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- Herausgeber: Fyfield Books
- Kategorie: Poesie und Drama
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
France's greatest poet of the last half century, Yves Bonnefoy wrote many books of poetry and poetic prose, as well as celebrated critical essays on literature and art (to which a second volume will be devoted). At his death in 2016 aged ninety-three, he was Emeritus Professor of Comparative Poetics at the Collège de France. The selection for this volume (and the second one) 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. A dual language edition.
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Poems ofYves Bonnefoy
edited & translated by Anthony Rudolf, John Naughton & Stephen Romer
with other translations by Galway Kinnell, Richard Pevear, Beverley Bie Brahic, Emily Grosholz, Susanna Lang & Hoyt Rogers
Contents
Preface
anthony rudolf
Yves Bonnefoy’s work for well over sixty years has been a two-track adventure in poetry and prose that has few equals since Baudelaire and Leopardi. Few poets have had a ‘second’ oeuvrein prose so intertwined with their poetry, so rich in signs and wonders, so complex and yet so trustful of readers. It was time to bring the two tracks together in one collection. Bonnefoy has observed that poetry, which, unlike prose, ‘knows its own mendacity’, is ‘the memory of truth’. The phrase ‘unlike prose’ is thus tested in the present volume and might have to be reworded as ‘unlike critical prose’. The reason is that this book, like the forthcoming French Pléiade edition of Bonnefoy’s work, contains not only poetry as such but also what he himself calls the poetic prose he was writing around the time he composed various groups of poems. His comment has logically to refer to his critical prose, which will form a companion Carcanet volume in due course, containing some of his lengthy and remarkable essays on a wide range of topics including Rimbaud and Shakespeare, Yeats and Borges, Mozart and artists such as Piero della Francesca and Edward Hopper.
The six sections of this book have been created for the sake of convenience and manageability, although there is a certain logic to the ordering. The reader will notice that only the verse (and the alternate prose parts of ‘Theatre’) have the original French on the facing page. This was for reasons of space but it also implies a logical distinction between verse poetry and prose poetry or poetical prose. Nor is there any escape from the loss, even the violence, entailed in using extracts from poetry books conceived and structured as architectonic wholes. The books are artfully orchestrated ensembles that seek to contain and to reconcile opposing forces. Nonetheless, we hope that the reader will turn to the complete books already available in English translation, all of which contain the French originals.
Poets’ prose has been essential to the life of literature in France for more than two hundred years because poetry became, in Bonnefoy’s xwords, ‘a very calculated, self-conscious form, and thus at a far remove from everyday speech – from which it followed that a number of experiences that might have become poetry were left behind by verse and had to seek other means of expression, most notably in prose. And indeed they did. For example, the eminently poetic feeling for nature, which in England is active in the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats, has found its home in French in […] the prose of Rousseau, Joseph Joubert, de Guérin or Chateaubriand.’ (from an essay written as a reply to an Oxford lecture, mainly about Bonnefoy, by Christopher Ricks).
Like Rilke’s DuinoElegies, Bonnefoy’s poetry names and celebrates the fundamental things, the simple things, of our world. Like that of Wordsworth, ‘a man speaking to men’, his poetry incarnates what it means to be a human being – one who thinks life, who thinks death, who thinks art, who thinks thought. At the same time, the extraordinary energy and potency of Bonnefoy’s prose, ‘sa gravité enflammée’, in the fine phrase of Philippe Jaccottet’s, are the result of a tension. This tension is, to simplify, between presence and concept: concepts are arrogant excarnations born of gnostic duality, denying presence, finitude and mortality. In TheArrière-pays(an excerpt is included in the present volume), the tension is brought to its most extreme, in that it impinges on the poet’s own spiritual journey. Italy and its art generate a way of thinking about concept and presence, about abstraction and finitude. There is a kind of synthesis, Bonnefoy concludes, in Poussin (who lived in Rome for sixteen years) and his search for the key to a ‘musique savante’.
Conceptual thought, which is ‘the original sin of knowledge’, always runs the risk of reductiveness to a single aspect (as in science and law), always runs the risk of abstraction or idealisation of what Rimbaud calls ‘rough reality’, the risk of alienating the gaze, in a word, the risk of dogma and fetishisation. Poetry guards against this by mirroring these dangers in a perpetual agon, for only thus can presence make itself felt in plenitude. ‘Poetry is an unceasing battle between representation and presence’, Bonnefoy writes in an essay where he confronts these issues and admits to having polemicised in earlier writings in a way which would be misunderstood by some readers. In his introduction to the present volume, John Naughton, xithe most important Bonnefoy scholar outside France, explores the manifold implications of the poet’s thinking in his poems and the way the poems and prose imbricate each other.
