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Yves Bonnefoy
| Britannica Concise Encyclopedia: Yves Bonnefoy |
| French Literature Companion: Yves Bonnefoy |
Bonnefoy, Yves (b. 1923). Since publication of his first major collection in 1953, Bonnefoy has often been hailed as the leading French poet of the postwar generation. The dense, hieratic poems of Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve, while not without echoes of Scève or Mallarmé, introduced a wholly original poetic voice marrying authentic philosophical questioning with lyrical intensity. The mysterious central figure of Douve, fleetingly a woman of flesh and blood, a dying body, a mythical emanation of the natural world, a disembodied voice, a genius loci, an absent interlocutor, pointed to central questions: where is the place of poetry, what kind of knowledge, if any, can poetry foster, and what is the relationship between the poet's medium and the world he seeks to encounter? In meditative essays written at about the same time as Douve (and collected in L'Improbable, 1959), Bonnefoy defined poetry as an act directed at what he called ‘la présence’, an engagement with the here and now of lived experience in the real world. Purely conceptual knowledge denies présence by affirming universality; the virtues of poetry—that ‘parole jetée matérielle contre l'origine et la nuit’—stem from its links with subjective utterance, with the materiality of language, and with the well-springs of myth.
Bonnefoy's great achievement is to have pursued with great persistence a searching interrogation into the ends and ethics of poetry, not only through the medium of poetry itself—as in Hier régnant désert (1958) and Pierre écrite (1965)—but also through essays, criticism, translation, and teaching. His extensive translations of Shakespeare and Yeats prompted insights into the language of poetry. Prose fables such as L'Arrière-pays (1972) and the narratives collected in Récits en rêve (1987) situate the poetic quest in a wider context of experiences. Bonnefoy has written widely on other poets, and his assessments of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Breton, or Jouve are uniquely penetrating and authoritative. Equally important, however, are his writings on the visual arts, which include monographs on French Romanesque art and on the baroque period in Rome, and numerous essays on contemporary artists such as Miró, Balthus, Hopper, and Garache. The vast book on the sculptor Giacometti (1991), like the earlier Rimbaud par luimême (1959), indicates a central preoccupation, shared by Geneva critics such as Poulet and Starobinski, with the links between works of art and the existential project or personal destiny of the artist.
Time and again, in the essays collected in such volumes as Le Nuage rouge (1977) and La Vérité de parole (1988), Bonnefoy seeks to establish the point at which the poem becomes no more than a linguistic object, or the painting an empty triumph of form over fact. In La Présence et l'image, the lecture delivered on his accession to a chair at the Collège de France in 1981, Bonnefoy suggests that poetry should involve a ‘guerre contre l'image’: a place where the lure of imaginary, Utopian perfection in both life and art is given its due but also sedulously resisted in furtherance of an open-ended commitment to genuine communication and to authentic love for the given world—‘ce qui est’. This is also the great theme of later collections, from Dans le leurre du seuil (1977) to Ce qui fut sans lumière (1987) and Début et fin de la neige (1991), often more straightforward than the early poems, but no less charged with a fervent belief in the vital role of poetry in human existence.
— Michael Sheringham
Bibliography
- G. Gasarian, Bonnefoy: la poésie, la présence (1966)
- J. Naughton, The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy (1984)
| Columbia Encyclopedia: Yves Bonnefoy |
Bonnefoy, Yves (ēv bônfwä'), 1923-, French poet and critic. His verse, e.g., On the Motion and Immobility of Douve (1953; tr. 1968, rev. ed. 1992), expresses a struggle to establish a concrete connection with the material world. His essays on art and literature include The Act and the Place of Poetry (1989) and studies of Miró and Rimbaud. Edited by Bonnefoy, Mythologies, a scholarly two-volume account of worldwide myths by various French authors, was published in English translation in 1991.
Bibliography
See studies by M. A. Caws (1984), J. Naughton (1984), and A. V. Williams (1990).
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Yves Bonnefoy (born June 24, 1923) is a French poet and essayist. Bonnefoy was born in Tours, Indre-et-Loire, the son of a railroad worker and a teacher.
His works have been of great importance in post-war French literature, at the same time poetic and theoretical, examining the meaning of the spoken and written word. He has also published a number of translations, most notably Shakespeare and published several works on art and art history, including Miró and Giacometti.
