An experiment with the sonnet form by one of the foremost French poets 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.  

Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016) was a central figure in post-war French culture, with a lifelong fascination with the problems of translation. Language, for him, was a visceral, intensely material element in our existence, and yet the abstract quality of words distorts the immediate, material quality of our contact with the world. This concern with what separates words from an essential truth hidden in objects involved him in wide-ranging philosophical and theological investigations of the spiritual and the sacred. But for all his intellectual drive and rigour, Bonnefoy's poetry is essentially of the concrete and the tangible, and addresses itself to our most familiar and intimate experiences of objects and of each other. In his first book of poetry, published in France in 1953, Bonnefoy reflects on the value and mechanism of language in a series of short variations on the life and death of a much loved woman, Douve. Douve, though, is the French word for a moat, that uncrossable body which separates us from safety and from danger. With this undercurrent at work we read the poems as if they are about the divide between us and death as much as they are about the divide between us and the untouchable reality of text. This is dangerous writing, fulfilling Derrida's "fatal necessity" by making us substitute the textual sign for reality. In his introduction, Timothy Mathews shows how Bonnefoy's poetics are enmeshed with his philosophical, religious and critical thought.

An inspiring book of poetry and prose by the celebrated author Yves Bonnefoy. Heralded as one of France’s greatest poets, Yves Bonnefoy has been dazzling readers since the publication of his first book in 1953. He remains influential and relevant, continuing to compose groundbreaking new work. Though Bonnefoy recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday, many are calling these past two decades his most impressive yet. His latest book of poetry and prose, The Digamma, fits wonderfully into his impressive oeuvre, offering his signature style of simple but powerful language with fresh new grace. A key passage of the title piece of the book depicts the figures of Nicolas Poussin’s The Shepherds of Arcadia, which Bonnefoy has identified as crucial to the artist’s evolution. The sustained reference to Poussin’s iconography serves to ground the text in the lost civilizations of antiquity. Subtly, it brings out the underlying theme of the entire collection—in the ambivalent world we inhabit, being and non-being is fundamentally one. As a leading translator of Shakespeare in France, Bonnefoy’s fascination with the master playwright is displayed in “God in Hamlet� and “For a Staging of Othello,� two poems in prose that belong to an ongoing series of meditations on the plays. The collection also includes haunting reflections on children, nature, the origins of art, and vanished cultures.

Yves Bonnefoy’s final poetic work, a collection of reflections about poetry, legacy, and life. The international community of letters mourned 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. Together Still is his final poetic work, composed just months before his death. The book is nothing short of a literary testament, addressed to his wife, his daughter, his friends, and his readers throughout the world. In these pages, he ruminates on his legacy to future generations, his insistence on living in the present, his belief in the triumphant lessons of beauty, and, above all, his courageous identification of poetry with hope.

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

An intensely personal and profoundly moving review of Bonnefoy’s childhood memories. In December 2015, six months before his death at the age of 93, Yves Bonnefoy concluded what was to be his last major text in prose, L’écharpe rouge, translated here as The Red Scarf. In this unique book, described by the poet as "an anamnesis"—a formal act of commemoration—Bonnefoy undertakes, at the end of his life, a profoundly moving exegesis of some fragments written in 1964. These fragments lead him back to an unspoken, lifelong anxiety: “My most troubling memory, when I was between ten and twelve years old, concerns my father, and my anxiety about his silence.� Bonnefoy offers an anatomy of his father’s silence, and of the melancholy that seemed to take hold some years into his marriage to the poet’s mother.   At the heart of this book is the ballad of Elie and Hélène, the poet’s parents. It is the story of their lives together in the Auvergne, and later in Tours, seen through the eyes of their son—the solitary boy’s intense but inchoate experience, reviewed through memories of the now elderly man. What makes The Red Scarf indispensable is the intensely personal nature of the material, casting its slant light, a setting sun, on all that has gone before.  