Bonnefoy has commented on the way the eminent translator Pierre Leyris would discuss translations ‘word by word, with the patience which springs from the heart allied to the intelligence’. This was while they were both engaged in a major Shakespeare project involving several translators. In turn, the patience referred to is evident in the work of Bonnefoy translators loyal to him over many years, rewarding his support and generosity with their affection, gratitude and best work. Indeed, for this volume, unlike the forthcoming volume of critical prose, it has not been a question of soliciting new translations. We have often had the good fortune to select from several good versions of the same poem and have not hesitated to use the work of different translators even in sequences of poems. We hope that new and existing readers of Bonnefoy will explore the many-sided work of the senior figure who started out as a young surrealist at the end of the war and, for seventy years, continued to produce poetry and prose of such depth and richness. We experience ‘The horizon of a voice where stars are falling, / Moon merging with the chaos of the dead’.
Yves Bonnefoy died on 1 July 2016, shortly after his ninety-third birthday. The selections for this volume (poetry and poetic prose) and, to some extent, for volume two (critical essays), were made by him in conjunction with the editors. He did not choose the translations, saying he had full confidence in our judgment. It is a great sadness that he did not live to see the publication of these two books in a language he loved and which he translated into French with such distinction and mastery. This essay and John Naughton’s were written before Yves Bonnefoy died. xii
Introduction
john naughton
Yves Bonnefoy is widely recognised as the most important French poet of the post-war era and as one of the most significant European writers of the last sixty years. His work is wide-ranging and diverse and includes poems in verse, poems in prose, fiction, literary and art criticism, and translations of Shakespeare, Donne, Keats, Leopardi, and Yeats. Bonnefoy is also the editor of the acclaimed DictionnairedesMythologiesetdesreligionsdessociétéstraditionnellesetdumondeantique. He has been a regular visitor to the United States, where he has been a guest professor at such places as the City University of New York, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Wesleyan, Brandeis, Williams College, and the University of California. He has lectured in many places in Europe, as well as in Japan, Great Britain, and Ireland. He has won the Prix Montaigne, the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Balzan, and the HudsonReview’s Bennett Award among other prizes and has been the recipient of many distinctions, including honorary doctorates from Oxford, Trinity College (Dublin), the University of Chicago, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Rome. In 2001, he was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
Born in Tours in 1923 and educated there until the end of his teens, Bonnefoy lost his father, a railway foreman, when he was only thirteen. After his father’s death his mother took a job as a teacher at a grade school outside Tours and looked after the education of her son. Bonnefoy eventually received an advanced degree in mathematics and philosophy before coming to occupied Paris in 1943. There he became involved in the surrealist circles, met and was admired by André Breton, and edited his own small review, called – with appropriate iconoclasm – LaRévolutionlanuit, after the painting by Max Ernst. He also married and taught mathematics and science for a time. The publication in 1953 of his first major book of poetry, DuMouvementetdel’immobilitédeDouve(OntheMotionandImmobilityofDouve), immediately placed him at the forefront of the new generation of French poets. Here was a voice, as even the somewhat xivresistant Jean Grosjean admitted, to be listened to with ‘the most serious attention’.
Inevitably the question was raised: who or what is Douve? A mysterious feminine presence, her death, physical decomposition, and resurrection put one in mind of the romantic notion enunciated by Edgar Allan Poe that ‘the death […] of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world’. And her relation to the poetic narrator would seem also to support Poe’s conviction that ‘the lips best suited for such are those of a bereaved lover’.
On the other hand, she seems intimately related to the poetic process itself, to the nature of inspiration and to the impact of death on inspiration. Now, death is a category in this poem that involves recognition not only of the fate of flesh – the opening sequence, called ‘Théâtre’, deals with physical decomposition with a brutal frankness reminiscent of Villon – but also of the inertia and life-lessness of established representation. The constant resurrections of Douve, however, her almost Ovidian metamorphoses, are the poetic expression of the recurrent but ephemeral moment of epiphanous vision, which retreats from what would try to capture or express it: ‘… à chaque instant je te vois naître, Douve, / À chaque instant mourir’. (‘each moment I see you born, Douve, / Each moment die’). Poetic utterance is not equal to the reality it seeks to articulate; what it touches dies from its touch, only to be resurrected as an unreachable domain, inexhaustible and eternally elusive. The French word douvemeans ‘moat’ or ‘ditch’. But the word also contains the notion of opening (d’ouverture), ‘tenté dans l’épaisseur du monde’ (‘attempted in the thickness of the world’), and poetry’s refusal to resign itself to the impossible is the reminder that Douveis associated with the human spirit, with those spiritual aspirations suggested by the English word ‘dove’, traditional symbol of the Holy Spirit whose origins are mysterious (d’où: where from?). Douveseems also to be a reflection of Bonnefoy’s idea of présence, which is the momentary apprehension of the fundamental unity of all being. This experience is always fleeting; it will, Bonnefoy tells us in his essay ‘Les Tombeaux de Ravenne’ (‘The Tombs of Ravenna’), ‘be lost a thousand times, but it has the glory of a god’. xv
To the extent that it is present, the object never ceases disappearing. To the extent that it disappears, it imposes, it cries out its presence.
As readers of Bonnefoy, it is important for us to note that, however tempting it is to use his essays as keys to the poems, he has always insisted on ‘the disparity […] between the realm of the image and that of the formulation’.
