Kaiama L. Glover
Photo by Nazenet Habtezghi
Bio
Kaiama L. Glover is professor of French and Africana Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She has published translations of Frankétienne’s Ready to Burst (2014), Marie Chauvet’s Dance on the Volcano (2016), and René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams (2017). She is the co-editor of Translating the Caribbean, a volume of critical essays on translation in the Americas published as a two-part special section of Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Glover has been awarded grants from the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She is the author of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool University Press, 2010) and of the forthcoming monograph Disorderly Women: On Caribbean Community and the Ethics of Self-Regard (Duke University Press).
When I applied for the National Endowment for the Arts fellowship to support my translation of Hadriana dans tous mes rêves, I had already published two other translations of Haitian novels, both of which had been commissioned by a forward-thinking and widely renowned independent publishing house. Translating Depestre’s novel was something I undertook on my own, unsolicited by a press. It was a project I had wanted to take on from my very first encounter with the novel as a graduate student. Unfortunately, and very surprisingly, I had gotten very little traction in my efforts to find a publisher interested in a translation of Hadriana.
Eventually, the inimitable and generous Edwidge Danticat and her visionary friend Johnny Temple, founding editor of Akashic Books, recognized the value of translating Depestre’s novel for an anglophone readership. But until that time, I was very much on my own with this project—a project that fell rather outside the scope of my scholarly work as a researcher and professor and that seemed unable to find its place in the world outside the academy either. For these reasons, I was deeply grateful for both the financial and the moral support the NEA grant represented, as well as for what it meant in confirming Akashic’s wisdom in having accepted the translation for publication.
From Hadriana in All My Dreams by René Depestre
[translated from the French]
CHAPTER 2
THE STAR THAT SHONE BUT ONCE
1
I watched the death of the star that shone but once.
– Kateb Yacine
In the issue dated January 11, 1938 the managing editor of The Southwest Gazette, Népomucène Homaire, devoted his editorial to the marriage of Hadriana Siloé and Hector Danoze:
“We take the upcoming marriage of the young Frenchwoman Hadriana Siloé and our compatriot Hector Danoze to be a capital event. The families of the future spouses have obtained the consent of our city fathers to turn these nuptials into a veritable public bacchanalia. After Hurricane Bethsabée, the crash of coffee prices on the world market, the terrorizing of local hymens by a savage woodland butterfly, and the recent death of Germaine Villaret-Joyeuse, the wedding of this mixed couple comes just in time to reunite Jacmel with the rhythms of life through dance and fantasy.”
“The religious ceremony at the Church of Saint Philippe and Saint Jacques will be followed by a reception at the Siloé manor. That evening, the young bride and groom, and their guests will join the entire population of Jacmel on the Place d’Armes to take part in an unprecedented carnival celebration.”
“There are a few marriages that have remained famous in our county. Indeed, on more than one occasion we’ve witnessed two beings, filled with wonder for one another, decide to unite their beauty and their passion in a single destiny. But the wedding that will take place next Saturday, January 29, is sure to stand out in our annals for even more exceptional reasons.”
“Hadriana, only daughter of the marvelous couple Denise and André Siloé, is the princely gift that the French nation, land of Debussy and Renoir, has given to our country. Much more than a young girl of nineteen, the tutelary fairy of Jacmel is a rose plucked from the hat of the good Lord. In the absence of Isabelle Ramonet, residing in Europe these days, Hadriana dizzyingly incarnates the ideal of the garden-woman that a local poet came up with long ago as a tribute to our Zaza.”
“Son of our beloved Priam Danoze, Hector, the chosen one, the most envied man in all of the Caribbean, does he have what it takes to manage the treasure that has been entrusted to him? That’s the question this union raises for us all. Let us respond with a resounding yes. Admittedly, aside from his talents as an aviator and his physical attractions, there’s nothing superhuman to distinguish the Danoze boy from any of Hadriana Siloé’s other suitors. Up to this point, his arrow has slain not one of the enemies of his little city. But I, his godfather, have seen a quality grow within him that puts him head-and-shoulders above the young men of his generation.”
“For my godson, in effect, his circle of loved ones extends well beyond his family, his fiancée, and his childhood friends. He has just as much love for his homeland, Jacmel, so often subjected to the weapons of fate: hurricanes, the Great Fire, and vlanbindingue spirits, not to mention the government scourges who chip away at the freedom of regular folks. Hector Danoze is as rooted in his passion for a woman, as he is moved by the condition of his fellow townspeople.
“In truth, after the misery of the last months, the marriage of these two exceptional beings is like a pact that Jacmel will sign with hope and beauty. All the love stories of the past, radiantly reanimated, will mingle freely in the immense blue skies of this wedding!”
About René Depestre
René Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams is a classic of the Haitian literary tradition. As celebrated Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat has written, “Hadriana is one of those rare literary cases in which a novel’s character becomes even more real, more powerful, than actual people....Depestre’s novel has had such an influence that pieces of it seem to appear everywhere.” Published in 1988, the novel won the Prix Renaudot, along with several other prestigious prizes, and is arguably the most important of Depestre’s prose fiction works.