Yves Bonnefoy

• 1. Introduction

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  Yves Bonnefoy was born on the 24th of June 1923 in Tours, and by the time he died in Paris on the 1st of July 2016, the Encyclopaedia Britannica had called him perhaps the most important French poet of the latter half of the 20th century. That is a remarkable sentence to read about anyone. It raises a question that hangs over everything that follows: how does a railroad worker's son from Tours become the standard-bearer for an entire tradition?

  His father, Marius Elie Bonnefoy, worked the railways. His mother, Helene Maury, taught school. Neither background points obviously toward a life spent translating Shakespeare, writing monographs on Giacometti, or holding the chair of comparative poetry at the College de France. Yet those are precisely the places Yves Bonnefoy ended up. How he got there, and what he made along the way, is the story ahead.

• 2. Finding His Voice

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  Bonnefoy studied mathematics and philosophy at the Universities of Poitiers and the Sorbonne in Paris. After the Second World War he traveled through Europe and the United States, studying art history as he went. Between 1945 and 1947 he moved in Surrealist circles in Paris, and the marks of that association are clearest in his first published work, Traite du pianiste, which appeared in 1946.

  That Surrealist phase proved short-lived. When On the Motion and Immobility of Douve appeared in 1953, the literary world encountered something distinctly his own. Critics and readers recognized immediately that Bonnefoy had found his voice. The work is described as highly personal, and the style that drove it became his signature: a deceptive simplicity of vocabulary that makes each poem feel direct, even inevitable, while concealing layers of thought underneath.

  Bonnefoy himself was careful about the word poet. He said in his own words: "One should not call oneself a poet. It would be pretentious. It would mean that one has resolved the problems poetry presents. Poet is a word one can use when speaking of others, if one admires them sufficiently. If someone asks me what I do, I say I'm a critic, or a historian." That refusal to claim the title reveals a quality of rigorous self-examination that runs through everything he produced.

• 3. A Life in Classrooms

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  Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts was one of the first stops in Bonnefoy's long career as a teacher, where he worked from 1962 to 1964. He would go on to teach literature at a constellation of universities across Europe and the United States: the Centre Universitaire at Vincennes, Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Princeton University in New Jersey, the University of Connecticut at Storrs, Yale University in New Haven, the University of Geneva, the University of Nice from 1973 to 1976, the University of Provence at Aix from 1979 to 1981, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, where he was made an honorary member of the Academy of the Humanities and Sciences.

  The appointment that carried the most prestige came in 1981, following the death of Roland Barthes. Bonnefoy was given Barthes's chair of comparative study of poetry at the College de France, where he remained until 1993. That twelve-year tenure placed him at the center of French intellectual life, and it ran alongside some of the most productive decades of his writing career.

• 4. The Art of Translation

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  Shakespeare presented Bonnefoy with a challenge he could not resist. The translations of Shakespeare's plays that he produced are considered among the best French versions ever made, a judgment that places him in an unusual position: a poet whose secondary work rivals his primary work in the esteem of readers and scholars.

  In 2004, Bonnefoy published Shakespeare and the French Poet, a collection of essays on the role of the translator, putting into print the thinking that underpinned years of work on the plays. The question of what is lost and found in translation was never abstract for him. It was a practical problem he had wrestled with page by page.

  Beyond Shakespeare, Bonnefoy worked closely with painters throughout his career. He wrote prefaces for artists' books, including those by his friend Miklos Bokor. He published monographs on Miro and Giacometti and wrote on the Paris-based Iranian artist Farhad Ostovani. His 1993 book Alberto Giacometti: A Biography of His Work, published by Flammarion, showed that his engagement with visual art was as sustained and rigorous as his engagement with poetry.

• 5. L'ephemere and Literary Community

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  In 1967 Bonnefoy joined with Andre du Bouchet, Gaetan Picon, and Louis-Rene des Forets to found L'ephemere, a journal of art and literature. The founding group brought together writers whose interests overlapped across poetry, criticism, and the visual arts, and the journal became a gathering point for that particular corner of French cultural life.

  Bonnefoy's English-language readership depended on a wide network of translators who worked to carry his poems across the language barrier. Emily Grosholz, Galway Kinnell, John Naughton, Alan Baker, Hoyt Rogers, Antony Rudolf, Beverley Bie Brahic, and Richard Stamelmann each contributed versions of his work. Kinnell's translation of On the Motion and Immobility of Douve appeared in 1968, published by Ohio University Press. Rogers translated The Curved Planks, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2007, and went on to translate several later collections for Seagull Books, with the last, Together Still, appearing in 2017 and translated jointly with Mathilde Bonnefoy.

• 6. Awards Across Decades

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  The Prix des Critiques in 1971 was the first formal recognition to arrive, and it was followed at intervals by prizes that mapped the breadth of Bonnefoy's reputation across different fields and countries. The French Academy awarded him its grand prize in 1981, and the Goncourt Prize for Poetry followed in 1987.

  The next fifteen years brought a run of international honors: the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca and the Balzan Prize for Art History and Art Criticism in Europe, both in 1995; the Golden Wreath of Struga Poetry Evenings in 1999; and the Grand Prize of the First Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Awards in 2000. The range of those prizes reflects the range of his work: poetry, art criticism, translation, and the intersections among them.

  Later recognition included the Franz Kafka Prize in 2007, the Griffin Lifetime Recognition Award in 2011 presented by the trustees of the Griffin Poetry Prize, co-winner of the Janus Pannonius International Poetry Prize in 2014, and the International Nonino Prize in Italy in 2015. When Bonnefoy died on the 1st of July 2016, President Francois Hollande said he would be remembered for elevating the French language to its supreme degree of precision and beauty, a phrase that echoes the quality Bonnefoy himself sought in every line he wrote.