Japanese university professor Hiroshi Matsui has just released the Japanese translation of Jacques Roumain’sclassic Governors of the Dew.
This quintessential Haitian novel has been translated into more than 20 languages. It can be read in German, Italian, Swedish, Polish, Danish, Czech, Russian, Finnish, Portuguese, Hungarian, Vietnamese, Slovak, Creole, English, Spanish… C ‘ is a classic of Haitian literature published in 1944.
“This novel tells of the struggle of a Haitian peasant, Manuel, who has just returned home after 15 years in the sugar cane fields in Cuba. Manuel struggles to get all the inhabitants of his village, separated by atavistic hatreds, to come together to work together on the construction of a waterworks system to bring water from a distant source, water without which the village s sinking more and more into misery. The protagonist falls in love with a young girl belonging to the enemy group and ends up murdered. “
Roumain, who died at 37, was the founder of the Haitian Communist Party. Governors of the Dew, a masterpiece of the indigenous literary movement, is strongly imbued with Marxist ideology. Continue reading.