Yves Bonnefoy Books

Following on from 2017's celebrated Poems, this is a wide-ranging selection of Bonnefoy's essays on literature, art and life.

An inspiring book of poetry and prose by the celebrated author Yves Bonnefoy. Heralded as one of France's greatest poets, Yves Bonnefoy has been dazzling readers since the publication of his first book in 1953. He remains influential and relevant, continuing to compose groundbreaking new work. Though Bonnefoy recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday, many are calling these past two decades his most impressive yet. His latest book of poetry and prose, The Digamma, fits wonderfully into his impressive oeuvre, offering his signature style of simple but powerful language with fresh new grace. A key passage of the title piece of the book 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 collection--in the ambivalent world we inhabit, being and non-being is fundamentally one. As a leading translator of Shakespeare in France, Bonnefoy's fascination with the master playwright is displayed in "God in Hamlet" and "For a Staging of Othello," two poems in prose that belong to an ongoing series of meditations on the plays. The collection also includes haunting reflections on children, nature, the origins of art, and vanished cultures.

Praised by Paul Auster as “one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime,” Yves Bonnefoy is widely considered the foremost French poet of his generation. Proving that his prose is just as lyrical, Rue Traversière, written in 1977, is one of his most harmonious works. Each of the fifteen discrete or linked texts, whose lengths range from brief notations to long, intense, self-questioning pages, is a work of art in its own right: brief and richly suggestive as haiku, or long and intricately wrought in syntax and thought; and all are as rewarding in their sounds and rhythms, and their lightning flashes of insight, as any sonnet. “I can write all I like; I am also the person who looks at the map of the city of his childhood, and doesn’t understand,” says the section that gives the book its title, as he revisits childhood cityscapes and explores the tricks memory plays on us. A mixture of genres—the prose poem, the personal essay, quasi-philosophical reflections on time, memory, and art—this is a book of both epigrammatic concision and dreamlike narratives that meander with the poet’s thought as he struggles to understand and express some of the undercurrents of human life. The book’s layered texts echo and elaborate on one another, as well as on aspects of Bonnefoy’s own poetics and thought.

A meditation on the major plays of Shakespeare and the thorny art of literary translation, Shakespeare and the French Poet contains twelve essays from France's most esteemed critic and preeminent living poet, Yves Bonnefoy. Offering observations on Shakespeare's response to the spiritual crisis of his era as well as compelling insights on the practical and theoretical challenges of verse in translation, Bonnefoy delivers thoughtful, evocative essays penned in his characteristically powerful prose.Translated specifically for an American readership, Shakespeare and the French Poet also features a new interview with Bonnefoy. For Shakespeare scholars, Bonnefoy enthusiasts, and students of literary translation, Shakespeare and the French Poet is a celebration of the global language of poetry and the art of "making someone else's voice live again in one's own."

The seventy-two entries in this volume explore, among other topics, the history, geography, and religion of Greece, Plato's mythology and philosophy, the powers of marriage in Greece, heroes and gods of war in the Greek epic, and origins of mankind in Greek myths. Ancient Egyptian cosmology, anthropology, rituals, and religion—closely linked to Greek mythology—are also discussed."In a world that remains governed by powerful myths, we must deepen our understanding of ourselves and others by considering more carefully the ways in which the mythological systems to which we cling and social institutions and movements to which we are committed nourish each other. Yves Bonnefoy's Mythologies not only summarizes the progress that has already been made toward this end, but also lays the foundation for the difficult work that lies ahead."—Mark C. Taylor, New York Times Book Review"The almost 100 contributors combine, with characteristic precision and élan, the arts of science and poetry, of analysis and translation. The result is a treasury of information, brilliant guesswork, witty asides, and revealing digressions. This is a work of genuine and enduring excitement."—Thomas D'Evelyn, Christian cience Monitor

These 130 articles explore mythologies in societies from India to Japan. Among the many topics are Buddhist and Hindu symbolic systems, myth in pre-Islamic Iran, Indonesian rites of passage, Chinese cosmology and demons, and Japanese conceptions of the afterlife and the "vital spirit." The mythological traditions of Turkey, Korea, Tibet, and Mongolia are also included."The almost 100 contributors combine, with characteristic precision and élan, the arts of science and poetry, of analysis and translation. The result is a treasury of information, brilliant guesswork, witty asides, and revealing digressions. This is a work of genuine and enduring excitement."—Thomas D'Evelyn, Christian Science Monitor

Focusing on childhood memories and familial relationships, the book presents Yves Bonnefoy's poignant reflections on his father's silence and the melancholy of his parents' marriage. Written as a commemoration shortly before his death, it intertwines fragments from 1964 with his experiences as a solitary boy in Auvergne and Tours. The narrative centers on the lives of his parents, Elie and Hélÿne, offering a deeply personal exploration of memory and anxiety, making it an essential read for those interested in introspective literature.

