From Claudia Rankine to Aimé Césaire and César Vallejo

Between April 2016 and March 2017, I read Claudia Rankine's "Don't Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric" (2004) four times (in part because I taught a course on Rankine's work – and Anthony Vahni Capildeo's – in the Spring Semester of 2017 at the University of Basel English Department). The epigraph to Rankine's book is from Aimé Césaire's "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal", so I read that in French back in 2017, too. Now, rereading Rankine for a student's MA exam, I notice again her references to César Vallejo's "Considerando en frío" – but now, having been learning Spanish since November 2020, I went to read that poem in the original, too. (Andrew Shields, #111Words, 28 September 2024)