You know the part in Cesaire's "A Tempest" where Antonio is making fun of Gonzalo's fantasies about the island they've landed on (which, three pages later, Gonzalo himself will call a "filthy hole"!), and he quotes a couple of lines of verse?
What a perfect intertext. Can you see why this particular late-Romantic French poem is such a great foil for Aime Cesaire's deconstruction of the French civilizing mission?
Men whose bodies are wiry and strong"I see you know your literature," Gonzalo responds. But I didn't recognize it. On this reading I finally got curious enough to Google the quotation. Nothing. Turns out it's not a common (or particularly good) translation. So I went to the French original and found
and women whose eyes are open and frank
Des hommes dont le corps est mince et vigoureux,It's a mid-19th-century poem by Charles Baudelaire, called "Exotic Perfume," in which the speaker reposes his head on his mistress' breasts and falls into a reverie, dreaming of sailing the open seas and coming ashore on a verdant and fragrant exotic island.
Et des femmes dont l'oeil par sa franchise étonne.
What a perfect intertext. Can you see why this particular late-Romantic French poem is such a great foil for Aime Cesaire's deconstruction of the French civilizing mission?
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