Yale University Press
trans. by Hoyt Rogers
When asked if he intended to be a poet, Yves Bonnefoy recalled his aunt giving him a small anthology of poems when he was around seven years of age. She inscribed: “To my godson—future poet.” “There was no mystery,” Bonnefoy stated, “even before I learned to read and write I knew it was in order to write poetry. Why? Perhaps because of a feeling that I could not practice the professions I saw around me.”[i] Second Simplicity: New Poetry and Prose, 1991-2011, translated by Hoyt Rogers, brings together Bonnefoy’s recent works as he approaches his ninetieth year.
Bonnefoy was born in 1923 in Tours, also the birthplace of 16th century French humanist poet Pierre de Ronsard. Bonnefoy’s mother was a primary school teacher and his father was a railroad worker who assembled locomotives and died when Bonnefoy was 13. His grandparents, whom he had close ties with, were innkeepers near the valley of the Lot River. Bonnefoy told an interviewer, “theirs was a little place near the railway station, with a few rooms they let. My grandmother cooked, and my grandfather looked after the clients. He also cut hair and made jackets.” In “The House where I was Born,” Bonnefoy writes:
In the same dream
I lie in the hollow of a hull,
Eyes and forehead pressed to the curved planks
Where I can hear the river knocking.
and later:
I woke up, but we were traveling.
The train had lumbered through the night.
Now it rolled toward massive clouds
That loomed in a cluster up ahead.
From time to time, lightning’s whip tore the dawn.
I watched the advent of the world
Throughout Bonnefoy’s oeuvre a perpetual dichotomy between presence and absence exists, yet the concept of Time is boundless, as if past experiences and characters exist concurrently with the finite now. If Bonnefoy alludes to childhood, history or the “advent of the world,” it is with the same intimate consciousness and perception of the present. In “The House I was Born” Bonnefoy returns to his childhood leitmotifs—rivers, trains, planks, father figures—and frames them within an adult dream. This intertwining of imagery makes his writing seem circular; death, music, art, literature all alter the passage of human life yet remain unchanged, almost untouchable. In “Mahler, The Song of the Earth” Bonnefoy writes of renouncing what is mortal in order to exist:
She moves forward, and you grow old.
Keep advancing, under interwoven trees,
And you’ll glimpse each other, now and then.
O music of words, utterance of sound,
Bend your steps toward each other as a sign
Of complicity, at last—and of regret.
There is a moving forward, but also a stillness. Language and music binding the reader to the world.
In the first section “Beginning and End of the Snow” (originally published in 1991) Bonnefoy’s marks the progression of seasons; his choice of imagery corresponds to an autumn and winter the author spent in New England. In the introduction to Second Simplicity Roger writes:
In her letters Emily Dickinson calls her poetry “my snow”—white pages that blow in from nowhere, without warning, and settle in drifts on the table. In his snow poems, Bonnefoy takes up this metaphor and expands it: the snowfall is the emblem of his words, swirling and ephemeral.[ii]
Bonnefoy’s “snow” poems—not unlike Dickinson’s in their compact length and deceptive effortlessness—wend their way through the poet’s interior geography, which was indubitably stimulated during Bonnefoy’s wanderings near Williamstown and Amherst through the winter terrain:
A Bit of Water
I long to grant eternity
To this flake
That alights on my hand,
By making my life, my warmth,
My past, my present days
Into a moment: the boundless
Moment of now.
But already it’s no more
Than a bit of water, lost in the fog
Of bodies moving through the snow.
The Mirror
Yesterday
Clouds still drifted
In the room’s black depths.
But now the mirror is empty.
Snowing
Unravels from the sky.
These two poems, quoted in their entirety, illustrate the hazy delineations between past and present, which come together in “the boundless moment of now”. Even the boundaries between the natural world and interior rooms fall away, as “clouds still drifted in the rooms.”
This reaching always towards the ungraspable, towards the edges of a room or a world, impart to his poems the feeling of being on the verge. Of what, he doesn’t tell us, but in interviews he has hinted at it:
"We need poetry…to prove to ourselves the value of those moments when we are able to encounter other people, or trees, or anything, beyond words, in silence.” [iii]
According to Bonnefoy, this “beyond words,” a “system of signs”, is what makes up consciousness, and the world. In this way signs and the senses can invent or redeem language and memory from a true primordial state, in much the same way as a mirror can reflect things we cannot see. Mirrors play an important part of Bonnefoy’s poetic imagery; they are a part of the idea that a thing or idea can obscure as well as illuminate, that obscurity can be hidden beneath something clear. He writes of mirrors almost as windows to a parallel yet hardly attainable consciousness:
I still hunger for that place
That was our mirror, hunger
for the fruit curved in its waters,
Hunger for its saving light.
(from “A Stone” p. 53)
“For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known,”[iv]St. Paul writes in Corinthians 13:12. And according to Bonnefoy: “poetry can only be a partial approach, which substitutes for the object a simple image and for (our feelings) a verbal expression—thereby losing the intimate experience… This means that we are deprived through words of an authentic intimacy with what we are, or with what the Other is.”[v]
Works Cited
[i] Paris Review, Interview with Yves Bonnefoy, Summer 1994, no. 131
[ii] Hoyt Rogers, Introduction to Second Simplicity, p. xiii
[iii] Paris Review
[iv] The Bible, Corinthians 13:12, New International Version
[v] Paris Review
trans. by Hoyt Rogers
When asked if he intended to be a poet, Yves Bonnefoy recalled his aunt giving him a small anthology of poems when he was around seven years of age. She inscribed: “To my godson—future poet.” “There was no mystery,” Bonnefoy stated, “even before I learned to read and write I knew it was in order to write poetry. Why? Perhaps because of a feeling that I could not practice the professions I saw around me.”[i] Second Simplicity: New Poetry and Prose, 1991-2011, translated by Hoyt Rogers, brings together Bonnefoy’s recent works as he approaches his ninetieth year.
