Praia negra, praia ardente

de la Relation (Poetics of Relation), a work by the Martinican thinker and writer Édouard Glissant (1928Glissant ( -2011)); particularly, it focuses on the essays "La plage noire" ("Black beach") and "La plage ardente" ("Burning beach"), placed in the middle and final parts of the volume.It seeks to discuss and present what one may call, considering this corpus, a reading of the oralthat is, a critical exercise of description, analysis, and interpretation of the characteristic orality within these written texts.Shared in three sections named approaches, the present text intends to look closer to some of the dimensions constituting, simultaneously, a complex matter such as this: what treatment is given to the oral by the critical fortune dedicated to Caribbean literatures of French language, as a whole, and to Glissant's oeuvre, specifically; how notions such as oral and orality are commonly understood and enunciated within the glissantian universe, particularly in its essays; the examination of some of the most influent theories on oral and orality within the European linguistic and literary studies tradition -for instance, some of Paul Zumthor's and Henri Meschonnic's ideas.Finally, the third approach consists in an annotated (re)translation of both essays, as well as a series of comments about the translative process and its difficulties.By approaching such distinct biases of one at once complex and multifaceted critical problem, this work concludes, in general lines, that the oral constitutive of that oeuvre does not present a single nature, totalizing or elucidative, on the contrary: it seems to update the openness, ambiguity, and, ultimately, the constant devir reclaimed by Glissant when it comes to his ideal of Relationnotably exemplified by his notion of opacité ("opaqueness") and its fundamental part in Poétique de la Relation (1990, p. 203

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