Bonnefoy Poems

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-80017-470-2
Verlag: Fyfield Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 360 Seiten

France's greatest poet of the last half century, Yves Bonnefoy wrote many books of poetry and poetic prose, as well as celebrated critical essays on literature and art (to which a second volume will be devoted). At his death in 2016 aged ninety-three, he was Emeritus Professor of Comparative Poetics at the Collège de France. The selection for this volume (and the second one) was made in close collaboration with the poet. The lengthy introduction by John Naughton is a significant assessment of Bonnefoy's importance in French literature. Bonnefoy started out as a young surrealist poet at the end of the Second World War and, for seven decades, he produced poetry and prose of great, and changing, depth and richness. In his lines we encounter 'the horizon of a voice where stars are falling, / Moon merging with the chaos of the dead'. Fellow poet Philippe Jaccottet spoke of his abiding gravité enflammée. Bonnefoy knew what translation demands, having himself translated Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, and Keats; Petrarch and Leopardi from Italian; and, from Greek, George Seferis. This volume is edited and translated by three of Bonnefoy's long-time translators -Anthony Rudolf, John Naughton, and Stephen Romer - with contributions from Galway Kinnell, Richard Pevear, Beverley Bie Brahic, Emily Grosholz, Susanna Lang, and Hoyt Rogers. A dual language edition.

Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016), regarded as France's greatest poet of the last fifty years, was the author of many volumes of poetry and poetic prose, and numerous books of essays on literature and art, including studies of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Goya and Giacometti. Between 1981 and 2016 he was Professor (and then Emeritus Professor) of Comparative Poetics at the Collège de France, a position he inherited from Roland Barthes. His work has been translated into scores of languages and he himself was a master translator of Shakespeare, Yeats, Keats, Leopardi, Seferis and others. He received a wide variety of literary prizes.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Bonnefoy, Yves

Weitere Mitwirkende

Rudolf, Anthony

Naughton, John

Romer, Stephen

Leseproben

Introduction

john naughton

Yves Bonnefoy is widely recognised as the most important French poet of the post-war era and as one of the most significant European writers of the last sixty years. His work is wide-ranging and diverse and includes poems in verse, poems in prose, fiction, literary and art criticism, and translations of Shakespeare, Donne, Keats, Leopardi, and Yeats. Bonnefoy is also the editor of the acclaimed Dictionnaire des Mythologies et des religions des sociétés traditionnelles et du monde antique. He has been a regular visitor to the United States, where he has been a guest professor at such places as the City University of New York, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Wesleyan, Brandeis, Williams College, and the University of California. He has lectured in many places in Europe, as well as in Japan, Great Britain, and Ireland. He has won the Prix Montaigne, the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Balzan, and the Hudson Review’s Bennett Award among other prizes and has been the recipient of many distinctions, including honorary doctorates from Oxford, Trinity College (Dublin), the University of Chicago, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Rome. In 2001, he was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Born in Tours in 1923 and educated there until the end of his teens, Bonnefoy lost his father, a railway foreman, when he was only thirteen. After his father’s death his mother took a job as a teacher at a grade school outside Tours and looked after the education of her son. Bonnefoy eventually received an advanced degree in mathematics and philosophy before coming to occupied Paris in 1943. There he became involved in the surrealist circles, met and was admired by André Breton, and edited his own small review, called – with appropriate iconoclasm – La Révolution la nuit, after the painting by Max Ernst. He also married and taught mathematics and science for a time. The publication in 1953 of his first major book of poetry, Du Mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve (On the Motion and Immobility of Douve), immediately placed him at the forefront of the new generation of French poets. Here was a voice, as even the somewhat resistant Jean Grosjean admitted, to be listened to with ‘the most serious attention’.

Inevitably the question was raised: who or what is Douve? A mysterious feminine presence, her death, physical decomposition, and resurrection put one in mind of the romantic notion enunciated by Edgar Allan Poe that ‘the death […] of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world’. And her relation to the poetic narrator would seem also to support Poe’s conviction that ‘the lips best suited for such are those of a bereaved lover’.

