 
Choose another writer in this calendar:
by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch This is an archive of a dead website. The original website was published by Petri Liukkonen under Creative Commons BY-ND-NC 1.0 Finland and reproduced here under those terms for non-commercial use. All pages are unmodified as they originally appeared; some links and images may no longer function. A .zip of the website is also available. |
Yves Bonnefoy (b. 1923) | |
|
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. 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 to write at a very early age, but his interest in mathematics, which he studied at the University of Poitiers and the Sorbonne, has also been a lasting one and stimulated his literary work. He attended the Lycée Descartes in Tours and moved in 1943 to Paris, where 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. His 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. 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. Bonnefoy's 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. 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 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. 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 has 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 do not see poems merely as verbal constructions, words have a transcendental meaning for Bonnefoy. He uses simple images - house, 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, translated 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 abstract concepts that normally constitute our language, whereas existence is marked by finitude and death. The intention of poetry, Bonnefoy has argued, is 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." (Bonnefoy in Ce qui fut sans lumière, trans. John T. Naughton, 1987) In 1968 Bonnefoy married Lucy Vines, an American; they had one daughter, Mathilde, who became a film editor and director. Bonnefoy has 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. From 1981 to 1993 he 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. 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 appeared in French. In La communauté des traducteurs (2000) he asks the question of whether it is possible to translated poetry. 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) Selected works:
|
