Shakespeare & the French Poet (review)

Yves Bonnefoy is one of France's outstanding twentieth-century poets. Born in Tours in 1923, in the days when people thought it the area where the most beautiful French was spoken, he studied philosophy and mathematics in Poitiers before moving to Paris during the Occupation; there he was taken up by the poets André Breton and Pierre Jean Jouve, who first recommended him as a Shakespeare translator. His first slim volume appeared in 1953 to immediate critical recognition, to be followed by half a dozen books of his own poetry, as well as many volumes of art and literary criticism, autobiography, and translation. He is no outsider: he succeeded Roland Barthes at the Collège de France (a kind of advanced studies institute superior to both the universities and the Grandes Écoles), where he lectured on poetry, among other subjects. Bonnefoy belongs to a long tradition that has used Shakespeare as a lever against French classicism, in his case particularly its abstraction and the grip of the alexandrine line. For Bonnefoy, Shakespeare is a supreme example of the way that great poetry gives us our best, perhaps our only, chance to glimpse ultimate reality and to intuit the unity of Being.

This collection represents material first assembled in Bonnefoy's 1998 Shakespeare et Yeats, supplemented by two further essays and an interview with the editor, who has long translated and explicated Bonnefoy's poetic work. He has revised some chapters, which have been translated individually for publication in English-language journals over the past forty years. For obvious reasons, Bonnefoy's translators are specialists in French literature, poets, or poetry specialists, whose interest is first and foremost in Bonnefoy. These translations have neither Bonnefoy's inwardness with Shakespeare's plays nor the interests of Shakespeare specialists. It is important to stress the long gestation of this book, because Bonnefoy repeats his views about Shakespeare (already clear from the outset, almost fifty years ago) in each of the separate publications of his translations.

Poets' literary criticism can be as much about themselves as it is about their subjects, and Bonnefoy's essays are further modulated by their origin as introductions intended for the general public for private reading. In France, such prefaces do not acknowledge previous scholarship or criticism, and Shakespeareans will recognize many uncredited opinions and insights. The only identifying notes are to quotations from French poetry, especially to Rimbaud, a major influence on Bonnefoy. One might have the impression of reading a modern Coleridge, with a strong absorption of German Romantic philosophy, extended by the varieties of existentialism and in ways that will bring Stanley Cavell to mind. For Bonnefoy, Shakespeare is, above all, a philosophical poet, not a man of the theater.

The introductions presented here concentrate on the tragedies and romances (categorized in France as tragicomedies). John Naughton has also included some shorter, more general reflections on translation (but nothing on Bonnefoy's single comedy, English history, his sonnets, or the prose translations of the narrative poems). Naughton's explication of what he characterizes as Bonnefoy's "somewhat elusive" ideas (xi) goes some way toward clarifying a position that readers coming to him for the first time may find hard to grasp. Bonnefoy's world is one which assumes real presences, that is, it is a sacred world mediated by images—errors of perception—which distract us from the reality of other people. Naughton might have drawn a parallel between Bonnefoy's contrast between Being and what he translates as "Day Dreaming" and his insistence on the divide between rhetoric and poetry. In both cases, Bonnefoy orients himself toward presumed essences, from which "covering" or misprision may distract the perceiving subject—usually a tragic hero, but including Leontes. He believes that Shakespeare knew this before him, and therefore he recognizes in Shakespeare's plays characters whose failure to connect with the Being of other characters leads to their own downfall and the plays' tragedies. His...