On the other hand, she seems intimately related to the poetic process itself, to the nature of inspiration and to the impact of death on inspiration. Now, death is a category in this poem that involves recognition not only of the fate of flesh – the opening sequence, called ‘Théâtre’, deals with physical decomposition with a brutal frankness reminiscent of Villon – but also of the inertia and life-lessness of established representation. The constant resurrections of Douve, however, her almost Ovidian metamorphoses, are the poetic expression of the recurrent but ephemeral moment of epiphanous vision, which retreats from what would try to capture or express it: ‘… à chaque instant je te vois naître, Douve, / À chaque instant mourir’. (‘each moment I see you born, Douve, / Each moment die’). Poetic utterance is not equal to the reality it seeks to articulate; what it touches dies from its touch, only to be resurrected as an unreachable domain, inexhaustible and eternally elusive. The French word douve means ‘moat’ or ‘ditch’. But the word also contains the notion of opening (d’ouverture), ‘tenté dans l’épaisseur du monde’ (‘attempted in the thickness of the world’), and poetry’s refusal to resign itself to the impossible is the reminder that Douve is associated with the human spirit, with those spiritual aspirations suggested by the English word ‘dove’, traditional symbol of the Holy Spirit whose origins are mysterious (d’où: where from?). Douve seems also to be a reflection of Bonnefoy’s idea of présence, which is the momentary apprehension of the fundamental unity of all being. This experience is always fleeting; it will, Bonnefoy tells us in his essay ‘Les Tombeaux de Ravenne’ (‘The Tombs of Ravenna’), ‘be lost a thousand times, but it has the glory of a god’.

To the extent that it is present, the object never ceases disappearing. To the extent that it disappears, it imposes, it cries out its presence.

As readers of Bonnefoy, it is important for us to note that, however tempting it is to use his essays as keys to the poems, he has always insisted on ‘the disparity […] between the realm of the image and that of the formulation’.

Gaëtan Picon, writing of the new French poets who had emerged after the Second World War, said of them that they felt totally disinherited from all poetic tradition. Marked by war, by a history ‘so monstrous that it denies all poetic possibility’, the new generation of poets, in Picon’s view, felt ‘separated from the word it might be, from the universe it might name’. Appropriately, Picon placed the efforts of the new poets ‘between the fact of ruin and the desire for reconstruction’. Some of these notions may be felt in certain of the poems of Douve.

Ainsi marcherons-nous sur les ruines d’un ciel immense,

Le site au loin s’accomplira

Comme un destin dans la vive lumière.

Le pays le plus beau longtemps cherché

S’étendra devant nous terre des salamandres.

Regarde, diras-tu, cette pierre:

Elle porte la présence de la mort.

Lampe secrète c’est elle qui brûle sous nos gestes,

Ainsi marchons-nous éclairés.

So we will walk among the ruins of a boundless sky,

The horizon will unfold

Like a destiny in the quickened light.

The most beautiful country sought so long

Will stretch before us, land of the salamanders.

You will say, look at this stone:

It carries the presence of death.

Secret lamp, it burns beneath us

As we move along, and so we walk in light.

[translated by Anthony Rudolf]

The first line, on one level at least, seems to speak of a painful period of decline – the end of a certain idealist tradition, the repudiation of the now invalid images of romantic reveries. The heavens, which have collapsed with their images, represent precisely the infinite imaginaire, which is the extreme form of alienation. On the other hand, the ‘ruins’ of the first line of the poem already point to the guiding stone that will appear at the end of the text.

The future tense of the initial verbs is suggestive of the search or quest for meaning in an age of spiritual eclipse. The ‘site’ of which the poem speaks indicates the ground upon which the future dwelling will be established. This ground is the land of the salamander, spirit of resurrection, survivor of fire and flood, and symbol for Bonnefoy, through its silent, unpretentious adherence to earth, of ‘all that is pure’. This land, which a misguided longing may have ‘sought’ unknowingly, is perhaps nothing so much as the simple evidence before us, its most common features – water, stone, tree – improbable and completely sustaining presences for the vision purified of an unbounded nostalgia, or, put another way,...