It took determination and patience for Geneviève Chevallier to complete the French translation of Nancy Cunard's Negro Anthology. The 900-page book includes 250 texts by 155 authors from the United States, South America, the Caribbean, Africa and Europe. A "sum made up of odds and ends", according to Romuald Fonkoua, professor of French-speaking literature at Paris-Sorbonne University, which brings together articles, poems, press clippings, testimonies, archival documents and statistics, as photographs, drawings and sheet music.
The result is exceptional in more ways than one. By its format (240 x 260 mm), its weight (almost 4 kg), its chic brown fabric cover and golden letters. By the quality of the texts and authors it brings together. By the pugnacity it took Nancy Cunard to publish it in 1934 in London, definitively marking her break with the middle of the white bourgeoisie of her time.
Born in 1896, the wealthy English heiress frequented the avant-garde Bloomsbury Group, of Virginia Woolf and her husband, Leonard, in the 1920s before fleeing the puritanism of British society for France. Nancy Cunard rubbed shoulders with the surrealists there, posed for Brancusi and Man Ray, published Samuel Beckett's first text, frequented Aragon... In 1928, she met the African-American pianist Henry Crowder and the rejection that their union would arouse, his mother, will inspire him an announcing pamphlet, Black Man and White Ladyship.
Alongside Henry Crowder, Nancy Cunard discovers the black condition of the time: segregation, lynchings, hangings... but also the artistic effervescence of the Harlem Renaissance. The heiress has already been confronted with colonial questions alongside the surrealists but also Leonard and Virginia Woolf, who since the 1920s have published authors from the British Empire or texts denouncing imperialism. A woman of letters and editor, she then embarked on a gigantic collection of texts, the first part of which is devoted to the United States, while the second evokes the Caribbean, Europe and Africa.
"A social outreach tool"
“The genre of the anthology is important in the discovery of the black world, explains Romuald Fonkoua. That of Nancy Cunard follows that of Alain Locke, The New Negro, published in 1925, as well as the Anthologie nègre of Blaise Cendrars, published in 1921. It precedes the Anthology of the new black and Malagasy poetry in French language, by Senghor, prefaced by Sartre in 1948. The anthology has become a genre in which we could group together minorities to show what they write, who they are. It is a tool for social or socio-literary visibility. »
In this "documentary" project which aims, according to Nancy Cunard collaborator Raymond Michelet, to "demonstrate that racial prejudice has no justification [and] that black people have a long social and cultural history behind them, and that those who reject as sub-humans ignorant of their past history, their civilization, their struggles", Nancy Cunard appeals mainly to those who are not heard: African-Americans and the colonized. She can count, moreover, on the surrealists, who sign, among others, the article "A murderous humanitarianism". Samuel Beckett ensures the English translation of French-language texts.
Raymond Michelet wrote several articles, including the indictment "White people are killing Africa", which was republished in 1945 by one of the figures of Pan-Africanism, George Padmore, who also contributed to the anthology alongside the future father of independence of Kenya, Jomo Kenyatta, of Nnamdi Azikiwe, who will become the first president of Nigeria, or even of the South African Thabo Edwin Mofutsanyana, member of the African National Congress (ANC).
Among the many other signatories, we find major figures of African-American thought and struggle, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Zora Neal Hurston, but also the Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabearivelo, the Haitian Jacques Roumain, the Cuban Nicolas Guillen... Linking Africa, Americas and Europe, the Negro Anthology invites you to travel within what Paul Gilroy called "the Dark Atlantic". And raises the question of the emancipation and liberation of black peoples.
Commercial fiasco and success of esteem
Printed in 1,000 copies, it will experience both a commercial fiasco and a success of esteem. The anthropologist Nicolas Menut, who signs the preface to the French translation, estimates that "the sales figures were rather low, around 300 to 400 copies maximum". However, the work will be hailed in African-American intellectual circles by personalities like Alain Locke, who does not hesitate to see in it "the best anthology, in every sense of the word, ever produced about blacks".
But the book will suffer several blows of fate. It is censored in the British West Indies. And the unsold copies, stored in the Norman house of Cunard, will be destroyed during the Second World War, participating in the legend of this work which has become rare... until the text is republished identically by Sarah Frioux-Salgas (curator of the exhibition "L'Atlantique noir" by Nancy Cunard, mounted by the Quai Branly museum in 2014) and the New Place editions, in 2018. And that its French translation is finally accessible thanks to Geneviève Chevallier.
The latter devoted four years of work to this, including a year and a half to seek out all the legatees of the contributors in order to obtain their agreement. Only a few could not be identified. "I made an effort to find the French originals that Samuel Beckett had translated, so as not to have to do the back-translation work which had been refused to us by his legatee. As far as possible, I worked from the languages in which the texts had first been written, including for Spanish, Ewe and Krou, for which I consulted specialists, because the translation into English had not always been well done, "says the former academic.
Editions du Sandre have chosen to publish the French translation identically. Same sepia and same edition of 1,000 copies. Biographies of authors have been added. Nearly ninety years later, the primitivism and essentialism of certain texts can be variously appreciated, but "this translation has the merit of showing the French public that the black question was already being posed in France as early as the 1920s. -1930, believes Romuald Fonkoua, and that a number of current ideas, such as decolonial issues, were already present in France at that time.
