The Poetics Of Yves Bonnefoy

Yves Bonnefoy is the most important and influential French poet to have emerged since the Second World War. Poet, art critic, historian, translator (particularly of Shakespeare), specialist in the problem of the relation of poetry to the visual arts and to the history of religions, Bonnefoy is now considered one of the most distinguished men of letters of his generation. Though Bonnefoy's work is familiar to American scholars, the complexity of his thought and style has created a need for a critical introduction to his work. This first major study of Bonnefoy written in English provides an overview of his entire literary career. Naughton situates Bonnefoy in the context of the existential philosophical tradition that nurtured him and in the poetic and artistic tradition that includes Dante and Shakespeare, Piero and Poussin, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Bonnefoy's poems appear in both French and English, and all quotations from his prose have been translated. This book will appeal not only to the growing number of students and scholars of French literature interested in Bonnefoy's work, but also to those who study comparative poetry and the relation of poetry to art and to contemporary religious thought.

The selection for this volume ... 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. Publisher's website viewed 08 Dec, 2017.

Always fascinated in his poetry by the nature of color and light and the power of the image, Bonnefoy continues to pursue these themes in his discussion of the lure and truth of representation. He sees the painter as a poet whose language is visual, and he seeks to find out what visual artists can teach those who work with words.

This book examines the work of two major poets who wrote in the second half of the twentieth century, Yves Bonnefoy of France and the Syrian-born Adonis (born Ali Ahmed Said). In conducting close readings of key moments from their respective poetry, the author illustrates how both of these writers, in their own unique ways, construct poetry as a form of spiritual practice, that is, as a way of transforming both the poet's and the implied reader's ontological, perceptual, and creative relationships with their internal and external worlds.

DIVAn eagerly awaited anthology of recent poetry and prose by the celebrated French poet Yves Bonnefoy/div

Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016) was a central figure in post-war French culture, with a lifelong fascination with the problems of translation. Language, for him, was a visceral, intensely material element in our existence, and yet the abstract quality of words distorts the immediate, material quality of our contact with the world. This concern with what separates words from an essential truth hidden in objects involved him in wide-ranging philosophical and theological investigations of the spiritual and the sacred. But for all his intellectual drive and rigour, Bonnefoy's poetry is essentially of the concrete and the tangible, and addresses itself to our most familiar and intimate experiences of objects and of each other. In his first book of poetry, published in France in 1953, Bonnefoy reflects on the value and mechanism of language in a series of short variations on the life and death of a much loved woman, Douve. Douve, though, is the French word for a moat, that uncrossable body which separates us from safety and from danger. With this undercurrent at work we read the poems as if they are about the divide between us and death as much as they are about the divide between us and the untouchable reality of text. This is dangerous writing, fulfilling Derrida's "fatal necessity" by making us substitute the textual sign for reality. In his introduction, Timothy Mathews shows how Bonnefoy's poetics are enmeshed with his philosophical, religious and critical thought.

"The Digamma" is the latest book of poetry in prose by celebrated author Yves Bonnefoy, who is also the leading translator of Shakespeare in France. In this new collection, his fascination with the defining author of our language is amply reflected in God in "Hamlet" and For a Staging of "Othello," two poems in prose which belong to an ongoing series of meditations on the plays. The collection also includes haunting reflections on children, nature, origins of art, vanished cultures. A key passage of the title piece of the book, The Digamma, depicts the figures of Nicolas Poussin s "The Shepherds of Arcadia," which Bonnefoy has identified as crucial to the artist s evolution. The sustained reference to Poussin s iconography serves to ground the text in the lost civilizations of antiquity. Subtly, it brings out the underlying theme of the entire collectionin the ambivalent world we inhabit, being and non-being are fundamentally one."

This innovative book aims to create a ‘poetics of Church’ and a ‘religious imaginary’ as alternatives to more institutional and conventional ways of thinking and of being ‘Church’. Structured as a spiritual and literary journey, the work moves from models of the institutional Catholic Church into more radical and ambiguous textual spaces, which the author creates by bringing together an unorthodox group of thinkers referred to as ‘poet-companions’: the 16th-century founder of the Society of Jesus, Ignatius of Loyola, the French thinkers Gaston Bachelard and Hélène Cixous, the French poet Yves Bonnefoy, and the English playwright Dennis Potter. Inspired especially by the reading and writing practices of Cixous, the author attempts to exemplify Cixous’ notion of écriture féminine—‘feminine writing’—that suggests new ways of seeing and relating. The project’s uniting of Ignatian spirituality with postmodern thinking and its concern with creating new theological, literary and spiritual spaces for women both coincide and contrast with Pope Francis’s pastoral and reformist tendencies, which have neglected to adequately address the marginalisation of women in the Church. As Francis has called for ‘a theology of women’, of which there are, of course, many to draw from, this volume will be a timely contribution with a unique interdisciplinary approach.

Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016), a major poet, was equally a seminal essayist and thinker. This second and final volume of the Yves Bonnefoy Reader, contains what he regarded as his foundational essays, as well as a generous selection of essays from all periods translated into English for the first time. Subjects include comparative French and English poetics, Shakespeare's theatre, the paintings of Piero della Francesca and Poussin, the sculpture of Bernini, Mozart's operas, a re-assessment of Rimbaud, the impact of photography on art, and much more. The range is broad, but the metaphysical challenge is the same: to affirm presence, and finitude, against all forms of life-sapping conceptual thought. Language may have become suspect, but these essays affirm the 'project of hope' that was Bonnefoy's from the outset. A range of translators contributes, from the editors whose work on Bonnefoy is celebrated and of long standing, to Iain Bamforth, Michael Bishop, Hilary Davies, Jennie Feldman, Emily Grosholz, Mark Hutchinson, Steven Jaron, Viviane Lowe, Hoyt Rogers, John Taylor and Ahren Warner.