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Poet, translator, art critic, professor at the College of France, several times tipped for the Nobel prize for literature, Yves Bonnefoy died Friday 1 st July in Paris at the age of 93. This great writer was a multiple man. Despite the diversity of its activities, the same intuition always seemed to guide his approach he called “the word of truth” , or the desire to enter “what life is immediate “.
In the poetic intensity, manifesting as an insatiable curiosity for all art forms (he has written essays on Picasso, Balthus, Giacometti, Mondrian, Alechinsky), Yves Bonnefoy built an open work, multiple-entry, in which the expression is always thorough with a requirement of thought. The poet was suspicious however the concept, he thought, we departs from the essential: desperate to identify our experiences, it limits them, and deprives us, moreover, the presence of the world. “The task of the poet is to show a tree before our intellect tells us that tree” , he wrote.
Read also Yves Bonnefoy, the origin of poetry
This is Yves Bonnefoy was born in Tours on June 24 in 1923 in a modest family: his father is a worker and his schoolteacher mother fitter . About childhood, he has repeatedly explained that this period of life corresponded to him the origin of the poetic experience. In spring 2010, recalling his “days bear;” , it had entrusted we see poetry as “preserve this sense of presence from any to any” which made “happiness, and also anxiety.”
fervent admirer of Rimbaud
for his parents, the little Bonnefoy explains that he wants to know how to read “writing poetry” . About 7 or 8 years old, he already shows great curiosity for literature. On the page of a book offered by his aunt, one can read this enlightening dedication: “In my godson and nephew, the future poet. “ That is when fellow high school Descartes in Tours, in July 1940, his literary vocation becomes clearer: advised by his philosophy teacher, he discovered a Small anthology of surrealism, the poet and filmmaker Georges Hugnet. Enchantments. “I found there, suddenly, the poems of Breton, Peret, Eluard, superb verbal masses of time to Tzara Dada (…) Giacometti, collages Max Ernst, Tanguy, the first Miro whole world “, he tells in his Interviews on poetry (Mercure de France, 1990)
<. p> Despite the attraction to the strange surreal caused by these discoveries, Bonnefoy chooses a much “reasonable” : mathematics. This is also the pretext that it gives to come to Paris, and prepare his license at the Sorbonne. He lives in a room with backyard, on the Quai Saint-Michel, makes his living giving lessons in mathematics and natural sciences. But it is now the literature that is imposed on him, first by reading. He discovered Bataille, Artaud, Michaux, Eluard, Jouve, and now frequents André Breton. In 1946, it’s also a Surrealist magazine, The Revolution Night , he published his first poem “The heart-space.” But this proximity to this group will remain short.
If Bonnefoy recognizes that surrealism could liberate thought from the shackles of laws and dogmas, he accuses Breton to deviate from the real benefit of a some “occultism” . What he rejects probably also is the gregarious and ideological dimension of this movement that opposes the chimera to reality and emphasizes the opacity to light. In fervent admirer of Rimbaud, to whom he devoted several critical essays, it is the “harsh reality” that seeks to embrace, as the poet of A season in hell . And not an unlikely surreality.
In 1947, Yves Bonnefoy decides to break with surrealism, shortly before the opening of an international exhibition dedicated to this movement to the Maeght Gallery, organized by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. If it moves away from André Breton, he however never deny its influence: openness to dream, especially, and access to “large unpredictable images, wild ‘
It is 31 years that Yves Bonnefoy made his entry into real literature. In 1954 he published a collection of poems, From motion and stillness of Moat , immediately welcomed by Maurice Nadeau, the creator of the New Letters , in definitive terms . “You may recall is not, writes, that had the Goncourt Prize, but it will remember that, this year, appeared the first collection of a great poet. You have to mark a milestone in the advent of Yves Bonnefoy and the new start he did take to poetry. “
Poetry dreamy, but ingrained in the flesh of the world, this book lays the foundation for an aesthetic that Bonnefoy last until his death. For the poet, the task is complex and paradoxical: it is wary of the words, as they are “no real grip on things,” , you have to go through them, however; divert their uses to find what he called “the second level of the word” .