The first English translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s account of his life as a traveler.   The Wandering Life is a poetic culmination of Yves Bonnefoy’s wanderings and characterizes the final twenty-five years of his work. Bonnefoy was an ardent traveler throughout his life, and his journeys in foreign countries left a profound imprint on his work. The time he spent in Italy, translating Shakespeare’s work in England, in universities in the United States, in India with Octavio Paz, and more, affected his poetry in discernible ways and inspired The Wandering Life. Interweaving verse and prose—vignettes that range from a few lines in length to several pages—this volume is a fitting capstone to Bonnefoy’s oeuvre and appears in English translation for the first time to mark the centenary of Yves Bonnefoy’s birth.  

A beautiful collection of poems from various styles and genres by France's foremost poet, Yves Bonnefoy. Praised by Paul Auster as “one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime,� Yves Bonnefoy is widely considered the foremost French poet of his generation. Proving that his prose is just as lyrical, Rue Traversière, written in 1977, is one of his most harmonious works. Each of the fifteen discrete or linked texts, whose lengths range from brief notations to long, intense, self-questioning pages, is a work of art in its own right: brief and richly suggestive as haiku, or long and intricately wrought in syntax and thought; and all are as rewarding in their sounds and rhythms, and their lightning flashes of insight, as any sonnet. “I can write all I like; I am also the person who looks at the map of the city of his childhood and doesn’t understand,� says the section that gives the book its title, as he revisits childhood cityscapes and explores the tricks memory plays on us. A mixture of genres—the prose poem, the personal essay, quasi-philosophical reflections on time, memory, and art—this is a book of both epigrammatic concision and dreamlike narratives that meander with the poet’s thought as he struggles to understand and express some of the undercurrents of human life. The book’s layered texts echo and elaborate on one another, as well as on aspects of Bonnefoy’s own poetics and thought.  

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.Together Still is his final poetic work, composed just months before his death. The book is nothing short of a literary testament, addressed to his wife, his daughter, his friends, and his readers throughout the world. In these pages, he ruminates on his legacy to future generations, his insistence on living in the present, his belief in the triumphant lessons of beauty, and, above all, his courageous identification of poetry with hope.

Reproduced in exquisite black and white, the images in this book range from Henri Cartier-Bresson's earliest work in France, Spain, and Mexico through his postwar travels in Asia, the US, and Russia, and even include landscapes from the 1970s, when he retired his camera to pursue drawing. While his instinct for capturing what he called the decisive moments was unparalleled, as a photojournalist Cartier-Bresson was uniquely concerned with the human impact of historic events. In his photographs of the liberation of France from the Nazis, the death of Gandhi, and the creation of the People's Republic of China in 1949, Cartier-Bresson focused on the reactions of the crowds rather than the subjects of the events. And while his portraits of Sartre, Giacometti, Faulkner, Capote, and other artists are iconic, he gave equal attention to those forgotten by history: a dead resistance fighter lying on the bank of the Rhine, children playing alongside the Berlin Wall, and a eunuch in Peking's Imperial Court. Divided into six thematic sections, the book presents the photographs in spare double-page spreads. In a handwritten note included at the end of the book, Cartier-Bresson writes, "In order to give meaning to the world, one must feel involved in what one singles out through the viewfinder." His work shows how he has been able to capture the decisive moment with such extreme humility and profound humanity.

Praised by Paul Auster as "one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime," Yves Bonnefoy is widely considered the foremost French poet of his generation. Proving that his prose is just as lyrical, Rue Traversiere, written in 1977, is one of his most harmonious works. Each of the fifteen discrete or linked texts, whose lengths range from brief notations to long, intense, self-questioning pages, is a work of art in its own right: brief and richly suggestive as haiku, or long and intricately wrought in syntax and thought; and all are as rewarding in their sounds and rhythms, and their lightning flashes of insight, as any sonnet. "I can write all I like; I am also the person who looks at the map of the city of his childhood, and doesn't understand," says the section that gives the book its title, as he revisits childhood cityscapes and explores the tricks memory plays on us. A mixture of genres - the prose poem, the personal essay, quasi-philosophical reflections on time, memory, and art - this is a book of both epigrammatic concision and dreamlike narratives that meander with the poet's thought as he struggles to understand and express some of the undercurrents of human life. The book's layered texts echo and elaborate on one another, as well as on aspects of Bonnefoy's own poetics and thought.

