Since the publication of his first book in 1953, Yves Bonnefoy has
become one of the most important French poets of the postwar years.
At last, we have the long-awaited English translation of his
celebrated work "L'Arriere-Pays", which takes us to the heart of
his creative process and to the very core of his poetic spirit. In
his poem "The Convex Mirror," Bonnefoy writes: "Look at them down
there, at that crossroads, / They seem to hesitate, then go on."
The idea of the crossroads haunts Bonnefoy's work, as he is
troubled by the idea that the path not taken may lead to the
arriere-pays, a place of greater plenitude, and of more authentic
being - an "elsewhere in the absolute." Seized by this fear that
what he terms "presence" exists always somewhere else, a little
further on, Bonnefoy here sets out on a labyrinthine quest to find
traces of this "original place," which he locates not only in
objects of knowledge and experience as diverse as the deserts of
Asia, a hill fort in India, a church in Armenia, and the paintings
of Piero della Francesca but also, crucially, in the undivided
intensity of his experiences as a child. Written with a visionary
grace, "The Arriere-Pays" is a spiritual testament to art,
philosophy, and poetry. Enriched by a new preface by the poet, this
volume also includes three recent essays in which he returns to his
original account of an ethical and aesthetic haunting, one that
recounts the struggle between our instinct to idealize - what he
deems our eternal Platonism - and the equally strong need to combat
this and to be reconciled with our nature as finite beings, made of
flesh and blood, in the world of the here and now.
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