During a reading tour at Williams College in Massachusetts in the winter of 1995, I saw a flyer announcing a lecture by the French poet Yves Bonnefoy. I had read Bonnefoy many years ago in Willis Barnstone’s anthology Modern European Poetry and ever since then had been trying to find translations of his work. Bonnefoy is still considered the most important poet since World War II, and the only one since Paul Valery to occupy the chair at the College de France left vacant by the death of Roland Barthes. I managed to convince (or coerce) the students I was reading for to give me his number. Unfortunately, our tour had to proceed that same evening to Rhode Island, but I did manage to call Mr. Bonnefoy the following morning. He was surprised that I had his number, but was polite and hospitable, and agreed to meet me in New York the following summer. He was giving a lecture at CUNY, but since friends from Massachusetts had popped in to take him to dinner, it was going to be a very brief meeting for us, during which he autographed my copy of New and Selected Poems and gave me his address in Paris, and enjoined me to write or call him up whenever I was there. He was back in New York the following Spring, and this time I had the good fortune of seeing him for a number of times. As we were walking down Lexington Avenue, he lamented the fact that his hotel used to have a cozy cafe where people could meet and talk. Now there’s a trendy gym where the cafe used to be. “I have stayed for twelve years at this hotel,” he told me. “Perhaps next time I will look for another home.” He had a melacholy nostaligia for the constant rearrangement of the world: he once bought a house in the south of France and together with his wife attempted to restore this crumbling edifice, and wrote an entire book of poems about the process.
Bonnefoy was among the last of the surrealists, but he broke away from Andre Breton and his group because he felt surrealism didn’t aspire to his own beliefs and denied the genuine-ness of life. “It was not a question of what I believed,” he told me, “but what I didn’t believe.” He had great difficulty adhering to the surrealist concept of non-reality, because he believed that reality—what he constantly referred to in his books as “presence”—was of primal importance in poetry.
He said he believed in being, and that being is something that happens not because of a god but because of will. By striving for unity with all creation, one accomplishes being. This, he said, was at the root of his poetry.
I told him that his poetry struck me nonetheless as mystical. “Mysticism is the easiest thing in the world,” he said. Recognizing the existence of things is a mystical act in itself. “You are mystical,” he told me, “because you are a poet.”
Indeed, Bonnefoy’s poetry, although conveniently labeled in some anthologies as surrealist, defies categorization. He has been translated in more than 20 languages, and recently a bibliography of his works and translations of them was released in France.
He himself has translated Shakespeare, and is in fact considered the most authoritative translator of the Bard in French. Translation, he told me, will play an even more important role in the future. “Perhaps the poetry of the future will be the poetry of translators—what translators can do with the text. Translation is important because we have to understand one another.”
Bonnefoy studied mathematics but at some point in his life felt he had to choose between that and poetry. Part of the reason he chose poetry over mathematics was because being a mathematician meant having to go to the Ecole Polytechnic, a kind of military school established by Napolean, “and I didn’t want to serve the military even as a mathematician.”
A few years ago, a book jacket for an American translation of his works erroneously referred to him as the poet laureate of France. “Only England has a poet laureate,” he said. “We don’t have it, and you don’t have it, thank God.”
This is not surprising from a poet who has always turned away from the cult of the personality. For Bonnefoy, the work of the poet is all that matters; although he is probably one of the most famous poets in Europe, fame rests uncomfortably on his shoulders. In New York, his lectures are unannounced and are attended only by a few specialists in the field.
Bonnefoy’s philosophy on art and life can be read in The Act and the Place of Poetry, a collection of essays published by the University of Chicago Press in 1989. In it, he says:
“For the person seeking, even if he is well aware that there is no path to guide him, the world around him will be inhabited by signs. The least object, the most ephemeral creature, because of the good they do him, will arouse the hope of an absolute good. “In the true place, elementary realities reveal that they are not confined to place and moment, that they partake less of the nature of being than that of language, that they can compel whatever appears beside them to speak to us, in a whisper, of an unforeseeable future.
“I have discovered the point at which, by the grace of the future, reality and language have united their powers. And I say that a longing for the true place is the vow made by poetry.
“Having conferred the energy to undertake the journey, poetry provides the path. Words appearing before us in the space of our waiting, words being only a matter of waiting and knowing, poetry will know how to dissociate, at the most important moments, quality that is ephemeral from meaning that is vigilant.
“It will search the horizon according to the wish of our hearts. It will question all that pass by.
“And when certain things reveal themselves to be openings, poetry will keep these keys in mind in its strictest economy; it will establish the word ‘lamp’ or ‘ship’ or ‘shore’ in the stronghold of a memory that is striving between dispersal and recovery.
“The poet is the person who ‘burns’ with expectation. Poetry brings about the transformation of the finished into the possible, of the remembered into the expected, of the wasteland into a journey, into hope.
“This poetry will prove to have been our destiny. For in the meantime we shall have grown older. The act of speech will have taken place in the same space of time as our other actions. It will have given us one kind of life rather than another.
“I think of that poet whose hope was the clearest, whose suffering was the keenest. Purely, like poetry incarnate, he became totally absorbed in the hopeless love that is love for mortal beings. But his desire remained desire, and his impulse toward plenitude maintained, in the honesty of his heart, the sense of what cannot be possessed.
“This union of lucidity and hope is what I call melancholy. And in the world of Justice, nothing comes closer to Grace—whether truth or beauty—than this ardent melancholy.
“This at least is the gift that a true poet can offer. And in his poverty, giving remains his wealth.”
We agreed to meet again in his hotel’s neighborhood before he left. This time, I was joined by Hootenanny Art Director Ken Weathersby. Bonnefoy was already at the lobby of his hotel when Ken and I met there. Ken and I wanted to record our conversation for Hootenanny. Bonnefoy obviously likes meeting young artists and wanted to look for a place quiet enough for us to talk. Such a place is of course almost non-existent in New York. We walked down several blocks, Bonnefoy looking into several places and shaking his head in disapproval. “This neighborhood is very inhospitable,” he told us. We finally settled for a small diner on East 60th, clean and efficient and empty, where we asked the waitress to turn down the pop music. Just as Ken and I head feared, Bonnefoy refused to have the conversation taped (“I’m afraid I have nothing interesting to say”), but he eagerly looked at slides of Ken’s work and copies of the magazine. He talked about his family, his childhood, and the difficulty of translating French, and the almost impossible task of translating French philosophy. He narrated that he was born in a provincial town where his father worked as an electrician—a fact that convinced him early on that his poetry should remain close to the earth, and which he said prepared him for “humble tasks” that surrealism and the egotism of its proponents seemed to deny. It was for this reason that he eventually broke away from Andre Breton.
He recalled that his brother-in-law, who lived in New York, once asked him what he meant by the world “parole.” In French, he said, “parole” is not just “words” or “speech,” but the act of using speech, and to translate that act into English was virtually impossible, because English had no word for it. Moreover, he said, this brother-in-law was not a man of letters, and trying to explain to him the literary meaning of “parole” proved futile.
Although most of his work has been translated superbly by various scholars, Bonnefoy still wonders if it is at all possible to translate poetry in its essential form. He has attempted to translate some of his own work, if only to explain to translators what he actually meant. For this issue of Hootenanny, he sent us his own translation of Dans le leurre de seuil, the title poem of a collection published in France in 1975.
