Yves Bonnefoy
Influential poet who translated Shakespeare into French
YVES BONNEFOY, who has died aged 93, was the most influential French poet since the Second World War.
His more than 100 titles, to which he was adding regularly into his nineties, comprised poetry, prose, livres d’artiste, essays, works of art history and of translation, notably of Shakespeare, John Donne and WB Yeats. He lived long enough to oversee plans for the forthcoming Pléiade edition of his works.
Among the French poets of his generation, Bonnefoy was the most attached to the English-speaking world. He married Lucy Vines, an American artist, and in the 1960s held visiting professorships at American universities including Harvard. He studied the New Criticism promulgated by figures like René Wellek and IA Richards; and after he had undertaken his first translation, of Hamlet, in 1957, Shakespeare never ceased to feed his imagination.
At the time of his death he had translated 10 major plays (including all the tragedies), as well as the poems and sonnets. The Winter’s Tale, notably, provided him with a central narrative of rebirth at a dark time. His own poetry attracted a tribe of translators.
Initially trained in mathematics and abstract thought, Bonnefoy might have had a career as a philosopher, had he not encountered André Breton and Surrealism. More lastingly the memory of experiences in childhood continually wrested him away from conceptual thought and into an apprehension of what he called “undivided being”. This experience, that in his poetics he calls “Présence”, and his collateral war on Platonism with its higher “forms”, occupied him for seven decades with remarkable consistency. “The task of the poet is to show us a tree, before the intellect tells us that it is one,” he once wrote.
Yves Jean Bonnefoy was born on June 24 1923 in Tours. His father, originally from the Aveyron, was a blue-collar worker on the railways, and his mother was a primary school teacher. Holidays were spent in the village of Toirac in the Lot and in many writings, notably in l’Arrière-pays (1972) – a kind of “excited reverie”, part autobiography, part art- history, part metaphysical thriller – Bonnefoy dwelt on this divided experience, between the humdrum everyday of Tours and the thrilling immediacy of life in the Lot valley. The opening sentence – “I have often experienced a feeling of anxiety, at crossroads” – takes on a psychological charge as the book progresses, as the young poet wrestles with what he calls his tentation gnostique – the idea that, up the road not taken, a higher civilisation might exist – an anxiety partially resolved in the book by an acceptance of the finite and a newfound joy in the celebration of the mortal that he discovers in Poussin and the Roman baroque.
Bonnefoy went to Paris after the war, ostensibly to read Mathematics at the Sorbonne. But in fact he attended André Chastel’s classes on Renaissance art and read widely in philosophy. Inevitably, he encountered Surrealism, and was even summoned to take tea with André Breton. His later break with the movement occasioned some of his most revealing thought, but surrealism, in the sense that unconscious or irrational material is allowed to seep in and disturb, remained a central feature of his work, from his breakthrough collection of 1953, Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve. The récit en rêve (dreamnarrative), was a genre he made his own.
In 1981 he was appointed to the Chair of Comparative Poetics at the Collège de France.
His later work included more personal material, notably his last book, L’echarpe rouge, completed just weeks before his death, partly an act of penance to his father, who had died early, estranged from his bookish son.
Yves Bonnefoy is survived by his wife and daughter. Yves Bonnefoy, born June 24 1923, died July 1 2016