Yves Bonnefoy: “Was it real, that we were”? – Le Figaro

The poet, regularly cited as nobelizable, died Friday 1 July at the age of 93. It leaves a considerable oeuvre, where poetry expressed by mere words or repeated theme “the relationship with the world.”

It was his friend the essayist Starobinski who perhaps best spoken poetry Yves Bonnefoy, evoking a famous preface *, the strength of his personal accent, “where I of subjective assertion manifests itself with force and simplicity.” Poetry with the subject “relationship with the world, not the internal reflection of me.”

With the publication of his first major book, From the movement and stillness of Moat , Yves Bonnefoy told us his contempt for the “imperfect intoxication to live.” Over half a century later, it will note still set , his poetic testament, his unfailing willingness to “preserve the meaning of words.” For him, poetry was “the epiphany of immediate reality.” Throughout his life, he will fight rhetoric, rejecting the mirage of images, confirming its rejection of the surrealist heritage and committed poetry, adopting a moderate lyricism, forged by demanding lucidity, and that will remain his trademark.

A poet in search of ever more clarity

The poetic universe of Yves Bonnefoy is crossed by mere words or themes, repeated, staged or perspective, and subject to subtle variations. These are wind, snow, source, earth, “the night flooded” the horizon forms from the sky, but also the beauty of the world and its rustling, birds, hot stones … Words exposed reader, offered by the poet in search of ever more clearly: that of sound, that of meaning; . With increasing fluidity

For its part, the poet and essayist Jean-Michel Maulpoix, theorist of critical lyricism notes Farewell poem , about Bonnefoy ” Desiring to presence, the poet refuses to regret as to flee, but seeks to move, returning to the lures and perils as well as in laying again the question of hope. “

“Oh, do not leave me. The stars shine, the sky moves “

This was reiterated, it is difficult to define in a few words the poetic art of this or that author, and more in the case the author of boards curves , for whom poetry must reveal the real. No doubt to give a taste, is it better to give some isolated parts of his dozen books published.

He said the poem was not it “a nascent state of impossible fullness”? Illustrations: “I sleep, and dream, and going by childhood paths”, “In the consent of the light”, “The smell of the horizon in all directions”, “It was a wind stronger than our memories. ” At the very end of his life, he wrote: “Oh, do not leave me. The stars shine, the sky moves. ” And again, more bitterly: “Was it real, that we were”

In 1965, at age 32, Bonnefoy had published these lines: “We do not see in the same light / We not have the same eyes, the same hands / the tree is closer and the voice of the deepest sources / Our steps are deeper among the dead. ” These deaths it has reached more than half a century later, in another light, that it has ceased to cherish and track …

* Poems , anthology of Yves Bonnefoy (Mercure de France, 1978)