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Poetry as Plenitude: Yves Bonnefoy Mary Ann Caws HOW TO RESPOND to the texts of a poet of such repeatedly and movingly stated plenitude as Yves Bonnefoy? No one answer, we know, would be sufficient in its own depth or plenty. Believing that in such a case the best response may be made with many voices, we have taken that option here. The particular poetic universe of this poet, so unfailingly generous toward the poetry and the thought of others, is filled. Its elements are deep. Even the nostalgia sensed like a fragrance is profound in its reference to myth and legend. Here, where the world of art completes the world of poetry, everything takes its own essential time. Its proper time, abolishing not just any appropriation by another, but indeed any sense of inappropriateness itself, even in the cases of difficult meeting. What could be more difficult, more exacting, than a translation of the poets Shakespeare and Yeats? In his totally appropriate response to these two great wielders of the English language, their major French translator demonstrates fully, as he does in his own poetry, one of his preferred maxims: Lear's "Ripeness is all." In none of his writing is there that extraordinary sense of explosion by which other poets are, sometimes willingly, torn apart, no conscious or unconscious excruciation of the self and its language. In the very completeness we sense, there may seem often no space nor reason for a commentary from without. And yet Bonnefoy it is who, in the mental dialogue of sharing customary to him, asks the reader to enter as an equal into the work of seeing. Haunted as I have been by three specific images from his work over the years, images of destruction, abandonment, incompleteness, and —somehow—preservation, I want to speak of them in remembering the celebrated opening of André Breton's Nadja: "Qui suis-je? ... en effet pourquoi tout ne reviendrait-il pas à savoir qui je 'hante'?" ' The disturbing relations such "hauntings" set up between subject and object are not my subject, and yet... I avow myself haunted by another's haunting images, figures, thoughts, expressions: who is haunted here? All of us. As for the three images I want to dwell on and in, the first is that found in the strange prose poem called "L'Anti-Platon," which pictures Vol. XXXVI, NO. 3 7 L'Esprit Créateur a donkey's head revolving on a phonograph turntable, like some Arcimboldo double object with a deserted city reading as the other side of the head. This vanité has remained revolving in my imagination as the years have passed, like the completion of Cézanne and Picasso's own vanités, unabsorbable, invincible, silencing all commentary. The second is that of the lost painting Bonnefoy describes in La Peinture et le lieu, Parmigianino's Madonna with the Long Throat. Somewhere it was forgotten, in some storage place, ripped in places and repainted in patches over the centuries of abandonment, but necessary, he says, as a stage on the long road. As so often, Bonnefoy's ellipsis here is telling. He does not say, nor does he need to, of what long road it is a question, concluding only, of the painting: "C'est seulement devant lui, comme témoin de sa solitude, que Dieu mériterait d'exister" (I, 182).2 The third, Giacometti's statue called The Invisible Object, otherwise known as Hands Holding Emptiness, kneels before us in its thin height, holding exactly nothing—except the beginning of everything, as some commentators point out—and thus able to hold anything.3 This image Bonnefoy returns to repeatedly, as did André Breton. Together these three images speak of, and yet hold us off from, that long road towards death. One revolves in mockery of all eternalising concepts, one is ripped and repainted in an only temporary preservation, and one is simply awaited, like an invisible object whose expectant space is the visible, unspecific, and majestic concentration of presence. Here we have all tried to speak in a collective and yet singular presence . We have to ask, for each poet, what is proper as a response, whether or...

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