Gaëtan Picon, writing of the new French poets who had emerged after the Second World War, said of them that they felt totally disinherited from all poetic tradition. Marked by war, by a history ‘so monstrous that it denies all poetic possibility’, the new generation of poets, in Picon’s view, felt ‘separated from the word it might be, from the universe it might name’. Appropriately, Picon placed the efforts of the new poets ‘between the fact of ruin and the desire for reconstruction’. Some of these notions may be felt in certain of the poems of Douve.
Ainsi marcherons-nous sur les ruines d’un ciel immense,
Le site au loin s’accomplira
Commeundestindanslavivelumière.
Lepaysleplusbeaulongtempscherché
S’étendradevantnousterredessalamandres.
Regarde,diras-tu,cettepierre:
Elleportelaprésencedelamort.
Lampesecrètec’estellequibrûlesousnosgestes,
Ainsimarchons-nouséclairés.
So we will walk among the ruins of a boundless sky,
The horizon will unfold
Like a destiny in the quickened light.
The most beautiful country sought so long
Will stretch before us, land of the salamanders. xvi
You will say, look at this stone:
It carries the presence of death.
Secret lamp, it burns beneath us
As we move along, and so we walk in light.
[translated by Anthony Rudolf]
The first line, on one level at least, seems to speak of a painful period of decline – the end of a certain idealist tradition, the repudiation of the now invalid images of romantic reveries. The heavens, which have collapsed with their images, represent precisely the infinite imaginaire, which is the extreme form of alienation. On the other hand, the ‘ruins’ of the first line of the poem already point to the guiding stone that will appear at the end of the text.
The future tense of the initial verbs is suggestive of the search or quest for meaning in an age of spiritual eclipse. The ‘site’ of which the poem speaks indicates the ground upon which the future dwelling will be established. This ground is the land of the salamander, spirit of resurrection, survivor of fire and flood, and symbol for Bonnefoy, through its silent, unpretentious adherence to earth, of ‘all that is pure’. This land, which a misguided longing may have ‘sought’ unknowingly, is perhaps nothing so much as the simple evidence before us, its most common features – water, stone, tree – improbable and completely sustaining presences for the vision purified of an unbounded nostalgia, or, put another way, infused with the energy normally expended on transcendence and dream.
The exhortation of the last stanza is the poet’s determination to convert the futurity of the projected quest of the first two parts of the poem into a present apprehension of both limitation and plenitude. This intuition is granted, as it so often is in Bonnefoy’s work, by the stone, which he views as the ‘exemplary form of the real’. Bonnefoy’s stones are reminiscent of those sepulchres in Poussin’s EtinArcadiaEgopaintings, which rise up as a reminder of death’s presence even in Arcadia to control an absent-minded absorption in nature’s splendours; they have something, too, of those skulls in Georges de la Tour that seem, more than the light from the nearby candle, to be the real source of the illumination on the penitent’s face. Recognition of finitude is the ‘secret’ source of grounding and orientation xviiin the poem. It is what now illuminates the poetic effort, the act of ‘knowing and naming’. The lamp of stone will accompany the poet through all his future wanderings, casting a dark but unmistakable light along his path. The poet will hold tight to this secret source in a kind of marriage with consciousness (‘le mariage le plus bas’).
Etsigrandsoitlefroidquimontedetonêtre,
Sibrûlantsoitlegeldenotreintimité,
Douve,jeparleentoi;etjet’enserre
Dansl’actedeconnaîtreetdenommer.
And however great the coldness rising from you,
However searing the ice of our embrace,
Douve, I do speak in you; and I hold you close
In the act of knowing and of naming.
[Galway Kinnell]
Douveworks out a shattering death rite. But if it deals in destruction, if it seeks to shatter the safe enclosures provided by representation and idea, if it means to restore us to a primitive sense of mystery and awe in the presence of the simplest of things, and with death as its starting point, it does so in a largely mythic, a-temporal setting. In short, while the poem sets out to record the devastations of being and the travail of becoming, it does so without incorporating a sense of existential time, or of the poet’s own specific place in it. The critic Jean Grosjean complained that Douvewas primarily concerned with literary problems and that its heroine appeared to have passed through too many universities. Although the criticism is both harsh and misguided, it points to a judgment that will be levelled against Bonnefoy in varying forms throughout his career and to which I will return.
*
Bonnefoy’s next book of poems, Hierrégnantdésert(Yesterday’sWildernessKingdom), published in 1958, would in fact deal with the poet’s own crisis in consciousness. ‘What I accused in myself,’ he would write in his autobiographical work L’Arrière-pays(1972), xviii‘what I thought I could recognise and judge, was the pleasure of creating artistically, the preference given to created beauty over lived experience’. ‘I saw correctly’, he goes on to say, ‘that such a choice, in devoting words to themselves, in making of them a private language, created a universe which guaranteed the poet everything; except that by withdrawing from the openness of days, by disregarding time and other people, he was in fact headed towards nothing except solitude.’ This assessment in part explains the repeated attacks on formal beauty that are found in this work, as for instance in the poem ‘L’imperfection est la cime’(‘Imperfection is the Summit’).
