 1943, his poetic opus "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal" (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land) was published in book form for the first time in Havana. His first book in French, Les armes miraculeuses (Miraculous Weapons), would be published three years later by Gallimard in Paris, and in 1947 two later versions of "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal" would appear in book form: a French version by Bordas in Paris and a French-English edition by Brentano's in New York.2 The limited edition Cuban book, printed as Retorno al país natal (Return to the Native Land), featured a preface by French poet Benjamin Péret, illustrations by Afro-Chinese-Cuban painter Wifredo Lam, and a translation of Césaire's poem by Lydia Cabrera, the Euro-Cuban writer and scholar of Afro-diasporic religions and folklore in Cuba.3 Césaire had anticipated his text's pertinence to Havana by including the city along with other Caribbean locales in the first printing of the poem for the Paris-based literary magazine Volontés in 1939 ("Cahier" 24).4 The Havana printing thus consolidated the poem's presentation of Martinique as translatable, or comparable, into other parts of the Caribbean archipelago.
Although Césaire's 1943 Cuban book is crucial to his development as a pan-Caribbean poet, thinker, and politician, it has received very little critical attention. Emily Maguire has written the only other critical essay devoted to the translation, and it has also received limited attention in works by Lourdes Arencibia, Alex Gil, and Richard Watts.5 I am interested in the translation and its publishing history for two related reasons: they are key to pan-Caribbean discourse in their "symbolic articulation of a broader conceptualization of the Caribbean," and they enhance and challenge our understandings of the race and gender politics of translations and their circulation (Martínez-San Miguel, "Colonial and Mexican Archipelagoes" 156). Cabrera's work as Césaire's first translator indicates that his poem did not merely cross between or over languages and places in her translation. Her translation of Césaire and its reception in Cuba offer great insight into the poietic—or generative—function of both circulation and translation in the conformation of geopolitical, historical, and social imaginaries.6 As...