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Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016) |
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French poet, essayist, translator, and art historian, generally acknowledged as the most important poet of his generation. Central themes in Bonnefoy's work are existence, nature, death, and the role of poetry. Du Mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve (1953, On the Motion and Immobility of Douve) is perhaps Bonnefoy's best-known collection of poems. He was been frequently mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature. The arm lifted and the arm turned The dismantled leg which the high wind pierces Yves Bonnefoy was born in Tours to a working-class family. Marius Elie Bonnefoy, his father, was a railroad worker, whose job involved assembling locomotives; he died in 1936. Bonnefoy's mother Hélène Maury was a teacher, as her own father had been, and looked after the education of her son. His summer vacations Bonnefoy spent at Toirac at the home of his grandparents, saying later that "Yes, I found this country beautiful; it even formed me in my deepest choices, with its great empty plateaus where the grey stone emerges and its rainstorms, sometimes several days long, above the closed-up châteaus." In a similar way, the Unites States has allways attracted him, "because of the immensity of the space that opens up before the traveler." Bonnefoy started reading poetry in primary school; Alfred de Vigny impressed him most. His interest in
mathematics, which he studied at the University of Poitiers and the
Sorbonne, also left a lasting impression. He attended the
Lycée Descartes in Tours, graduated with honors, and went in 1944 to the occupied Paris. There he first
rushed to hear Paul Valéry’s lectures at the Collège de France ("he was
not an interesting lecturer") and at attended Gaston Bachelard's
courses at the Institute d'histoire des sciences. He also married. Bonnefoy's degree in
philosophy at the Sorbonne was followed by a diploma for which he
studied the work of Charles Baudelaire and Søren Kierkegaard. To
support himself, he worked as a teacher and in the secretary's office
of the university. In the summer of 1948 Bonnefoy met the Holocaust poet Paul Celan;
despite their many differences, they became friends. Celan committed suicide in 1970. "I can still
hear Paul Celan saying to me one afternoon," Bonnefoy recalled, "when
we got together to talk about Romanesque architecture and painting, you (meaning French or Western poets) are at home inside your reference points and language. But I am outside." (Paul Celan: Selections, edited and with and introduction by Pierre Joris, 2005, p. 22) From 1949 to 1953 Bonnefoy traveled in
Europe and the Unted States and studied art history. While in Italy, he
became fascinated by the paintings of De Chirico. In Paris he was
closely associated with the Surrealist circles, but refused to sign the
surrealist manifesto Rupture inaugurale. However, under their
influence he published his first literary works, 'Traité du pianiste'
(1946) and 'Anti-Platon' (1947) in the Trotskyist magazine La Révolution la Nuit.
" Like André Breton, he believed that dreaming plays a vital role in
the creative process, arguing that "writing, and even speaking, in the
most ordinary sense of the word, means dreaming . . . " Bonnefoy's first important collection of poems, Du Mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve, about death and reincarnation, gained critical acclaim. It begins with intensive poem dealíng with the death of Douve, an allegorical character, who is simultaneously a woman loved, nature, the mind, and the poetry itself. The number 19, a prime number, has a special significance in the work, in which the three separate sections contain 19 poems. The four sections of Hier régnant désert (1958) and of Pierre écrite (1965) contain 13, 19, 13, 11 and 17, 17, 19, 9 poems respectively. Hier régnant désert, Bonnefoy's second book of verse, received the Prix de l'Express. In 1967 Bonnefoy founded with André du Bouchet, Gaëtan Picon,
and Louis-René des Forêts L'éphemère,
a journal of art and literature. ". . . like Apollinaire's Bonnefoy's
essays seem to flow directly out of his availability to the art he is
discussing," noted Robert W. Greene in Searching for Presence (2004). From the 1960s onwards Bonnefoy published several works
on art and art history, such as Miró (1964), Rome 1630:
L'horizon du premier baroque (1970), Sur un Sculpteur et des
peintres (1989), and The Lure and the
Truth of Painting (1995).