Ilyavaitqu’ilfallaitdétruireetdétruireetdétruire,
Ilyavaitquelesalutn’estqu’àceprix.
Ruiner la face nue qui monte dans le marbre,
Marteler toute forme toute beauté.
Aimer la perfection parce qu’elle est le seuil,
Mais la nier sitôt connue, l’oublier morte,
L’imperfectionestlacime.
There was this:
You had to destroy, destroy, destroy.
There was this:
Salvation is only found at such a price.
You had to
Ruin the naked face that rises in the marble,
Hammer at every beauty, every form.
Love perfection because it is the threshold,
But deny it once known, once dead forget it.
Imperfection is the summit.
[ar]
Hierrégnantdésertreflects more suffering and self-doubt than do any of Bonnefoy’s other works. It is also the most painfully self-conscious. xixInterrogation of methods, the effort to constitute a ‘self’, the struggle with the question of time, the search for artistic values, for new departure – the problems that pervade Hierrégnantdésertrepresent the difficult coming of age of the poet and translate his struggle to establish both a poetic and an ethical identity.
As is the case in all of Bonnefoy’s poetic works – and their moral dimension resides in this – Hierrégnantdésertseeks to master the problems it presents and to balance one set of forces with another. The painful awareness of entrapment in a dark night of the soul (‘I was lost in the silence I gave birth to’), the recognition of the night-mare-haunted child one has been, give way to a renewed sense of self-mastery, since these acknowledgements constitute responses and seek to convert, as Bonnefoy wrote a few years later in his study of Rimbaud, ‘what one endures into what one takes on, suffering into being’. The entire movement of this work is to reconnect with that dawn which is ‘the daughter of tears’, and to restore ‘the footstep to its true place’. The radiantly confident poems that end the book, inspired in part by a trip the poet made to Greece, are a sign of this renewal.
Icil’inquiètevoix consentd’aimer
Lapierre simple,
Lesdallesqueletempsasservitetdélivre,
L’olivierdontlaforceagoûtdesèchepierre.
Here the unquiet voice agrees to love
Simple stone,
Flagstones time enslaves, delivers,
The olive tree whose strength tastes of dry stone.
[ar]
*
If Yves Bonnefoy’s first two books of poetry are marked by a solitary and stoical vigilance, by an icy sleeplessness and constriction, his third book, Pierreécrite(WordsinStone, 1965), is striking precisely because of its contrasting expansiveness and trust, and because of xxthe sudden presence of a beloved other who appears in the opening poems of the book – ‘smiling, pristine, sea-washed’ – like some Venus from her shell, and whose ‘frail earthly hands’ untangle ‘the sorrowful knot of dreams’. A new fullness and confidence pervade Pierreécrite, and the poet can exclaim:
Nous n’avons plus besoin
D’images déchirantes pour aimer.
Cet arbre nous suffit, là-bas […]
We no longer need
Harrowing images in order to love,
That tree over there is enough […]
[Richard Pevear]
Why this confidence? Part of the explanation undoubtedly lies in the maturation upon which the poems repeatedly insist. Bonnefoy’s translation of Hamletappeared the same year as Hierrégnantdésert, surely Bonnefoy’s ‘greyest’ book. Some years later (1978), Bonnefoy wrote an important essay called ‘Readiness, Ripeness: Hamlet, Lear’, in which he remarks that Hamlet confronts a world without meaning and hence feels that ‘a single act still has some logic and is worthy of being carried out: and that is to take great pains to detach oneself from every illusion and to be ready to accept everything – everything, but first of all and especially death, essence of all life – with irony and indifference’. The ‘ripeness’ that is so often apparent in KingLearreflects ‘the quintessence of the world’s order, whose unity one seems to breathe’, whereas the ‘readiness’ of Hamlet is ‘the reverse side of this order, when one no longer sees anything in the greyness of the passing days but the incomprehensible weave’. One might characterise Hierrégnantdésertas a kind of Hamlet-phase, or Hamlet-crisis. The epigraph Bonnefoy chooses for Pierreécrite, on the other hand, is a quotation from TheWinter’sTale– that play which Bonnefoy sees as ‘in fact solar’ and which he feels could be ‘superimposed on Hamletpoint for point’: ‘Thou mettest with things dying; I with things newborn.’ Indeed, the new collection, with its rich and colourful evocations of nature and place, of languorous erotic experience, of the blessings of simple domestic life, does seem to constitute a fresh departure for the poet. xxi
In the early 1960s, Bonnefoy and his second wife, American-born Lucille Vines, discovered an abandoned building in Provence, near the Vachère mountain, a building which at one time had been a monastery, and which, after the Revolution, had been converted into some kind of farmhouse. Bonnefoy’s attachment to the place and to the surrounding countryside was instantaneous. It was here that he felt he must live:
Wooded hills, a vast sky, narrow paths that run among the stones beneath red clouds, the eternity of the simple rural life, the few shepherds, the flocks of sheep, the silence everywhere: only Virgil or Poussin, whom I loved so much, had spoken to me seriously of these things. […] This was the beginning of several years of profound attachment, despite great difficulties, and even a sense of contradiction that was painful to experience. We got rid of the hay and the partitions that the peasants had added after the Revolution to reduce the size of the rooms, and thus, thanks to our efforts, the religious character of what once had been the church was restored, but its authority scarcely lent itself to the daily life we had to lead, even though we tried – in vain of course – to bring this life as close as possible to the being of the snake beneath the stones of the entrance, or the buzzards and the owls and the hoopoes that built their nests in the walls or in the open barns. There was more of the real here than anywhere else, more immanence in the light on the angle of the walls or in the water from new storms, but there were also a thousand forms of impossibility – I won’t go into all the turns this took – and so there was also more dreaming.