An intensely personal and profoundly moving review of Bonnefoy's childhood memories. In December 2015, six months before his death at the age of 93, Yves Bonnefoy concluded what was to be his last major text in prose, L'écharpe rouge, translated here as The Red Scarf. In this unique book, described by the poet as "an anamnesis"--a formal act of commemoration--Bonnefoy undertakes, at the end of his life, a profoundly moving exegesis of some fragments written in 1964. These fragments lead him back to an unspoken, lifelong anxiety: "My most troubling memory, when I was between ten and twelve years old, concerns my father, and my anxiety about his silence." Bonnefoy offers an anatomy of his father's silence, and of the melancholy that seemed to take hold some years into his marriage to the poet's mother. At the heart of this book is the ballad of Elie and Hélène, the poet's parents. It is the story of their lives together in the Auvergne, and later in Tours, seen through the eyes of their son--the solitary boy's intense but inchoate experience, reviewed through memories of the now elderly man. What makes The Red Scarf indispensable is the intensely personal nature of the material, casting its slant light, a setting sun, on all that has gone before.

An experiment with the sonnet form by one of the foremost French poets of his generation. Yves Bonnefoy has wowed the literary world for decades with his diffuse volumes. First published in France in 2008, The Anchor's Long Chain is an indispensable addition to his oeuvre. Enriching Bonnefoy's earlier work, the volume, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic, also innovates, including an unprecedented sequence of nineteen sonnets. These sonnets combine the strictness of the form with the freedom to vary line length and create evocative fragments. Compressed, emotionally powerful, and allusive, the poems are also autobiographical--but only in glimpses. Throughout, Bonnefoy conjures up life's eternal questions with each new poem. Longer, discursive pieces, including the title poem's meditation on a prehistoric stone circle and a legend about a ship, are also part of this volume, as are a number of poetic prose pieces in which Bonnefoy, like several of his great French predecessors, excels. Long-time fans will find much to praise here, while newer readers will quickly find themselves under the spell of Bonnefoy's powerful, discursive poetry.

Yves Bonnefoy's final poetic work, a collection of reflections about poetry, legacy, and life. The international community of letters mourned the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France's greatest poets of the last half-century. A prolific author, he was often considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize and published a dozen major collections of poetry in verse and prose, several books of dream-like tales, and numerous studies of literature and art. His oeuvre has been translated into scores of languages, and he himself was a celebrated translator of Shakespeare, Yeats, Keats, and Leopardi. Together Still is his final poetic work, composed just months before his death. The book is nothing short of a literary testament, addressed to his wife, his daughter, his friends, and his readers throughout the world. In these pages, he ruminates on his legacy to future generations, his insistence on living in the present, his belief in the triumphant lessons of beauty, and, above all, his courageous identification of poetry with hope.

Alberto Giacometti has long been recognized as one of the most original artists of the last century, producing not just the sculptures for which he is best known, but also remarkable paintings, drawings, and lithographs. Yves Bonnefoy's groundbreaking monograph, first published in 1991, reveals the psychological and intellectural context of Giacometti's artistic output, while at the same time providing key interpretations of individual works. Available for the first time in paperback, this richly illustrated, scholarly study remains a seminal work on the artist and his era, raising issues central to the understanding of twentieth-century art as a whole.

In Prosastücken und Gedichten greift Yves Bonnefoy, einer der wichtigsten zeitgenössischen Dichter Frankreichs, lebenslange Motive von neuem auf: die Sprache, das Namengeben und die Kindheit. We geht sie konzentrierter, betonter, aber auch spielerischer an als zuvor. Im Mittelpunkt jedoch stehen, wie so häufig bei Bonnefoy, die Dichtung (in Gestalt von Baudelaire, Verlaine und Mallarmé), die Architektur (verkörpert durch Leon Battista Alberti) und die Malerei (in Gestalt der berühmten „Verspottung der Ceres“ von Adam Elsheimer und dreier Gemälde Poussins).

A parallel-text edition of the poems of Baudelaire with a new translation which restores once banned poems to their original places and reveals the full richness and variety of the collection.

