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  • A French Shakespeare for English Readers: Yves Bonnefoy
  • David Gervais (bio)
Shakespeare and the French Poet by Yves Bonnefoy, trans. John Naughton. University of Chicago Press, 2004. $25 (pb). ISBN 978 0 226 06443 7
Théâtre et poésie: Shakespeare et Yeats by Yves Bonnefoy. Mercure de France, 1998. ISBN 978 2 715 22108 6

‘There is a world elsewhere …’

It is not possible to do justice to either the complexity of Yves Bonnefoy’s view of Shakespeare or to its fundamental simplicity. He is a writer whose prose makes an immediate appeal to the reader whilst inviting slow and prolonged meditation: though we soon feel at home with him, we sense that it will take time and thought to understand him properly. Like the French poets who have meant most to him, such as Rimbaud and Valéry, he offers us not just a style but a practice of thinking, a particular way of exercising our minds. To him, language is always an instrument for inner discovery; his lucidity belongs more to the spirit than the reason. The most clear-cut images in his poetry are the most suggestive. For this reason, he takes care not to juxtapose French and English literature in the dogmatic, either/or way that more conventional critics so easily fall into. What drew him to Shakespeare was the way his ‘superb English … harbored a great deal of our own approach to poetry: the grand words of Latin origin, but also, and even more important, something of that resonant space that French poetry often maintains between words to allow their range of meaning a wider scope’ (Shakespeare and the French Poet). French poetry and English may be very different, but there is a sense in which their aspirations coincide.

There are, in fact, few French precedents for Bonnefoy’s bright, hard precision of thought, apart from Racine and Pascal (and perhaps some of the [End Page 269] later poems of Baudelaire). Most French poets rely more on rhetoric than he does. His effects depend more on rhythmic balance and harmony than on verbal display. Though his syntax is often exhilaratingly sinuous it is never theatrical or elaborate just for the sake of it: it has a Yeatsian fluidity but not Yeats’s overt flamboyance.1 There is something new and unique in the special clarity of Bonnefoy’s verse. Verlaine, who prided himself on his simplicity, is apt to seem a touch nebulous when at his most serious; even Rimbaud, at his most intense, can seem dense and a bit clotted. Bonnefoy, on the other hand, as in this simple little poem from Hier régnant désert (1958), can combine a seemingly artless simplicity with a refined subtlety of feeling:

Tu es seul maintenant malgré ces étoiles, Le centre est près de toi et loin de toi, Tu as marché, tu peux marcher, plus rien ne change, Toujours la même nuit qui ne s’achève pas.

Et vois, tu es déjà séparé de toi-même, Toujours ce même cri, mais tu ne l’entends pas, Es-tu celui qui meurt, toi qui n’as plus d’angoisse, Es-tu même perdu, toi qui ne cherche pas.2

The exactness of a word like ‘vois’ (a strong Racinian verb) and the plangent repetition of the word ‘même’ give these lines an air of unforced mystery. The effect is as natural as breathing; it affects us immediately, like an electric shock, but, at the same time, it keeps its distance, significant but coolly unparaphraseable. Bonnefoy’s little poem (is it a poem about love or about death?) has a classic poise but one could not describe it as ‘classical’. It does not draw attention to its own symmetry of structure: we see through rather than by its form. Though the presence of French classicism may be sensed within it, it also carries echoes of more recent French poetry (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, etc.)

It may seem indirect to begin an essay on Bonnefoy and Shakespeare by invoking earlier French poets in this way and, implicitly, casting one’s mind back to French critics like Voltaire, in whose...

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