[John Naughton]
This place is the central element both in Pierreécriteand in the later Dansleleurreduseuil(TheLureoftheThreshold, 1975). Its memory haunts Cequifutsanslumière(IntheShadow’sLight, 1987). And this is because Bonnefoy will have lived in this locale an experience of the profound oneness of being. This experience is promoted by Eros (‘I was loving, I was standing in the eternal dream’, one poem affirms). Love engenders a myriad of echoes and associations, and xxiiassures entrance into what Georges Bataille has called ‘the continuity of being’. A depth opens up behind things, as is reflected in the poem ‘Le myrte’.
Parfoisjetesavaislaterre,jebuvais
Surteslèvresl’angoissedesfontaines
Quand elle sourd des pierres chaudes, et l’été
Dominait haut la pierre heureuse et le buveur.
Parfois je te disais de myrte et nous brûlions
L’arbre de tous tes gestes tout un jour.
C’étaient de grands feux brefs de lumière vestale,
Ainsi je t’inventais parmi tes cheveux clairs.
Tout un grand été nul avait séché nos rêves,
Rouillé nos voix, accru nos corps, défait nos fers.
Parfois le lit tournait comme une barque libre
Qui gagne lentement le plus haut de la mer.
Sometimes I knew you as the earth, I drank
Upon your lips the anguish of springs
Welling among warm stones, and summer
Loomed above the rapt stone and the drinker.
Sometimes I called you myrtle and we burned
The tree of all your gestures all day long.
Those were the great brief fires of vestal light,
Thus I invented you in your bright hair.
A vast and empty summer scorched our dreams, rusted
Our voices, increased our bodies, broke our chains.
Sometimes the bed turned like a boat set free
That slowly gains the high, the open sea.
[Emily Grosholz]
The ‘you’ addressed in the poem assumes a variety of forms, and Bonnefoy organises the poem around the repetition of the initiatory xxiiiword ‘sometimes’ to suggest the intermittent manifestations of this beloved presence, represented by the elemental realities of earth, water, and fire which are evoked in succession. It is evident that Bonnefoy knows about the historical significance of myrtle – the fact that this evergreen shrub was sacred to Venus, the goddess of love, and that, while connected with resurrection and life-in-death, it is also closely associated with love, marriage and bounty. That the myrtle in Bonnefoy’s poem keeps some of its traditional erotic symbolism is confirmed by the fact that the gestures – of bending to drink, of watching the flash of fire – are nicely ambiguous and could be read as suggesting the fundamental ‘materiality’ of the sexual act itself. But this is the richness of presence, that it leads from one thing to another, that it encourages the poet, as a part of his ‘inventiveness’, to see hair in fire, or fire in hair, or to feel lips in earth’s water, water in lips.
One can identify several philosophical influences on Bonnefoy’s poetics, and one of them comes from Plotinus. ‘All Being is one’, writes Plotinus in his Enneads. ‘Being is bound up with the unity which is never apart from it; wheresoever Being appears, there appears its unity’ (Enneads, 4.4.11). In his essays Bonnefoy has echoed this thought, which the poems express less explicitly. The simplest object – the salamander one sees on a wall, for instance – may suddenly become the gateway to an awareness of the unity of all being. ‘Its essence’, writes Bonnefoy, ‘has spread into the essence of other beings, like the flowing of an analogy through which I perceive everything in the continuity and the sufficiency of a place, and in the transparency of unity.’
The love poems that make up the third section of Pierreécrite(‘Un feu va devant nous’) are among the most beautiful lyric poems of Bonnefoy’s oeuvre. He has not, however, forgotten about human finitude, despite his feeling that he has ‘reentered the garden / whose gates the angel closed forever’ and that his lips have tasted an eternity dispelling all thought of death. A number of the poems that make up the second section of Pierreécrite(also titled ‘Pierre écrite’) are simply called ‘A Stone’, and they may be read as epitaphs on tombstones that recall the brevity or the futility of human existence. Still, what emerges predominantly in this work is the sense of affirmation xxivand peace, and the feeling of life being shared. Though death is ever present, even in the place that seems the pathway to unity and plenitude, it is made to share a place with ‘the wisdom that chooses living’.
