A Tribute to Yves Bonnefoy
Yves Bonnefoy was born on the 24th of June 1923. He died aged 93 years old, on the 1st of July 2016. He was a poet, an art critic and theorist, a translator, and a Professor at the Collège de France.
In recent years, he had been a regular part of the conversation when discussing potential Literary Nobel laureates. To many he was one of, if not the greatest contemporary French poets, his body of work displaying remarkable consistency and longevity. His first published work was a fragment of Le Coeur-espace, in the review La Révolution la Nuit, which he had founded in 1946. Ensemble encore, suivi de Perambulans in noctem were hitting the bookshelves only two months ago. Hundreds of pages could be written to resume his literary or intellectual output, let alone addressing them both at the same time. Born in Tours, his father was a railway worker and his mother a teacher; the former died in 1936. Every summer, the young Yves spent his holidays in southern France, with his grandparents, and these halcyon days would be echoed in L’Arrière-pays (1972). In 1943, now living in Paris, Bonnefoy dropped his initial choice of studying mathematics to instead embrace poetry and the history of art. This was more a return to his inner nature than an act of rebellion: when Yves’s aunt had offered his 8-year-old self a book, she had dedicated it “to my godson and nephew, a future poet”, having noticed his keen interest in literature.
The surrealists had been Bonnefoy’s first literary heroes, the impulse behind his pursuit of poetry and art. He admired the intensity with which they manipulated words, their free-spiritedness, how their minds seemed to attract all kinds of dreamlike or primeval imagery. But he also came to be dismayed by what he considered to be their disdain for reality, and what felt like the occulting of reality by a smokescreen of poetic fireworks. And so he parted ways with his erstwhile idols in 1947, refusing to sign the surrealist manifesto Rupture Inaugurale. Over the course of the next few years, he was able to travel across Europe, and he completed his maîtrise on Baudelaire and Kierkegaard.
Du movement et de l’immobilité de Douve was published in 1953, and it began with these words: « Je te voyais courir sur des terrasses/ je te voyais lutter contre le vent/le froid saignait sur tes lèvres… » . A collection of Bonnefoy’s poems, it set itself a task which would come to be at the heart of the poet’s work: returning to the unity of being, recovering it from the damages of intellectual and literary theorising. The eponymous Douve took on many different guises: a woman, a river, a swathe of land. Through her, and through words – words that are the only tool available, even though they cannot be trusted - Bonnefoy tried to make life accept and endure Death by fully becoming aware of it. As a testament to the legacy of his early surrealistic penchants, Bonnefoy’s words infused the prosaically real with a dream-like quality.
He achieved many academic and literary distinctions in his life: the Grand Prix de poésie de l’Académife française in 1981, commander of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1987. He was appointed Professor at the Collège de France in 1981 (by then he had already taught in Geneva and New York), having been elected to the Chair of Poetics. Bonnefoy on this occasion criticised the recent trends that had worked towards the death of the subject. Instead he spoke out in favour of a rebirth of lyricism, for ‘we nonetheless say “I” when we speak’. To the delight of anglophile Frenchmen or Francophile Englishmen, he was also throughout his life a prolific translator of those monuments of Anglophone literature: Shakespeare, Keats, and Yeats. As with the rest of his work, he associated an intellectual effort to his creative accomplishments, writing essays on translation. Translating, after all, was to him akin to writing poetry, because it also involved the manipulation and reshaping of language.
Julius Caesar, by Shakespeare, was Bonnefoy's first translation effort.
The theme of unity, of overcoming what feels like unavoidable dichotomies, was one that continued to inform Bonnefoy’s work over the following decades. In the essay L’Arrière-pays, he admits “I was often struck by a feeling of worry at crossroads”. But building on this image, he rejected the illusory beliefs which give birth to feelings of regrets. For when one is faced with a crossroads, says Bonnefoy, the path which we chose not to take didn't lead to a thither, a “hinterland” which could perhaps be accessed later on if given the chance, as we would like to believe. Furthermore, L’Arrière-pays was his attempt at explaining the “ontological refraction” of unity, this light that by bouncing off words seems to stem from something other than the grounded truth of reality. This unity which Bonnefoy championed also manifested itself in one of the other aspects of his rich career, that of an art critic and theorist. He was in constant conversation with other artists and forms of art, and published plenty of essays: on Rimbaud, who fascinated him; on Goya; on Giacometti; and on French Gothic and Baroque art, as well as many other subjects. Thought and artistic creation weren’t antagonistic. Instead they were companions in lending power to Man’s voice. Bonnefoy’s voice aimed at conciliating his “spontaneous materialism” and his “innate concern for transcendence”. Death was what he sought to overcome. Reality, the firm ground on which one’s feet stand, was what he tried to come into contact with. A simple explanation for his impressive literary output could be that to provide a faithful account of the simple yet wonderful things (“the table upon which I write, the amorphous rock in a ravine”), rather than the unambitiously sublime, is a daunting task. Especially when equipped only with these most unreliable instruments: words.
Poetry:
Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve (1953). Published in English as On the Motion and Immobility of Douve, translated by Galway Kinnell. (Bloodaxe Books)
L'Arrière-pays (1972). Translated into English as The Arrière-Pays by Stephen Romer (Seagull Books)
Poèmes (1947–1975) (1978). In English: Poems: 1959-1975. Translated by Richard Pevear. (Random House) Ce qui fut sans lumière (1987). In the Shadow's Light, translated by John Naughton (University of Chicago Press)
Les Planches courbes (2001); The Curved Planks, translated by Hoyt Rogers. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)
Second Simplicity: New Poetry and Prose, 1991-2011 (2012), translated by Hoyt Rogers. (University of Yale Press)
Ensemble encore suivi de Perambulans in noctem (2016)
L'Écharpe rouge (2016)
Artistic criticism, essays :
Arthur Rimbaud (1961)
Rome, 1630 : l'horizon du premier baroque (1970)
Entretiens sur la poésie (1980)
La Présence et l'Image (inaugural lecture at the Collège de France) (1983)
Alberto Giacometti, biographie d'une œuvre (1991). In English as Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work (Flammarion)
The Lure and the Truth of Painting: Selected Essays on Art (1995), edited by Richard Stamelman (University of Chicago Press)
Théâtre et Poésie : Shakespeare et Yeats (1998)
Shakespeare & the French Poet (2004), University of Chicago Press
Notre besoin de Rimbaud (2009)