SOURCE: "The French Connection," in American Poetry Review, Vol. 13, January-February, 1984, pp. 40-5.

In the following excerpt, Perloff offers praise for Césaire's poetry and its English translation upon publication of The Collected Poetry of Aimé Césaire.

I turn Finally to what will surely be considered one of the most important translations from the French in 1983—Clayton Eshleman and Annette Smith's Collected Poetry of Aimé Césaire. A number of these translations had already appeared in Paul Auster's anthology, but it takes more than a handful of short poems to give the reader a sense of Césaire's astonishing poetic power, and the new California bilingual edition puts the entire lyric corpus before us for the first time.

The black poet Aimé Césaire was born in 1913 in Martinique. Creole is the first language of all black Martinicans, but Césaire's lower middle-class parents made strenuous efforts to...