Nous vieillissions, lui le feuillage et moi la source,
Lui le peu de soleil et moi la profondeur,
Etluilamortetmoilasagessedevivre.
We grew old, he the leaves and I the pool,
He a patch of sunlight and I the depths,
He death and I the wisdom that chose life.
[rp]
The emphasis on aging contributes to the sense of an ongoing and maturing relationship in which recognition of death and limitation is diffused through a tempered acceptance of life. The insistence upon gladness and love points to a change in vision, to that ‘change in the light’ of which another poem speaks.
Nousnenousvoyonsplusdanslamêmelumière,
Nousn’avonspluslesmêmesyeux,lesmêmesmains.
L’arbreestplusproche,etlavoixdessourcesplusvive,
Nospassontplusprofonds,parmilesmorts.
We no longer see each other in the same light,
We no longer have the same eyes, or the same hands.
The tree is closer, and the water’s voice more lively,
Our steps go deeper now, among the dead.
[jn]
In 1861, Baudelaire wrote a memorable letter to his mother in which he declared, ‘with all my heart I want to believe (and with a sincerity I alone can know) that an outside and invisible being takes an interest in my destiny, but what can I do to believe it?’ He could also affirm, however, that ‘God is the only being who, in order to reign, does not even need to exist.’ Bonnefoy’s relation to divine transcendence also contains a paradoxical dimension. The poem ‘La Lumière, changée’, the first stanza of which was cited above, concludes in the following way: xxv
Dieuquin’espas,posetamainsurnotreépaule,
Ébauchenotrecorpsdupoidsdetonretour,
Achèvedemêlerànosâmescesastres,
Cesbois,cescrisd’oiseaux,cesombresetcesjours.
Renonce-toi en nous comme un fruit se déchire,
Efface-nous en toi. Découvre-nous
Lesensmystérieuxdecequin’estquesimple
Etfûttombésansfeudansdesmotssansamour.
God, who are not, put your hand on our shoulder,
Rough cast our body with the weight of your return,
Finish blending our souls with these stars,
These woods, these bird cries, these shadows and these days.
Give yourself up in us the way fruit tears apart,
Have us disappear in you. Reveal to us
The mysterious meaning in what is merely simple
And would have fallen without fire in words without love.
[jn]
The poet speaks very directly and intimately to a force he seems convinced ‘is not’ (‘Dieu qui n’es pas’). There is a significant difference in the way Bonnefoy experiences this paradox and the way Baudelaire does. Yes, the poem seems to say, ‘God is not’, but this ‘absence’ allows the reality that presents itself to the physical senses to assert itself, if not as a divine power, at least with enough certainty and significance as to completely sustain the person who adheres to it. In fact, the poem seems to place in opposition an immanence in which one can live fully and a transcendent order viewed as illusory and impracticable. ‘Renouncing itself ’, this order, like a setting sun, gives its radiance to the real world, thus illuminating its rich and inexhaustible substantiality. The self merges with this simple immanence, refusing the lure of some ideal and imperishable world, governed by an invisible and all-powerful divinity.
Another of the major philosophical influences on Bonnefoy is the Russian thinker Lev Shestov (1866–1938). Shestov confirmed xxviBonnefoy’s intuition that the rational way in which we receive the world, largely through the mediation of conceptual thinking, in fact impoverishes us. ‘Reason’, wrote Shestov in his PotestasClavium, which Bonnefoy read as a young man, ‘with all its generalisations and its anticipations […] does not enlarge but, on the contrary, infinitely restricts our already sufficiently impoverished experience.’ There are some things, Shestov maintains, ‘that it is better not to understand, not to explain. […] Strange as it may be, it is often better to weep, curse, and laugh than to understand. […] It does no harm not only for poetry but for prose as well to be, at times, not too intelligent and not to know everything.’ And ‘Men willingly accept every explanation, even the most absurd, provided that the universe no longer has a mysterious aspect.’ The qualities that tradition has assigned to God – his omniscience, his omnipotence, his being always at rest – are qualities one would not wish on one’s worst enemy. It would be tiresome to know everything in advance, and the deity ‘who can do everything has no need of anything’.
A constant element in Bonnefoy’s poetics, evident from the very outset of his career, is his critique of the concept and of the conceptual reception of the world. ‘The concept, which is our unique way of philosophising,’ he wrote in his essay ‘Les Tombeaux de Ravenne’ (1953), ‘is a profound rejection of death, regardless of the subject it explores.’
It is clearly always a means of escape. Because we die in this world and in order to deny our fate, man has constructed with concepts a dwelling place of logic, where the only worthwhile principles are those of permanence and identity. A dwelling made of words, but eternal. [… The concept] operates like opium. One can guess by this image the fundamentally moral critique I wish to make of concepts. […] There is a lie in concepts in general, which allows thinking, thanks to the vast power of words, to abandon the world of things.