Bonnefoy was born in 1923 in Tours, also the birthplace of 16th century French humanist poet Pierre de Ronsard. Bonnefoy’s mother was a primary school teacher and his father was a railroad worker who assembled locomotives and died when Bonnefoy was 13. His grandparents, whom he had close ties with, were innkeepers near the valley of the Lot River. Bonnefoy told an interviewer, “theirs was a little place near the railway station, with a few rooms they let. My grandmother cooked, and my grandfather looked after the clients. He also cut hair and made jackets.” In “The House where I was Born,” Bonnefoy writes:
In the same dream
I lie in the hollow of a hull,
Eyes and forehead pressed to the curved planks
Where I can hear the river knocking.
and later:
I woke up, but we were traveling.
The train had lumbered through the night.
Now it rolled toward massive clouds
That loomed in a cluster up ahead.
From time to time, lightning’s whip tore the dawn.
I watched the advent of the world
Throughout Bonnefoy’s oeuvre a perpetual dichotomy between presence and absence exists, yet the concept of Time is boundless, as if past experiences and characters exist concurrently with the finite now. If Bonnefoy alludes to childhood, history or the “advent of the world,” it is with the same intimate consciousness and perception of the present. In “The House I was Born” Bonnefoy returns to his childhood leitmotifs—rivers, trains, planks, father figures—and frames them within an adult dream. This intertwining of imagery makes his writing seem circular; death, music, art, literature all alter the passage of human life yet remain unchanged, almost untouchable. In “Mahler, The Song of the Earth” Bonnefoy writes of renouncing what is mortal in order to exist:
She moves forward, and you grow old.
Keep advancing, under interwoven trees,
And you’ll glimpse each other, now and then.
O music of words, utterance of sound,
Bend your steps toward each other as a sign
Of complicity, at last—and of regret.
There is a moving forward, but also a stillness. Language and music binding the reader to the world.
In the first section “Beginning and End of the Snow” (originally published in 1991) Bonnefoy’s marks the progression of seasons; his choice of imagery corresponds to an autumn and winter the author spent in New England. In the introduction to Second Simplicity Roger writes:
In her letters Emily Dickinson calls her poetry “my snow”—white pages that blow in from nowhere, without warning, and settle in drifts on the table. In his snow poems, Bonnefoy takes up this metaphor and expands it: the snowfall is the emblem of his words, swirling and ephemeral.[ii]
Bonnefoy’s “snow” poems—not unlike Dickinson’s in their compact length and deceptive effortlessness—wend their way through the poet’s interior geography, which was indubitably stimulated during Bonnefoy’s wanderings near Williamstown and Amherst through the winter terrain:
A Bit of Water
I long to grant eternity
To this flake
That alights on my hand,
By making my life, my warmth,
My past, my present days
Into a moment: the boundless
Moment of now.
But already it’s no more
Than a bit of water, lost in the fog
Of bodies moving through the snow.
The Mirror
Yesterday
Clouds still drifted
In the room’s black depths.
But now the mirror is empty.
Snowing
Unravels from the sky.
These two poems, quoted in their entirety, illustrate the hazy delineations between past and present, which come together in “the boundless moment of now”. Even the boundaries between the natural world and interior rooms fall away, as “clouds still drifted in the rooms.”
This reaching always towards the ungraspable, towards the edges of a room or a world, impart to his poems the feeling of being on the verge. Of what, he doesn’t tell us, but in interviews he has hinted at it:
"We need poetry…to prove to ourselves the value of those moments when we are able to encounter other people, or trees, or anything, beyond words, in silence.” [iii]
According to Bonnefoy, this “beyond words,” a “system of signs”, is what makes up consciousness, and the world. In this way signs and the senses can invent or redeem language and memory from a true primordial state, in much the same way as a mirror can reflect things we cannot see. Mirrors play an important part of Bonnefoy’s poetic imagery; they are a part of the idea that a thing or idea can obscure as well as illuminate, that obscurity can be hidden beneath something clear. He writes of mirrors almost as windows to a parallel yet hardly attainable consciousness:
I still hunger for that place
That was our mirror, hunger
for the fruit curved in its waters,
Hunger for its saving light.
(from “A Stone” p. 53)
“For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known,”[iv]St. Paul writes in Corinthians 13:12. And according to Bonnefoy: “poetry can only be a partial approach, which substitutes for the object a simple image and for (our feelings) a verbal expression—thereby losing the intimate experience… This means that we are deprived through words of an authentic intimacy with what we are, or with what the Other is.”[v]
Works Cited
[i] Paris Review, Interview with Yves Bonnefoy, Summer 1994, no. 131
[ii] Hoyt Rogers, Introduction to Second Simplicity, p. xiii
[iii] Paris Review
[iv] The Bible, Corinthians 13:12, New International Version
[v] Paris Review