'The poet makes himself a seer by a long, prodigious, and rational disordering of all the senses. . .' Rimbaud was sixteen when he made this famous declaration. By 1886, then thirty-two and an explorer, trader and slave-trader on the Red Sea, he had absolutely no interest in the fate or success of the poetry infused with mysticism, alchemy and magic that he had written in his teens. That same year, in Paris, Les Illuminations was being published as the work of 'the late' Arthur Rimbaud, first in a Symbolist periodical and then in book form, with an Introduction by his former lover, Verlaine. Seldom has a writer's vision of changing the world through words failed so spectacularly as did Rimbaud's. That failure turned him into an incomparable tragic poet: not only 'a wild undisciplined genius, a mystic philosopher and thinker, an inspired poet' but also, according to Enid Starkie, 'one of the most finished artists . . . a supreme master of prosody and style'. This Penguin Classic reproduces the text of the Pléiade edition, 1954, with selected letters and prose translations that have been highly acclaimed.

La Vérité de parole est le troisième volume de L’Improbable, recueil d’essais sur la poétique dont les deux premières parties sont L’Improbable (suivi d’Un rêve fait à Mantoue) et Le Nuage rouge. TABLE : I - Marceline Desbordes-Valmore ; La poétique de Nerval ; Madame Rimbaud ; II - Une écriture de notre temps ; III - Un poète « figuratif » ; Gaëtan Picon allait parler, ce soir-là ; Les mots, les noms, la terre ; Jorge Luis Borges ; IV -Quelque chose comme une lettre ; Note bibliographique

La Méditerranée considérée comme une chambre d'échos : 24 pays où s'écrivent et se parlent une quinzaine de langues. Cette anthologie ne se veut pas un palmarès, mais un parcours qui accueille les voix de toutes les rives, les voix vivantes qui entrent en résonance autant qu'en dissonance, en amitié autant qu'en opposition ou en défiance. Les poètes de Grèce, de Chypre, de Turquie, de Syrie, du Liban, d'Israël, de Palestine, d'Égypte, de Lybie, de Tunisie, d'Algérie, du Maroc, du Portugal, d'Espagne, de France, d'Italie, de Malte, de Croatie, de Slovénie, de Bosnie, de Serbie, du Monténégro, d'Albanie et de Macédoine ne cherchent pas d'accord factice autour d'une mer commune et sous un même ciel, ils disent un réel disparate, souvent déchiré, rarement réenchanté ; ils disent et leurs voix révèlent l'espace d'aujourd'hui dans le respect ou la dilapidation de tous les héritages.

La Quête du Graal« La Quête du Graal est une œuvre de littérature spirituelle, dont tous les détails « signifient » et servent à la transmission d'un certain message. Mais ce roman est en même temps un authentique chef-d'œuvre littéraire, l'un des plus beaux de tout le Moyen Âge. Il n'a rien d'une prédication ou d'un récit seulement édifiant ; les sermons mêmes des ermites qui périodiquement instruisent les héros et leur expliquent leurs songes ou leurs aventures ne rompent pas la trame de l'invention romanesque. Ce développement des symboles est nécessaire à une œuvre dont toute l'imagination est orientée vers une intelligence de signes cachés dans les événements, les rencontres et les rêves. »Albert Béguin

Salué dès sa publication en octobre 2001 comme l'un des livres majeurs d'Yves Bonnefoy, « Les Planches courbes » s'impose en effet au sommet d'un oeuvre sans faiblesse ni reniement. Une parole qui sait magistralement faire la place du sens et du chant s'élève, à la fois affirmée et fragile, inquiète et souveraine. Les planches courbes auxquelles le titre se réfère sont celles de la barque du passeur qui tente encore une avancée entre les deux rives du fleuve, les deux rives du rêve, les deux rives de la vie. La pluie d'été I Mais le plus cher mais non Le moins cruel De tous nos souvenirs, la pluie d'été Soudaine, brève. Nous allions, et c'était Dans un autre monde, Nos bouches s'enivraient De l'odeur de l'herbe. Terre, L'étoffe de la pluie se plaquait sur toi. C'était comme le sein Qu'eût rêvé un peintre" Yves Bonnefoy

Propose un résumé et des repères pour la lecture de l'oeuvre, ainsi qu'une approche de ses problématiques essentielles, pour se préparer à l'écrit et à l'oral.

