Short answers, pulled from the story.
Yves Bonnefoy was a French poet, art historian, and translator born on the 24th of June 1923 in Tours and died on the 1st of July 2016 in Paris. The Encyclopaedia Britannica described him as perhaps the most important French poet of the latter half of the 20th century. He held the chair of comparative study of poetry at the College de France from 1981 to 1993.
On the Motion and Immobility of Douve, published in 1953, was the work in which Bonnefoy found his distinctive voice and first came to wide public notice. It was translated into English by Galway Kinnell and published by Ohio University Press in 1968. His earlier published work, Traite du pianiste (1946), showed the influence of the Surrealists he had associated with between 1945 and 1947.
Bonnefoy taught at Brandeis University (1962-64), the Centre Universitaire at Vincennes (1969-70), Johns Hopkins University, Princeton University, the University of Connecticut, Yale University, the University of Geneva, the University of Nice (1973-76), the University of Provence at Aix (1979-81), and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. In 1981 he was appointed to the chair of comparative study of poetry at the College de France, a post he held until 1993.
Bonnefoy received the Prix des Critiques in 1971, the French Academy's grand prize in 1981, the Goncourt Prize for Poetry in 1987, the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca and the Balzan Prize in 1995, the Golden Wreath of Struga Poetry Evenings in 1999, the Franz Kafka Prize in 2007, the Griffin Lifetime Recognition Award in 2011, co-winner of the Janus Pannonius International Poetry Prize in 2014, and the International Nonino Prize in 2015.
Bonnefoy's French translations of Shakespeare's plays are considered among the best ever made in the French language. He also published Shakespeare and the French Poet in 2004, a collection of essays examining the role of the translator.
Bonnefoy co-founded L'ephemere, a journal of art and literature, in 1967 together with Andre du Bouchet, Gaetan Picon, and Louis-Rene des Forets.