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Yves Bonnefoy (1923- ) | |
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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 has 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. Bonnefoy started to write at a very early age, but his interest in mathematics has also been a lasting one and stimulated his literary work. In 1934 he entered the Lycée Descartes in Tours. Before moving in 1944 to Paris, where he took a degree in philosophy at the University of Paris, he studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Poitiers and the Sorbonne. After the war Bonnefoy traveled in Europe and the Unted States and studied art history. In Paris he became closely associated with the Surrealist circles. Under their influence he published his first literary work, Traité du pianiste (1946). His first important collection of poems, Du Mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve, about death and reincarnation, gained critical acclaim. Its first poem deals intensively 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. 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 Bonnefoy has 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), Giacometti (1991), and The Lure and the Truth of Painting (1995). Mythologies (1991), which Bonnefoy edited, explored myths and religious traditions. In 1971 he received the Prix des Critiques. 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. Words have a mystical role in Bonnefoy's poetry. He uses simple images - stone, tree, desert, wind, fire, water - but they are 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 had 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, trans. by Richard Pevear, 1985) Throughout his career Bonnefoy has been concerned with the relationship between reality and the task of poetry. Conceptional thinking is deceptive - permanence and immutable identity characterize concepts, whereas existence is marked by finitude and death. The intention of poetry, Bonnefoy has argued, is give beings and things back their proper identity. Bonnefoy has traveled widely, and taught literature at a number of universities, including 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), Collège de France, Paris (from 1981), and Graduate School, City University of New York (from 1986). In 1968 Bonnefoy married Lucy Vines; they had one daughter. Hier régnant désert (1958), Bonnefoy's second book of verse, received the Prix de l'Express. 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 1981 he was named to the Collège de France after the death of Roland Barthes. 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 appeared in French. 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) Selected works:
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