Pisać, wystarczy jedno słowo, a już pojawia się i pracuje język, a wraz z nim nieścisłości, pułapki cała przeszłość mowy. Dla pisarza nie ma nic bezpośredniego, nawet jeśli jest wyczulony na to, co nie posiada jeszcze nazwy ani określonego kształtu. Intuicyjnie rozpoznaje odmienną jakość prawdy, która tkwi w kwitnącej gałązce albo w toczącym się po dnie wąwozu kamieniu. Jednakże próba odtworzenia w słowach nieskończonej gęstości lub kompletnej pustki jest od początku szaleńczym pragnieniem, z którego strona po stronie musi rezygnować żywiąca się takimi doświadczeniami poezja. Jeszcze dziś niektórzy malują w ten sposób: wychodząc od kolorów, które na płótnie rozpraszają nasze wspomnienia i przekraczają znaczenie. Takie malarstwo jest tylko sobą: wydaje się, że kurtyna została rozdarta i mamy dostęp do bezpośredniego doświadczenia.

La mythologie gréco-romaine a été une source d'inspiration inépuisable pour les artistes. La redécouverte de l'Antiquité au XVe siècle a permis la renaissance de cet univers riche en héros, récits épiques et histoires d'amour entre dieux et mortels, que des artistes tels que Titien, Poussin, Tintoret ou Rembrandt ont exploré. L'enthousiasme des artistes, libres avec leurs pinceaux, est palpable lorsqu'ils interprètent les mots d'Homère ou d'Ovide, traduisant les mouvements d'une pulsion, le jeu des regards et la force érotique d'un corps, tout en intégrant le fantastique. Cependant, les peintres, en traduisant les poètes, commettent souvent des trahisons. Faux-sens et contresens nourrissent leurs créations. Par exemple, l'érudition de Botticelli contraste avec la désinvolture de Corrège, qui dédaigne le texte d'Ovide en ajoutant une métamorphose inédite à l'histoire de Jupiter et Io. En interprétant les amours des dieux, les artistes découvrent également la liberté inhérente à l'acte de créer. Cet ouvrage propose de revisiter la mythologie en mettant en parallèle les récits passionnés des amours divines et les œuvres d'art, peintes ou sculptées, inspirées par ce mariage du ciel et de la terre.

Nouvelle édition en 1986

Francouzští básníci poslední doby Jaká je dnešní francouzská poezie? Bezpochyby formálně a názorové bohatá. Má také různou myšlenkovou inspiraci: surrealistickou, existencialistickou i křesťanskou. Českému čtenáři, vedenému k zemitosti a lidovosti, se však může zdát abstraktní a spekulativní... Má blízko k próze, a to poetické zůstává v maximálně účinném obraze, v hudbě a volbě slov a v rytmu věty. Ve Francii se klade větší důraz na jazykovou stránku poezie. V naší znalosti francouzské poezie vznikla mezera a tu bylo třeba zaplnit. Antologie obsahuje ukázky z tvorby 14 současných francouzských básníků. Svazek seznamuje čtenáře jednak s předchůdci dnešní francouzské poezie (Char, Ponge, Michaux), dále s básníky narozenými ve 20. letech i se současnými nadějnými autory. Editor Aleš Pohorský. Kniha je doplněna fotografiemi Paříže od Barbary Huckové.

Bonnefoy, esejista je jedním z vrcholných představitelů francouzské tradice kultivovaného přemýšlení o věcech umění, tradice, na níž participovali Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry nebo Reverdy. Tematická škála jeho esejů je rozsáhlá: vedle zamyšlení o osudech a funkci poezie jsou věnovány i jednotlivým básníkům, sochařům, malířům a architektům. Předkládaný výbor přináší jednak filozoficky fundované úvahy o místě básnického slova v dnešním kulturním kontextu, jednak brilantní charakteristiky básníků a výtvarných umělců, jako jsou Leopardi, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Celan, Mondrian nebo Giacometti. Přeložil Jiří Pelán a Václav Jamek.

Zatím poslední básnická sbírka francouzského básníka a esejisty, jednoho z nejvýraznějších představitelů současné francouzské kultury. Sbírka veršů podivuhodně oproštěných a projasněných, poezie, jež si uchovala vnímavost, citlivost a samozřejmost dětského pohledu.

V překladu a s obsáhlým doslovem Jiřího Pelána vycházejí dvě sbírky nejvýznamnějšího současného francouzského básníka. Hluboká poezie, zrcadlící tragiku lidské existence, vybízí k opětovnému čtení, kdy znovu odhaluje své při prvním čtení nezachycené stránky.

Tryzne súčasného vedomia v jeho vzťahu k svetu a funkcia, ktorú v súčasnosti môže plniť poézia a umenie, to sú otázky, ktorým dielo Yvesa Bonnefoya čelí od svojich začiatkov. Prináša na ne odpoveď spôsobom slobodným a úplne osobným, ale s úsilím sprostredkovať zmysel, ktorý môže byť zdieľaný v širokom meradle. Vybral a preložil Ján Švantner.