In his first book, the name of fluke means both woman , river, moor. The poems of Yves Bonnefoy, such as analyzing the Swiss writer Starobinski are “between two worlds” . They look the most literal dimension of reality (which is perhaps the most enigmatic), but they also feed on “dream narratives” .
For this is the quest presence – “obviously mysterious” for Bonnefoy – that animates the writing in its roads. With this expectation claimed incessantly finally refound unity of being. Sometimes complex reputation, poems by Yves Bonnefoy are nevertheless simple. They appoint a possible world, and finally accessible without speech that pre-exist their “The poem is not a didactic activity, it does not explain the experience of the world it seeks to deepen” , he assured.
not wanting to separate the human experience, Yves Bonnefoy has written beside his poetic research extensively on the history of artistic forms. Creating and thinking, for the writer, are speech acts involved the same momentum. In 1954 he joined the CNRS, with a subject of study devoted to the “sign and significance of the shape at Piero Della Francesca” , under the direction of André Chastel and Jean Wahl.
His works include many critical essays on the murals of France Gothic and Baroque art ( Rome, 1630 , Flammarion, 1970). This artistic heritage is in the The Inland (Gallimard, 1972), Yves Bonnefoy make him his deepest tribute. This book oscillates between autobiography and philosophical reflection. Yves Bonnefoy it illuminates the path of his life in the light of art and in seeking the “true” instead, he finds the essence in Renaissance painting. A world finally possible, he thinks that “no one would work as a foreign land” .
Fascinated by the time
This concern for constant dialogue with all forms of art, he saw other fruitful adventures, mixing work and friendship. In 1967, with the poet Jacques Dupin, the critical Gaétan Picon, and Louis-René writer Forestry, he founded The Ephemeral . This review, which is a bridge between the floor and the arts, brings together men writing and images. It “originated the feeling there’s a poetic approach to reality whose work is not the end means” , he wrote. Despite its short life (five numbers), this review marks his era and saw the birth of the voices of new writers like Pascal Quignard or Alain Veinstein.
Bonnefoy, the text is a meeting to which is close but also abroad – his translator activity will testify. In 1960, he translated Julius Caesar , Shakespeare. The play is performed at the Odeon, with decorations created by his friend Balthus, and directed by Jean-Louis Barrault. The result after ten Shakespeare plays, but also Yeats, Petrarch, Leopardi … He also devote extensive testing to translation he considered close to poetic creation, because it is also an act of transformation language.
Welcoming the reporter from World in 2010 in his office in the rue Lepic in Montmartre, he had held since the 1950s, Yves Bonnefoy had only wanted “talk” . He refused the formula of recorded oral interview for fear of not being able to return to what he could have said. He recalled his work, without suggesting that it was over. He spoke of his “bibliographer” busy collecting his scattered multiple publications since decades in magazines, newspapers, conference proceedings … He also wanted to go over some things that were particularly important to him, like his friend Henri-Cartier Bresson photographer – “his Leica was a rapid instrument that his mind” , he said – he admired for his great willingness to “beauty what is “
for Yves Bonnefoy was a real poet. fascinated by time, little by then. About the modern world, he distrusted all kinds of ideologies, all threats to poetry, which must, he thought, deploy deep thought systems. “The XXI th century , he confided to the Literary Magazine in April 2008, that’s possibly one that will see the poetry perish, smothered under the ruins of which it covers the natural world as well as society. “
- 24 June 1923 Born in Tours
- 1945-1946 Frequent surrealist circles. Visits to André Breton in his return from America
- 1947 Shortly before the International Exhibition of Surrealism, André Breton break with
- 1950 Publication of first poems “from the movement and stillness of Moat”
- 1959 “the Improbable”, a collection of essays on art and poetry
- 1970 “Rome 1630: the horizon of the early Baroque.” In the fall, teaching at the University of Geneva (replacing Jean Rousset)
- 1981 Election Collège de France (Chair in comparative studies of the poetic function)
- 1990 “Talks on poetry (1972-1990)”
- 2016 : Publication of “the red Scarf”
- 1 st July 2016 Death in Paris
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