He was never friends with the Swiss sculptor and painter Alberto
Giacometti (1901-1966), but wrote a scholarly monograph on him, Giacometti (1991). Mythologies (1991), which Bonnefoy edited, explored myths and religious traditions. Translations of works by Shakespeare, Yeats, and Leopardi constitute an important part of his work. At school he had read Mark Antony's speech in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, which had impressed him deeply and it was this play, along with Hamlet, he first translated in his thirties. L'Arrière-pays (1972) was Bonnefoy's spiritual autobiography - "arrière-pays" is a compound that refers to the region situated beyond or behind a coastal region. Bonnefoy equated poetry with voyaging, whether it is spiritual in nature. It is this constant search that is apparent in his work, which acknowledges man's inability to grasp the immensity of existence. "We have being," Bonnefoy wrote in his book on Rimbaud, "only because of that desire in us which never obtains and which never gives up." A poet who did not see poems merely as verbal constructions, words had a transcendental meaning for Bonnefoy. He used simple images - house, stone, tree, desert, wind, fire, water - but they were part of the complex spiritual dimension beyond the present moment and the fleeting perception. "I think, and in fact I have always thought, that poetry is an experience of what goes beyond words," he once said. In 'The Words of Evening' he wrote: "Clarity of coming night and clarity of speech / - The mist that rises from all living things / And you, the glowing of my lamp in death." (from Poems, 1959-1975, translated by Richard Pevear, 1985) The landscape of New England inspired Début et fin de la neige (1991). Bonnefoy spent several months at Williamstown in 1985. "At nightfall I would watch the lights of the cars fleeing silently along a road on a distant hillside beyond the woods - they seemed to me to be headed for someplace beyond the world." (Bonnefoy in Ce qui fut sans lumière, translated by John T. Naughton, 1987) Throughout his career Bonnefoy was been concerned with the relationship between reality and the task of poetry. Conceptional thinking is deceptive - permanence and immutable identity characterize abstract concepts that normally constitute our language, whereas existence is marked by finitude and death. The intention of poetry, Bonnefoy argued, is to give beings and things back their proper identity, Presence hidden. By chance in the summer of 1963, Bonnefoy found a house at Valsaintes in Haute-Province in the south of France, a former monastery, which has occupied a central place in his writings. After years of effort, he managed to restore the religious character of the building, bringing to life "the illusion that Valsaintes was the "true place," the one and only true place above the world." (Ce qui fut sans lumière, 1987) In 1968 Bonnefoy married Lucy Vines, an American; they had one
daughter, Mathilde, who became a film editor and director. Bonnefoy
traveled widely, and taught literature at a number of universities,
including Brandeis University (Waltham, MA
), Centre Universitaire (Vincennes), Johns Hopkins University
(Baltimore, MD), Princeton University (New Jersey), Yale University (
New Haven, Connecticut), University of Geneva, University of Nice,
University of Provence (Aix), and Graduate School, City University of
New York. Like Robert Lowell, Robert Fitzgerald, John Updike and
Bernard Malamud, he attended Lorge Luis Borges's lectures in Cambridge.
Shortly before Borges’ death, Bonnefoy visited him at the City Hospital
in Geneva. They briefly discussed Virgil and Verlaine. From 1981
to 1993 Bonnefoy was a professor of comparative studies at the
Collège de France, Paris. In 1981 he was named to the Collège de France
after the death of Roland Barthes. His study in Montmartre was crowded
with books, there were photographs of Rimbaud and Baudelaire, and an
oil painting depicting Verlaine, his wife Mathilde Mauté and Rimbaud. Bonnefoy received the Prix des Critiques in 1971. His other awards include L'Express Prize for essays (1959), Cecil Hemley prize (1977), Montaigne-prize (1978), Académie Française grand poetry prize (1981), Sociéte des Gens de Lettres grand prize (1987), Prix Goncourt, Hudson Review's Bennett Award (1988), the Franz Kafka Prize awarded by the Prague-based Franz Kafka Society (2007). In 2011, Bonnefoy received the Griffin Lifetime Recognition Award. Bonnefoy's translations of Shakespeare's plays, a part of his concern for the linguistic differences between English and French, are considered among the best that have ever published in French. A large number of his poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies. In La communauté des traducteurs (2000) he asked the question of whether it is possible to translated poetry. Bonnefoy died on July 1, 2016, in Paris. For further reading: Yves Bonnefoy by J.E. Jackson (1976); Poétique d'Yves Bonnefoy by J. Thélot (1983); The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy by John T. Naughton (1984); Le concept de la réalité dans la poésie d'Yves Bonnefoy by R. Giguere (1985); Yves Bonnefoy: le simple et le sens by M. Finck (1989); La tentation du silence: essai sur l'oeuvre poétique d'Yves Bonnefoy, suivi d'entretiens avec l'auteur by Jean-François Poupart (1998); 'Bonnefoy, Yves' by Robert D. Cottrell, in Encyclopedia of World Literature, Vol. 1, ed. by Steven R. Serafin (1999); Searching for Presence: Yves Bonnefoy's Writings on Art by Robert W. Greene (2004); Shakespeare and the French Poet: With an Interview with Yves Bonnefoy, ed. John Naughton (2004); Yves Bonnefoy, poète et philosophe by François Ménager (2018); Yves Bonnefoy and Jean-Luc Nancy: Ontological Performance by Emily McLaughlin (2020); The Poetics of Adonis and Yves Bonnefoy: Poetry as Spiritual Practice by Kareem James Abu-Zeid (2021) Selected works:
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