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."

Velazquez. Poussin. Carvaggio. Bernini. Despite their disparate backgrounds, these greats of European Baroque art converged at one remarkable place in time: Rome, 1630. In response to the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church turned to these masters of Baroque art to craft works celebrating the glories of the heavens manifested on earth. And so, with glittering monuments like Bernini's imposing bronze columns in St. Peter's Basilica, Rome, 1630 came to be the crossroads of seventeenth-century art, religion, and power. In Rome, 1630, the renowned French poet and critic Yves Bonnefoy devotes his attention to this single year in the Baroque period in European art. Richly illustrated with artwork that reveals the unique, yet instructive, place of Rome in 1630 in European art history, Bonnefoy dives deep into this transformative movement. The inclusion of five additional essays on seventeenth-century art situate Bonnefoy's analysis within a lively debate on Baroque art and art history. Translator Hoyt Rogers's afterword pays homage to the author himself, situating Rome, 1630 in Bonnefoy's productive career as a premier French poet and critic.

In December 2015, six months before his death at the age of 93, Yves Bonnefoy concluded what was to be his last major text in prose, L'echarpe rouge, translated here as The Red Scarf. In this unique book, described by the poet as "an anamnesis"-a formal act of commemoration-Bonnefoy undertakes, at the end of his life, a profoundly moving exegesis of some fragments written in 1964. These fragments lead him back to an unspoken, lifelong anxiety: "My most troubling memory, when I was between ten and twelve years old, concerns my father, and my anxiety about his silence." Bonnefoy offers an anatomy of his father's silence, and of the melancholy that seemed to take hold some years into his marriage to the poet's mother. At the heart of this book is the ballad of Elie and Helene, the poet's parents. It is the story of their lives together in the Auvergne, and later in Tours, seen through the eyes of their son-the solitary boy's intense but inchoate experience, reviewed through memories of the now elderly man. What makes The Red Scarf indispensable is the intensely personal nature of the material, casting its slant light, a setting sun, on all that has gone before.

From the publication of his first book in 1953, Yves Bonnefoy has been considered the most important and influential French poet since World War II. A prolific writer, critic, and translator, Bonnefoy continues to compose groundbreaking new work sixty years later, constantly offering his readers what Paul Auster has called "the highest level of artistic excellence." In The Present Hour, Bonnefoy's latest collection, a personal narrative surfaces in splinters and shards. Every word from Bonnefoy is multifaceted, like the fragmented figures seen from different angles in cubist painting--as befits a poet who has written extensively about artists such as Goya, Picasso, Braque, and Gris. Throughout this moving collection, Bonnefoy's poems echo each other, returning to and elaborating upon key images, thoughts, feelings, and people. Intriguing and enigmatic, this mixture of sonnet sequences and prose poems--or, as Bonnefoy sees them, "dream texts"--move from his meditations on friendship and friends like Jorge Luis Borges to a long, discursive work in free verse that is a self-reflection on his thought and process. These poems are the ultimate condensation of Bonnefoy's ninety years of life and writing and they will be a valuable addition to the canon of his writings available in English. "Beverley Bie Brahic does a splendid job of translating the latest work of Yves Bonnefoy. She catches his unique combination of human detail and a groping for the beyond. . . . Brahic does full justice to the profoundly moving text--with its frequent shifts between the personal and the searchingly philosophical."--Joseph Frank, author of Responses to Modernity: Essays in the Politics of Culture

