Shakespeare and the French Poet (review)

Bonnefoy is generally (and rightly) considered the best French poet of his generation (he was born in 1923), and he is also an important critic as well as a translator of English poetry (Yeats among the moderns, as well as Donne and Keats). He has moreover translated many of Shakespeare's plays and has prefaced each of them with a critical essay. Seven of these essays are translated here by various hands, and the book also includes other essays containing penetrating reflections on the problems confronting a translator because of the differences between the French and English languages.

Bonnefoy is of course familiar with the classics of Shakespeare criticism in English and refers to them from time to time, but his interpretations follow along their own path. It is not surprising that these stem from the same problematic that marks his poetry. As John Naughton points out in his excellent prefacing remarks, Bonnefoy's poetry is based on a dialectic of image and presence, which can be described as that between human finitude and an attempt to escape from its limitations. In the past, human finitude was contained within a framework of relations culminating in God and reflected in language itself through such a notion as, for example, the great chain of being; but this framework no longer exists. One of the tasks of modern poetry, as Bonnefoy sees it, is to attempt to resurrect and keep alive the values of this framework without being committed to any sort of dogma. He approaches Shakespeare in the same way and defines him as "a poet of a harsher time," living after "the collapse of the 'goodly frame' which the Christian Middle Ages had built with heaven and earth around man, who was created by God." But Shakespeare "felt that an order still remained in place, in nature and in us—a deep universal order, the order of life, which, when understood, when recognized in its simplest forms, when loved and accepted, could give new meaning through its unity and its sufficiency to our condition as exiles from the world of the Promise—just as grass springs up among the ruins."

What Bonnefoy searches for in Shakespeare's plays is evidence that this "deep universal order" continues to exist, finding indications and suggestions of it in aspects of the works that are often overlooked because only intimated or suggested and kept in the background. This search leads to readings that make no attempt to replace the more accepted ones but, instead, to constantly enrich them with new nuances and new emphases. Prospero's supernatural powers in The Tempest, a species of "white magic" quite fashionable in the Elizabethan period, are seen to alienate him from the human world; and the relatively overlooked role of women as preservers and restorers of "the human," in a universe controlled by "images" of power, glory, or ambition, is appraised. Bonnefoy's interpretations are not so much critical essays as richly humane and rewarding reflections and meditations on the plays by a creative spirit finely attuned to their every nuance, and responding in the light of his own poetic preoccupations.