The concept is the veil that prevents full recognition of and participation in the world offered to our senses. ‘Whoever crosses the space offered to the senses reconnects with a sacred water that flows xxviithrough each thing.’ Shestov had also posed a fundamental and ironical question. ‘Today sensible goods are accessible to all’, he wrote:
The crudest man, even the savage, sees the sun and the sky, hears the song of the nightingale, breathes the odour of lilac and lily of the valley, etc. Spiritual goods, on the contrary, are the lot only of the elect. But what if the opposite were the case: what if spiritual goods were accessible to all, what if everyone could assimilate geometry, logic, and the lofty ideas of morality, while sight, hearing, sense of smell were the portion of some only? How then would we establish our hierarchy? Would we continue, as before, to consider spiritual goods beautiful and sublime and declare sensible goods vile and base? Or would the arbiter elegantium (you know, of course, who he is and where he is to be sought) be obliged to proceed to a transmutation of values?
If one can see something of the sort of transmutation of values envisioned by Shestov in Bonnefoy’s poem cited above, it is important to note that the attachment to the gifts offered to the senses is never permanently acquired. It often seems the object of a fervent wish, of an oft-repeated ‘prayer’, in which an effort of the will is fully engaged, and it is clear that the ‘love’ of which the last line of the poem speaks only exists precariously. This world of rich substantiality can all at once appear as devoid of all meaning. An abyss can suddenly open up, and ‘the voices fall silent in the substance of the world’, as Bonnefoy wrote in an essay on Giacometti. An unanswerable question – Why? – is raised with respect to all things, which can emerge not only in fragmented, but even in nightmarish form. Bonnefoy can be haunted by this kind of perception, and his poetry often vacillates between a precarious adherence and a sense of abandonment. A striking example of the kind of ‘negative presence’ I’m referring to can be found in the poem ‘Les Guetteurs’ (‘The Watchers’) in Hierrégnantdésert, where phenomena rise up in a terrifying groundlessness.
Ilyavaituncouloiraufonddujardin,
Jerêvaisquej’allaisdanscecouloir, xxviii
La mort venait avec ses fleurs hautes flétries,
Je rêvais que je lui prenais ce bouquet noir.
Ilyavaituneétagèredansmachambre,
J’entraisausoir,
Etjevoyaisdeuxfemmesracornies
Crierdeboutsurleboispeintdenoir.
Ilyavaitunescalier,etjerêvais
Qu’aumilieudelanuitunchienhurlait
Danscetespacedenulchien,etjevoyais
Unhorriblechienblancsortirdel’ombre.
There was a passage at the far end of the garden,
I dreamed that I was walking down this passage.
Death approached with his tall withered flowers,
I dreamed I took the black bouquet from him.
In my bedroom were some shelves.
I entered at nightfall
And saw two shrivelled women standing
On the black painted wood, and crying out.
There was a staircase and I dreamed
A dog howled in the middle of the night
In that place of no dog and I saw
A dreadful white dog step out of the shadow.
[ar]
It is a hallmark of Bonnefoy’s moral determination that he tirelessly seeks to convert these moments of frightening uncertainty and to reintegrate the disoriented self into the unity that was lost.
*
Pierreécriteends on a note of provisional triumph: vision has been purified, changed, ‘dredged from night’, as the last poem of the collection xxixputs it. Bonnefoy’s next book of poems, Dansleleurreduseuil(TheLureoftheThreshold, 1975), reflects this change, since the work is quite different from anything published earlier. The longest, densest, most complex of Bonnefoy’s poetical works, Dansleleurreduseuilgives dramatic expression to the concerns of a lifetime: the search for place, the desire for transcendence, the meditation on death and the act of writing, on the role and status of the image. Divided into seven sections of varying length, the work has a continuous narrative flow that distinguishes it from the previous collections, although these too, it could be argued, have their own deeply buried narrative line. Once again, the poem is set in the house in Provence. The dwelling, with its gaping holes and missing stones, with its need for mending and restoration, becomes the symbol of a menaced but indomitable sacred order, the persistence of which the poet sees reflected in the simple, daily realities surrounding him.
The first section of the book begins during a sleepless, doubt-filled night. All the meaning the poet has seen gathered together suddenly collapses, ‘avec un bruit / De sommeil jeté sur la pierre’ (‘with a sound / Of sleep thrown over stone’). But the poet remembers what he has heard about the strange death of his friend, the musicologist Boris de Schloezer. What had he seen at the moment of crossing the awesome threshold? What was he coming to understand, to accept?
Ilécouta,longtemps,
Puisilseredressa,lefeu
Decetteoeuvrequiatteignait,
Quisait,àunecime
Dedéliements, de retrouvailles, de joie
Illumina son visage.
He listened, long,
Then drew himself up, the fire
Of that work which reached,
Who knows, a summit
Of release, recovery, joy
Shone in his face.
[jn] xxx
The transfigured vision reminds the poet of a painted image, doubtless of the Poussin painting on TheFindingofMoses, which is now in the Louvre. The picture seems to evoke a world of peaceful harmony and even breathing, where mind and world are in perfect accord. It is as though longing had been dispersed in the real, and dreams dispelled to allow a simple evidence to emerge in the form of a child. The images in the painting – the boatman, the rescued infant, the Pharaoh’s daughter – animate a whole network of verbal associations in Bonnefoy’s poem.