For decades readers and critics have acclaimed Yves Bonnefoy as France's greatest living poet. His most recent book of verse, "The Curved Planks," crowns an oeuvre that has won him the highest international honors. More than any other single work, this sequence embodies the astonishing variety of Bonnefoy's art. A rich fabric of themes, styles, and genres, it balances aesthetic complexity with heartfelt directness. This bilingual edition of "The Curved Planks" sets the French texts alongside English versions by the noted translator Hoyt Rogers, who has collaborated closely with Bonnefoy in crafting poems that re-create the freshness and vision of the originals. This volume also includes a preface by the renowned poet and critic Richard Howard and essays by the translator that situate "The Curved Planks" in the author's body of work. All assist in introducing the English-language reader to Bonnefoy's profound poetic gift. Yves Bonnefoy has published seven major poetry collections, numerous studies of literature and art, and an extensive dictionary of mythology. His work has been translated into many languages, and he is a celebrated translator of Shakespeare and Yeats. He lives in Paris.
Hoyt Rogers translates poetry and other literary works from the French, German, and Spanish. He is also the author of a book of poems, "Witnesses," and a volume of criticism, "The Poetics of Inconstancy." He lives in the Dominican Republic. For decades readers and critics have acclaimed Yves Bonnefoy as France's greatest living poet. His most recent book of verse, "The Curved Planks," crowns an oeuvre that has won him the highest international honors. More than any other single work, this sequence embodies the astonishing variety of Bonnefoy's art. A rich fabric of themes, styles, and genres, it balances aesthetic complexity with heartfelt directness.
This bilingual edition of "The Curved Planks" sets the French text alongside English versions by the noted translator Hoyt Rogers, who has collaborated closely with Bonnefoy in crafting poems that re-create the freshness and vision of the originals. This volume also includes a foreword by the renowned poet and critic Richard Howard and two comprehensive essays by the translator; all assist in introducing the English-language readers to Bonnefoy's profound poetic gift. "Yves Bonnefoy represents contemporary French poetry at its classic best: sober and yet soaring, full of invocation and desire: 'Let this world endure . . . Let this world remain.' This volume--thanks to Hoyt Rogers, Richard Howard, and the input of Bonnefoy himself--is a splendid celebration of the depths of this particular craft, whose curved planks of its prow are shaped like a mind."--Mary Ann Caw, Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature, the Graduate School of the City University of New York "[Bonnefoy] is a poet of small epiphanies: some long-ago summer evening when the night forgot to fall while a lone child played on the road and a distant voice kept calling him. This is the secret of his lyricism, the memory of a fragment of time touched by eternity that he cannot let go. Is this one obsession enough for a lifetime of poetry? In a few of his finest poems, Bonnefoy makes us believe that it is."--Charles Simic, "The New York Review of Books
""Yves Bonnefoy is one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime--more than half a century now, and still counting. These recent poems, superbly translated by Hoyt Rogers, attest to his enduring greatness."--Paul Auster
"Yves Bonnefoy represents contemporary French poetry at its classic best: sober and yet soaring, full of invocation and desire: 'Let this world endure . . . Let this world remain.' This volume--thanks to Hoyt Rogers, Richard Howard, and the input of Bonnefoy himself--is a splendid celebration of the depths of this particular craft, whose curved planks of its prow are shaped like a mind."--Mary Ann Caw, Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature, the Graduate School of the City University of New York
"I have been deeply impressed, reading Hoyt Rogers's translations of Yves Bonnefoy's "Les planches courbes." They are much more than English versions of these strong and delicate originals--they are re-creations that became distinct poems in our language, a true and loving homage to their source."--Alastair Reid
""The Curved Planks" is the crowning achievement of a major French poet who has much to say to our troubled times: Yves Bonnefoy continues to explore the possibilities of hope, to assay the significance of the here and now, to chronicle the dual 'presence' of emptiness and plenitude. Hoyt Rogers has composed fluent, engaging translations that reveal a profound respect for the original poems--and for the man who wrote them."--John Taylor, author of "Paths to Contemporary French Literature
"
"The first poetic associations of Bonnefoy, an octogenarian French poet often mentioned in the same breath as Paul Valry, were with the French surrealists, but he has long since been a maverick of French verse, crafting stanzas as simple as they are resonant and rooted in everything from modernism to medieval song. This sequence, composed of short series of poems that take in every form from prose to rhyme, centers, as Richard Howard notes in a baroque preface, on renewal, taking the myth of Ceres as a point of origin: 'she still/ Stops at night / Under rustling trees, / And knocks at closed doors.' Hoyt--who provides a long afterword, a translator's note and a bibliography--offers a translation that is solid and clear, and that allows for play among word and phrase senses: 'the limitless space of clashing currents, of yawning abysses, of stars.'"--"Publishers Weekly" Table of Contents
Foreword by Richard Howard
"LA PLUIE D'ETE
"SUMMER RAIN
"Les rainettes, le soir
"Tree Frogs, at Evening
I. "Rauques etaient les voix
"At evening, the tree frogs
II. "Its s'attardaient, le soir"
They lingered, at evening
"Une pierre
"A Stone
"Une pierre
"A Stone
"La pluie d'ete
"Summer Rain I." Mais le plus cher
" Yet the dearest
II." Et tot apres le ciel
" And soon after, the sky
"Une pierre
"A Stone
"Une pierre
"A Stone
"Les chemins
"The Paths
I. "Chemins, o beaux enfants
" Paths, O beautiful children II. "Et vite it nous menait
"And quickly he would lead us III." Ceres aurait bien du
"Ceres, all sweat and dust
"Hier, l'inachevable
"Yesterday, Without End
"Une pierre
"A Stone
"Une pierre
"A Stone
"Que ce monde demeure!
"Let This World End

Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016), a major poet, was equally a seminal essayist and thinker. This companion volume to Yves Bonnefoy: Poems contains what he regarded as his foundational essays, as well as a generous selection from all periods. In his art criticism, as in his literary essays, Bonnefoy manages that rare thing: to impart metaphysical urgency to each discreet encounter with a painting or a poem, born of his constant quest for intensity, for 'presence'. Whether he is examining an early Byzantine fresco, a Shakespeare play, a Bernini angel, a drawing by Blake, a poem by Rimbaud, the exigency, the high seriousness and the challenge is the same: to affirm presence, and finitude, against all forms of life-sapping conceptual thought. If they cannot always deliver ecstasy or hope, the great poets, argues Bonnefoy, are pledged to 'intensity as such', sustained by 'une mélancolie ardente'.

From the publication of his first book in 1953, Yves Bonnefoy has been considered the most important and influential French poet since World War II. A prolific writer, critic, and translator, Bonnefoy continues to compose groundbreaking new work sixty years later, constantly offering his readers what Paul Auster has called "the highest level of artistic excellence." In The Present Hour, Bonnefoy's latest collection, a personal narrative surfaces in splinters and shards. Every word from Bonnefoy is multifaceted, like the fragmented figures seen from different angles in cubist painting-as befits a poet who has written extensively about artists such as Goya, Picasso, Braque, and Gris. Throughout this moving collection, Bonnefoy's poems echo each other, returning to and elaborating upon key images, thoughts, feelings, and people. Intriguing and enigmatic, this mixture of sonnet sequences and prose poems - or, as Bonnefoy sees them, "dream texts" - moves from his meditations on friendship and friends like Jorge Luis Borges to a long, discursive work in free verse that is a reflection on his thought and process. These poems are the ultimate condensation of Bonnefoy's life in writing, and they will be a valuable addition to the canon of his writings available in English.

The Book, Behind the Dune is a long unitary poem about the birth of a poetic consciousness and its development in a world marked by the discovery of beauty, eroticism and the reality of evil. Influenced by St. Augustine, The Cloud of Unknowing and Wordsworth's The Prelude, the poem, full of literary, artistic and philosophical references, is simultaneously a meditation on the meaning of time and its manifestations-its epiphanies-in a concrete life. The reflection on historical time leads the poet to the reality of "the pain of the world," but also towards a world that is incessantly and continually beginning. As Yves Bonnefoy puts it, "Sanchez Robayna knows what 'the new time' expects of us which Rimbaud foresaw as 'very severe'." The Book, Behind the Dune (El libro, tras la duna), already translated into French, Italian, Czech, German and Arabic, is presented here for the first time in English.

