Yves Bonnefoy

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Yves Bonnefoy: Notes of an Admirer

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[The obsessive and dominating theme of Yves Bonnefoy's writings is] the conflict between faith and reason, hope and despair, life and death, light and darkness, between "le vrai lieu" and "le désert." No writer of our time has expressed this theme in more impressive and convincing accents than Yves Bonnefoy. And it is because he refuses, like Dostoevsky, to surrender either pole of the terrible antinomy—because he feels each with equal purity and equal strength—that his work is so powerful and (I use the word advisedly) so exhilarating. For it is only by being able to endure, as Hegel would say, the full power of the negative, that whatever positive emerges—tentative and minimal as it must inevitably be in our own time—maintains its ability to console and to persuade. (pp. 400-01)

It seems to me that students of Yves Bonnefoy would be well advised to explore [his] "Russian connection," [or the influence of such writers as Dostoevsky, Borigde Schloezer, Lev Shestov, and Wladimir Weidlé on his work] and to weigh its share in supporting the values that he espouses. My own guess would be to regard this Russian component as contributing to reinforce and strengthen Bonnefoy's reaction against the seductions of estheticism in all its forms and varieties (a seduction so strong in the French late nineteenth-century tradition), his fascination with the metaphysical aspirations of Rimbaud and the religious velleities of Baudelaire, his demand that art serve a profound human function and satisfy a deep spiritual longing rather than becoming a refuge from the risks and hazards of human life. (p. 401)

This is one of the perspectives on Yves Bonnefoy that has occurred to me; another arises from the fact that he is not only a reader of English poetry but a translator of Shakespeare and Yeats. There is no question that his relation to English poetry is many-sided and intricate…. (p. 402)

I do not know if anyone else has ever made the comparison, but I have always been struck very forcibly by the resemblance between a certain aspect of Bonnefoy and a special Wordsworthian timbre. The spare, stark quality of Bonnefoy's language and the monumental simplicity of the scenes he evokes are closer than anything I can think of in French poetry to the spirit of the best Wordsworth…. [The resemblance between Wordsworth and Bonnefoy is worth investigating because] Bonnefoy's elucidation of the essential creative intuition from which his best poetry springs bears an uncanny resemblance to Wordsworth's description of those "spots of time" which also furnished him with poetic inspiration. (pp. 402-03)

[Is] there not a remarkable similarity between Wordsworth's "spots of time" visions, which are the nuclear core of his poetry, and Bonnefoy's description of his own inner metamorphosis at the moment of poetic apprehension?…

There is much more that could be said about the relation between Bonnefoy and Wordsworth, who both draw their most powerful imagery from rural life … and who both wish to strip language of all rhetorical excess so that it may become the proper vehicle for the expression of these "beautiful and permanent forms" and the revelations which they provide. (p. 403)

Joseph Frank, "Yves Bonnefoy: Notes of an Admirer," in World Literature Today (copyright 1979 by the University of Oklahoma Press), Vol. 53, No. 3, Summer, 1979, pp. 399-405.

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