
Poems: Volume I
Yves Bonnefoy(Author)
Fyfield Books (Publisher)
Published on 26. October 2017
Book
Paperback/Softback
360 pages
978-1-78410-075-9 (ISBN)
Description
France's greatest poet of the last half century, Yves Bonnefoy wrote many books of poetry and poetic prose, as well as celebrated critical essays on literature and art (to which a second volume will be devoted). At his death in 2016 aged ninety-three, he was Emeritus Professor of Comparative Poetics at the College de France. The selection for this volume (and the second one) was made in close collaboration with the poet. The lengthy introduction by John Naughton is a significant assessment of Bonnefoy's importance in French literature.
Bonnefoy started out as a young surrealist poet at the end of the Second World War and, for seven decades, he produced poetry and prose of great, and changing, depth and richness. In his lines we encounter `the horizon of a voice where stars are falling, / Moon merging with the chaos of the dead'. Fellow poet Philippe Jaccottet spoke of his abiding gravite enflammee.
Bonnefoy knew what translation demands, having himself translated Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, and Keats; Petrarch and Leopardi from Italian; and, from Greek, George Seferis. This volume is edited and translated by three of Bonnefoy's long-time translators -Anthony Rudolf, John Naughton, and Stephen Romer - with contributions from Galway Kinnell, Richard Pevear, Beverley Bie Brahic, Emily Grosholz, Susanna Lang, and Hoyt Rogers.
Bonnefoy started out as a young surrealist poet at the end of the Second World War and, for seven decades, he produced poetry and prose of great, and changing, depth and richness. In his lines we encounter `the horizon of a voice where stars are falling, / Moon merging with the chaos of the dead'. Fellow poet Philippe Jaccottet spoke of his abiding gravite enflammee.
Bonnefoy knew what translation demands, having himself translated Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, and Keats; Petrarch and Leopardi from Italian; and, from Greek, George Seferis. This volume is edited and translated by three of Bonnefoy's long-time translators -Anthony Rudolf, John Naughton, and Stephen Romer - with contributions from Galway Kinnell, Richard Pevear, Beverley Bie Brahic, Emily Grosholz, Susanna Lang, and Hoyt Rogers.
Reviews / Votes
'The editors and translators have done a wonderful job in the selection and simplicity of the selections. This is a book to appeal to both admirers of Bonnefoy's work and the general reader who is looking toward engaging with a lifetime of poetic output.'?Andrew Taylor, Stride Magazine 'Although his early surrealisms might have allowed him to explore his unconscious, the 'conscious' that these later poems explore seems warmer, more carefree.'
?Ian Pople, the North 'Throughout this lovely volume, Bonnefoy emerges as a person of huge and searching empathies, whose lifelong quest was towards a larger truth.'
Ian Pople, the North '... an exhilirating sense of a consciousness expanding into the phenomena of the universe, a genuine encounter between self and Other which is at the very least quivering on the edge of our conceptual knowledge.'
Martyn Crucefix, Agenda
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
Manchester
United Kingdom
Publishing group
Carcanet Press Ltd
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Dimensions
Height: 213 mm
Width: 135 mm
Thickness: 28 mm
Weight
440 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-78410-075-9 (9781784100759)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions

Yves Bonnefoy | Anthony Rudolf | John Naughton
Poems
E-Book
09/2024
Fyfield Books
€19.19
Available for download
Persons
Yves Bonnefoy was named to the College de France in 1981 to fill the chair left vacant by the death of Roland Barthes and was the first poet honoured in this way since Paul Valery. He is the author of six critically acclaimed books of poetry. Bonnefoy's poems have appeared in English in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Partisan Review, and other journals. He is the editor of Mythologies and author of In the Shadow's Light, The Act and the Place of Poetry, and The Lure and the Truth of Painting, all published by the University of Chicago Press.
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