A meditation on the major plays of Shakespeare and the thorny art of literary translation, Shakespeare and the French Poet contains twelve essays from France's most esteemed critic and preeminent living poet, Yves Bonnefoy. Offering observations on Shakespeare's response to the spiritual crisis of his era as well as wry insights on the practical and theoretical challenges of verse in translation, Bonnefoy delivers thoughtful, evocative essays penned in his characteristically powerful prose. In seven essays exploring Shakespeare's major plays, Bonnefoy represents the Bard as a writer precariously straddling the nascent chasm between a vanishing world governed by religious authority and an emerging world directed by scientific thought. In negotiating this rift, Bonnefoy asserts, Shakespeare confronts in his plays certain existential and ontological uncertainties that still trouble us today. poetry into French verse, Bonnefoy recognizes a history of cultural misunderstanding, a risk inherent in any translation project. Bonnefoy's longtime collaborator John Naughton faithfully renders Bonnefoy's perfectly crafted sentences in a manner that retains the original's meaning, elegance, and flow while acknowledging just that risk. Translated and edited specifically for an American readership, this volume also contains a new interview with Bonnefoy. For Shakespeare scholars, Bonnefoy enthusiasts, and students of literary translation, Shakespeare and the French Poet is a celebration of the global language of poetry and the art of making someone else's voice live again in one's own.

Heralded as one of France's greatest poets, Yves Bonnefoy has been dazzling readers since the publication of his first book in 1953. He remains influential and relevant, continuing to compose groundbreaking new work. Though Bonnefoy recently celebrated his ninetieth birthday, many are calling these past two decades his most impressive yet. His latest book of poetry and prose, The Digamma, fits wonderfully into his impressive oeuvre, offering his signature style of simplistic but powerful language with fresh new grace. A key passage of the title piece of the book depicts the figures of Nicolas Poussin's The Shepherds of Arcadia, which Bonnefoy has identified as crucial to the artist's evolution. The sustained reference to Poussin's iconography serves to ground the text in the lost civilizations of antiquity. Subtly, it brings out the underlying theme of the entire collection-in the ambivalent world we inhabit, being and nonbeing is fundamentally one. As a leading translator of Shakespeare in France, Bonnefoy's fascination with the master playwright is displayed in "God in Hamlet" and "For a Staging of Othello," two poems in prose which belong to an ongoing series of meditations on the plays. The collection also includes haunting reflections on children, nature, the origins of art, and vanished cultures.

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.

This bilingual edition of the contemporary master's fifth work, Ce qui fut sans lumi, re, will delight, engage, and stir all lovers of poetry. Included here is an extensive new interview with the poet in English translation. Included here is a very helpful and touchingly personal interview with the poet. . . . For readers with no prior knowledge of Bonnefoy's work, this volume would be an excellent place to start.--Stephen Romer, Times Literary Supplement

The seventy-two entries in this volume explore, among other topics, the history, geography, and religion of Greece, Plato's mythology and philosophy, the powers of marriage in Greece, heroes and gods of war in the Greek epic, and origins of mankind in Greek myths. Ancient Egyptian cosmology, anthropology, rituals, and religion--closely linked to Greek mythology--are also discussed. "In a world that remains governed by powerful myths, we must deepen our understanding of ourselves and others by considering more carefully the ways in which the mythological systems to which we cling and social institutions and movements to which we are committed nourish each other. Yves Bonnefoy's Mythologies not only summarizes the progress that has already been made toward this end, but also lays the foundation for the difficult work that lies ahead."--Mark C. Taylor, New York Times Book Review "The almost 100 contributors combine, with characteristic precision and ilan, the arts of science and poetry, of analysis and translation. The result is a treasury of information, brilliant guesswork, witty asides, and revealing digressions. This is a work of genuine and enduring excitement." --Thomas D'Evelyn, Christian cience Monitor