SB-The French List
3 total works
The international community of letters mourns the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France's greatest poets of the last half-century. A prolific author, he was often considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize and published a dozen major collections of poetry in verse and prose, several books of dream-like tales, and numerous studies of literature and art. His oeuvre has been translated into scores of languages, and he himself was a celebrated translator of Shakespeare, Yeats, Keats, and Leopardi.Poetry and Photography is Bonnefoy's seminal essay on the intricate connections between the two fields as they play out against a background of major works in the history of literature. Bonnefoy is concerned not just with new concepts that photography introduces to the world of images, but also with the ways in which works like Maupassant's "The Night" perpetuate these concepts. A short, critical text on different forms of artistic creation, masterfully translated by Chris Turner, the volume is an invigorating read.
Widely considered the foremost French poet of his generation, Yves Bonnefoy has wowed the literary world for decades with his diffuse volumes. First published in France in 2008, The Anchor's Long Chain is an indispensable addition to his oeuvre. Enriching Bonnefoy's earlier work, the volume, translated by Beverley Bie Brahic, also innovates, including an unprecedented sequence of nineteen sonnets. These sonnets combine the strictness of the form with the freedom to vary line length and create evocative fragments. Compressed, emotionally powerful, and allusive, the poems are also autobiographical-but only in glimpses. Throughout, Bonnefoy conjures up life's eternal questions with each new poem. Longer, discursive pieces, including the title poem's meditation on a prehistoric stone circle and a legend about a ship, are also part of this volume, as are a number of poetic prose pieces in which Bonnefoy, like several of his great French predecessors, excels. Long-time fans will find much to praise here, while newer readers will quickly find themselves under the spell of Bonnefoy's powerful, discursive poetry.
Praise for Bonnefoy "Few exceptions of contemporary French letters deserve the attention of the reading public in America more than Bonnefoy...His writings are an important lighthouse on the contemporary cultural coastline."-Hudson Review "Bonnefoy's poems, prose, texts, and penetrating essays have never ceased to stimulate both the writing of French poetry and the discussion of what its deepest purpose should be...He is one of the rare contemporary authors for whom writing does not-or should not-conclude in utter despair, but rather in the tendering of hope."- France Magazine
Praise for Bonnefoy "Few exceptions of contemporary French letters deserve the attention of the reading public in America more than Bonnefoy...His writings are an important lighthouse on the contemporary cultural coastline."-Hudson Review "Bonnefoy's poems, prose, texts, and penetrating essays have never ceased to stimulate both the writing of French poetry and the discussion of what its deepest purpose should be...He is one of the rare contemporary authors for whom writing does not-or should not-conclude in utter despair, but rather in the tendering of hope."- France Magazine
Yves Bonnefoy is one of the greatest living voices of contemporary French poetry. In this, his sixth book published by Seagull Books, he explores in profound new ways the mysteries of human consciousness. Readers find snatches of conversations overheard, dropped without any possible conclusion each pregnant with half-hidden, half-visible meaning. Limpid, punctuated with silences, the poems of Ursa Major are like stones picked up, turned over and set back down on the edge of life."Countless voices traverse us; endless, almost, as the meanders of dreams or the starry scintillations of summer nights. Only listen, and a few words rise from the murmur, referring to precise things, making allusions one would like to understand, offering opinions perhaps worth mulling over." With these words Bonnefoy introduces the collection, newly available in English by the master translator Beverly Bie Brahic.
This deeply moving sequence of prose poems invites readers to attend to the multitudinous voices that carry on their conversations within us, to trust them "just as on summer nights we would lie down in the grass of the meadow, behind our houses, to go forth among the millions of stars with a feeling of falling."
This deeply moving sequence of prose poems invites readers to attend to the multitudinous voices that carry on their conversations within us, to trust them "just as on summer nights we would lie down in the grass of the meadow, behind our houses, to go forth among the millions of stars with a feeling of falling."