Yves Bonnefoy

Yves Bonnefoy’s book of poems, Beginning and End of the Snow followed by Where the Arrow Falls, combines two meditations in which the poet’s thoughts and a landscape reflect each other. In the first, the wintry New England landscape he encountered while teaching at Williams College evokes the dance of atoms in the philosophical poem of Lucretius as well as the Christian doctrine of death and resurrection. In the second, Bonnefoy uses the luminous woods of Haute Provence as the setting for a parable of losing one’s way.

Since the publication of his first book in 1953, Yves Bonnefoy has become one of the most important French poets of the postwar years. At last, we have the long-awaited English translation of his celebrated work "L'Arriere-Pays", which takes us to the heart of his creative process and to the very core of his poetic spirit. In his poem "The Convex Mirror," Bonnefoy writes: "Look at them down there, at that crossroads, / They seem to hesitate, then go on." The idea of the crossroads haunts Bonnefoy's work, as he is troubled by the idea that the path not taken may lead to the arriere-pays, a place of greater plenitude, and of more authentic being - an "elsewhere in the absolute." Seized by this fear that what he terms "presence" exists always somewhere else, a little further on, Bonnefoy here sets out on a labyrinthine quest to find traces of this "original place," which he locates not only in objects of knowledge and experience as diverse as the deserts of Asia, a hill fort in India, a church in Armenia, and the paintings of Piero della Francesca but also, crucially, in the undivided intensity of his experiences as a child. Written with a visionary grace, "The Arriere-Pays" is a spiritual testament to art, philosophy, and poetry. Enriched by a new preface by the poet, this volume also includes three recent essays in which he returns to his original account of an ethical and aesthetic haunting, one that recounts the struggle between our instinct to idealize - what he deems our eternal Platonism - and the equally strong need to combat this and to be reconciled with our nature as finite beings, made of flesh and blood, in the world of the here and now.

For decades readers and critics have acclaimed Yves Bonnefoy as France's greatest living poet. His most recent book of verse, The Curved Planks, crowns an oeuvre that has won him the highest international honors. More than any other single work, this sequence embodies the astonishing variety of Bonnefoy's art. A rich fabric of themes, styles, and genres, it balances aesthetic complexity with heartfelt directness. This bilingual edition of The Curved Planks sets the French texts alongside English versions by the noted translator Hoyt Rogers, who has collaborated closely with Bonnefoy in crafting poems that re-create the freshness and vision of the originals. This volume also includes a preface by the renowned poet and critic Richard Howard and essays by the translator that situate The Curved Planks in the author's body of work. All assist in introducing the English-language reader to Bonnefoy's profound poetic gift.

This selection spans four decades and draws on all of Bonnefoy's major collections. The translations, many of them new, are presented alongside the original French. Naughton's introduction looks at the evolution of Bonnefoy's poetry from 1953 to 1993.

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 ilan, 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

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.

This bilingual edition of the contemporary master's fifth work, Ce qui fut sans lumi, re, will delight, engage, and stir all lovers of poetry. Included here is an extensive new interview with the poet in English translation. "Included here is a very helpful and touchingly personal interview with the poet. . . . For readers with no prior knowledge of Bonnefoy's work, this volume would be an excellent place to start."—Stephen Romer, Times Literary Supplement