The second section of the poem is a summons to the will to combat the seeming futility of the world. Then, in the following sections, the poet returns to the bed he has left and thus initiates the process by means of which he comes to participate in the kind of miraculously affirmative vision his friend has enjoyed and which he sees reflected both in Poussin’s painting and in Shakespeare’s TheWinter’sTale, through the figure of Hermione, reanimated from the frozen immobility to which possessiveness and suspicion have reduced her. Parts 3 and 4 of the poem evoke the process of conception. But it is a characteristic of Bonnefoy’s work to place erotic experience in the context of the vaster workings of nature and to present it as metaphorical for the search for marriage in writing between the word and the real. He therefore deals with the question of generationon both the biological and the spiritual level. The future child promises a new and joyful world, less tormented and rent, and is therefore both infant and sign – the force that ‘carries the world’.
Oui, par l’enfant
Etparcesquelquesmotsquej’aisauvés
Pouruneboucheenfante.‘Vois,leserpent
Dufonddecejardinnequitteguère
L’ombrefadedubuis.Toussesdésirs
Sontde silence et de sommeil parmi les pierres.
La douleur de nommer parmi les choses
Finira.’ C’est déjà musique dans l’épaule,
Musique dans le bras qui la protège,
Parolesurdeslèvresreconciliées. xxxi
Yes, by the child
And by these few words I saved
For a child’s mouth. ‘Look, the serpent
At the back of the garden hardly ever leaves
The lustreless shade of the box-tree. His only desire
Is for silence and sleep among the stones.
The painfulness of naming among things
Will cease.’ There is already music in the shoulder,
Music in the arm that protects it,
Words on lips that have been reconciled.
[jn]
The last sections of the book, including extracts from ‘L’épars, l’indivisible’ (‘The Scattered, the Indivisible’), published here, register a vigorous acceptance and affirmative certainty the poet had feared was lost.
*
Reading the last sections of Dansleleurreduseuil, one might have been tempted to think that Bonnefoy had arrived at a level of acceptance and serenity that made more writing unnecessary. And it is true that his first four books are a kind of theatre of self-knowing, in which the difficult struggle for self-mastery is played out, and to a certain extent achieved. His next book of poems, Cequifutsanslumière, published in 1987, twelve years after Dansleleurreduseuil, makes it clear, however, that the poet had yet another kind of drama to face: the moment of saying farewell to the house and countryside that had meant so much to him for so many years.
Adieu,dit-il,
Présencequinefutquepressentie
Bien que mystérieusement tant d’années si proche,
Adieu, image impénétrable qui nous leurra
D’êtrelavéritéenfinpresquedite,
Certitude,làoùtoutn’aétéquedoute,etbienquechimère
Parolesiardentequeréelle. xxxii
Adieu,nousneteverronsplusvenirprèsdenous
Avecl’offrandeducieletdesfeuillessèches,
Nous ne te verrons pas rapprocher de l’âtre
Tout ton profil de servante divine.
Adieu, nous n’étions pas de même destin,
Tu as à prendre ce chemin et nous cet autre,
Et entre s’épaissit cette vallée
Quel’inconnusurplombe
Avecuncrirapided’oiseauquichasse.
Farewell, he whispers,
Farewell, presence that was but dimly sensed
Though for so many years so mysteriously close.
Farewell, unfathomable image that beguiled us
All the more as it seemed the truth almost spoken,
Certainty, when all the rest was only doubt, and though
But a dream, speech so ardent it was real.
Farewell, no longer shall we see you come near us
With your offerings of sky and dry leaves,
No longer shall we see you bring toward the hearth
That profile of servant divine.
Farewell, our destinies were not the same,
You must take that path and we this other,
And between them grows deeper and denser
That valley which the unknown looms over
With the quick cry of the swooping bird of prey.
[jn]
The sense of leaving this place, of turning toward the unknown, mingles with memories of other moments and other places in the past, particularly those of early childhood. The poet manages to translate the painful sense of loss into a confidence in the unforeseen, and to create from the strains of dispossession an autumnal register that is as haunting as anything he has ever written. Like all of Bonnefoy’s work, this book is organised around the principle of death and resurrection, disappointment and resurgent hope, farewell and new departure. xxxiii
Etilssedisentquepeuimportesilavigne
Engrandissantadissipélelieu
Où fut rêvé jadis, et non sans cris
D’allégresse, la plante qu’on appelle
Bâtir, avoir un nom, naître, mourir.
Carilspressentleurslèvresàlasaveur,
Ilssaventqu’ellesourdmêmedesombres,
Ilsvont,ilssontaveuglescommeDieu
Quandilprenddanssesmainslepetitcorps
Criant,quivientdenaître,toutevie.
And they tell themselves it hardly matters
That the growing vines have scattered the place
Where once, and not without cries of joy,
They dreamed of the plant that people call
Building, having a name, coming to birth, dying.