He studied mathematics and philosophy at the Universities of Poitiers and the Sorbonne university in Paris. After the Second World War he travelled in Europe and the United States and studied art history. From 1945 to 1947 he was associated with the Surrealists in Paris (a short-lived influence that is at is strongest in his first published work, Traité du pianiste (1946)). But it is with the highly personal Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve (1953) that Bonnefoy found his voice and that his name first came to public notice. Bonnefoy's style is remarkable for the deceptive simplicity of his vocabulary. Starkness of expression is combined with a deeply-ingrained sensuality and a longing for an (unattainable) 'other place', which comes to define human experience. In 1967 he joined with André du Bouchet, Gaëtan Picon, and Louis-René des Forêts to found L'éphemère, a journal of art and literature. Although it is his poetry that has made him a prominent figure in 20th century world literature, he has written a great number of essays on art in general, and pictorial art in particular. In this regard, L'Arriere-Pays ('The Hinterland', or 'The Land Beyond', 1972) occupies a pivotal place in his work. He has taught literature at a number of universities in Europe and in the USA (Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts (1962-64), Centre Universitaire, Vincennes (1969-1970), Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Princeton University, New Jersey; Yale University, New Haven, Connecticut, University of Geneva, University of Nice (1973-1976), University of Provence, Aix (1979-1981) and Graduate School, City University of New York (from 1986). In 1981, following the death of Roland Barthes, he was given the chair of comparative study of poetry at the Collège de France. He has been awarded a number of prizes throughout his creative life, most notably the Prix des Critiques in 1971, the Balzan Prize (for Art History and Art Criticism in Europe), the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca in 1995 and Franz Kafka Prize in 2007. His name is regularly mentioned among the prime favourites for the Nobel Prize.
Contents |
Works
Poetry
Each year links to its corresponding "[year] in poetry" article:
- 1946: Traité du pianiste
- 1953: Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve
- 1958: Hier régnant désert
- 1962: Anti-Platon
- 1965: Pierre écrite
- 1971: L'Arrière-pays
- 1975: Dans le leurre du seuil
- 1977: Rue Traversière
- 1978: Poèmes (1947–1975)
- 1980: Entretiens sur la poésie
- 1987: Ce qui fut sans lumière
- 1987: Récits en rêve
- 1991: Début et fin de neige, suivi de Là où retombe la flèche
- 1993: La Vie errante, suivi de Une autre époque de l'écriture
- 1997: L'Encore Aveugle
- 1999: La Pluie d'été
- 2001: Le Théâtre des enfants
- 2001: Le Cœur-espace
- 2001: Les Planches courbes
- 2008: La Longue Chaine de l'Ancre
Individual poems
- "The Almond Tree". The New Yorker 60 (49): 36. 21 January 1985.Translated by Richard Pevear.
Essays
- Peintures murales de la France gothique (1954)
- Dessin, couleur, lumière (1995)
- L'Improbable (1959)
- Arthur Rimbaud (1961)
- La Seconde Simplicité (1961)
- Un rêve fait à Mantoue (1967)
- Rome, 1630 : l'horizon du premier baroque (1970), prix des Critiques 1971
- L'Ordalie (1975)
- Le Nuage rouge (1977)
- Trois remarques sur la couleur (1977)
- L'Improbable, suivi de Un rêve fait à Mantoue (1980)
- La Présence et l'image (leçon inaugurale au Collège de France) (1983)
- La Vérité sur Parole (1988)
- Sur un sculpteur et des peintres (1989)
- Entretiens sur la poésie (1972-1990)
- Aléchinsky, les Traversées (1992)
- Remarques sur le dessin (1993)
- Palézieux (1994), avec Florian Rodari
- La Vérité de parole (1995)
- Dessin, couleur et lumière (1999)
- La Journée d'Alexandre Hollan (1995)
- Théâtre et poésie : Shakespeare et Yeats (1998)
- Lieux et destins de l'image (1999)
- La Communauté des traducteurs (2000)
- Baudelaire : la tentation de l’oubli (2000)
- L'Enseignement et l'exemple de Leopardi (2001)
- André Breton à l'avant de soi (2001)
- Poésie et architecture (2001)
- Sous l'horizon du langage (2002)
- Remarques sur le regard (2002)
- La Hantise du ptyx (2003)
- Le Poète et « le flot mouvant des multitudes » (2003)
- Le Nom du roi d'Asiné (2003)
- L'Arbre au-delà des images, Alexandre Holan (2003)
- Goya, Baudelaire et la poésie, entretiens avec Jean Starobinski (2004)
- Feuilée, avec Gérard Titus-Carmel (2004)
- Le Sommeil de personne (2004)
- Assentiments et partages, exposition du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Tours (2004)
- Shakespeare & the French Poet (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2004)
- L'Imaginaire métaphysique (2006)
- Goya, les peintures noires, Ed. William Blake And Co, (2006)
- Ce qui alarma Paul Celan, Galilée, (2007)
- La Poésie à voix haute, La Ligne d'ombre (2007) ISBN 978-2-9528603-0-7
Monograph
- Biographie d'une œuvre (Alberto Giacometti)
References
"Elusive Presence (Yves Bonnefoy)", 'Paths to Contemporary French Literature', volume 1, by John Taylor, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2004, pp. 252-256.
"Bonnefoy and Shakespeare", 'Paths to Contemporary French Literature', volume 2, by John Taylor, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2007, pp. 142-148.
"The Gold of Ripe Fruit (Yves Bonnefoy)", Into the Heart of European Poetry, by John Taylor, New Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Publishers, 2008, pp. 352-356.
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Mentioned in
- Louvre 200, Vol. 3: Selected Places (1993 Visual Arts Film)
- Dis, Blaise..." Chanson du Transsibérien (2002 Album by Pierre Cartier)
- Chansons de la Belle Espérance (2006 Album by Pierre Cartier)
- Marceline Desbordes-Valmore
