The American Side of France’s Greatest Postwar Poet

Yves Bonnefoy, who died this month, set out to unite the often incompatible traditions of French and English-language poetry.PHOTOGRAPH BY SUEDDEUTSCHE ZEITUNG PHOTO / ALAMY

Yves Bonnefoy, who died earlier this month, at the age of ninety-three, is widely considered France’s greatest poet of the past fifty years. But he also belongs, in part, to a lineage of New England poetry. In 1985, on an invitation from Williams College, Bonnefoy spent an autumn and winter in western Massachusetts, a brief stay that helped inspire the collections “In the Shadow’s Light” and “Beginning and End of the Snow.” In the great tradition of Frenchmen who travel to the United States and describe the place with fresh eyes, he recorded his impressions of the forests, their colors, and the changes of light against the snow:

First snowfall, early this morning. Ochre and green
Take refuge under the trees.

The second batch, toward noon. No color’s left
But the needles shed by pines,
Falling even thicker than the snow.

Then, toward evening,
Light’s scale comes to rest.
Shadows and dreams weigh the same.

With a toe, a puff of wind
Writes a word outside the world.

There is something at once very American and very French about this poem. (The translation is by Hoyt Rogers.) Like Emerson, Dickinson, and Frost, Bonnefoy subjects the forest to close, reverential observation, and reveals in it an earthly Eden. Yet there is also, in these lines, a sense that the vision is illusory, the melting material of dreams and symbols. It’s characteristic of Bonnefoy that his faithful description of passing through the woods on a snowy evening also gives him the metaphor of a blank piece of paper in the instant before a poem fills it.

Bonnefoy’s writing is made of these gentle disagreements—his lifelong project was the reconciliation of stubborn opposites. The child of a teacher and a railroad worker, he was born in Tours in 1923 and spent the war years studying mathematics and philosophy. With his celebrated début collection, in 1953 (“On the Motion and Immobility of Douve”), he began a truly polymathic literary career, publishing, along with free-verse poetry, short fiction, lyric essays, translations (notably of Shakespeare and Yeats), literary criticism, and art history. He devoted considerable attention to the visual arts. (His second marriage was to the American painter Lucy Vines; the photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson was one of his closest friends.) He travelled widely, and lectured in comparative literature both in France and abroad.

All this roving among forms, disciplines, and continents seemed to thrust him into a permanently ambassadorial role. In a 1958 article for the literary magazine Encounter, Bonnefoy explored the “cultural gulf” between French and Anglo-American poetic traditions. The differences, he suggested, were as diametric as darkness and light. In English-language literature, there was a preoccupation with “communicated meanings.” This was writing dedicated to saying something intelligible, exemplified by the ordered, almost mathematical poetry of John Donne and T. S. Eliot. You don’t simply read these writers: you analyze them.

But the French had become antagonistic to the supremacy of ideas. Bonnefoy wrote that “the influence of the great 19th-century poets, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Rimbaud, and more recently of surrealism, has profoundly regenerated the whole conception of poetry by emphasizing that its value is non-rational and subjective.” The goal was to harness a language that would annihilate meaning, moving poetry toward the purer plane of solitude and silence.

These are incompatible aims, yet Bonnefoy set out to unite them. He recognized that the Anglo-Saxon heritage was cramped by its bourgeois demand for a literature in which everything can be reasonably explained. (“The idea that some undiscovered meaning may still subsist in a poem seems to be regarded as scandalous, a blow to collective moral security.”) But he also saw that the headlong rebellions of the French avant-garde were devolving into rarefied gibberish, becoming an “experiment not on the situations of life,” as he put it in an interview with The Paris Review, but merely on “the verbal instrument.”

Could poetry both freely create and rationally assert? Could it speak from the unconscious but still make conscious sense? Bonnefoy’s solution was to convey the motion back and forth between these two states: the physical and the symbolic, the real and the dream. His poems often open with precise, concrete descriptions, only to abruptly dissolve into the ineffable projections of the imagination, as in “Rain Falls on the Ravine” (translated, again, by Rogers):

I hear the first wasp
Already rousing in the warmth
Of the fog that seals this path
Where a few puddles shine. The wasp searches
In peace, invisible. I could believe
That I am here, that I listen; but its hum
Deepens only in my mind. The path
Beneath my feet is no longer the path,
Only my dream
Of the wasp, the hoopoes, the fog.

Or they begin in empty textual abstraction—“the drift of the signs,” as he put it—before being rejuvenated by an encounter with something solid and actual:

The books: he tore them all apart.
The devastated page. Yet the light
On the page, the increase of light. He knew
He was becoming the blank page again.

He went out. Torn, the visage of the world
Took on another beauty, seemed more human now.
In shadow play, the sky’s hand reached for his.
The stone where you see his weathered name
Was opening, forming a word.

The above is from of a sequence of poems, each of which is titled “A Stone.” Stones, along with trees, snow, rain, and light, are frequent motifs in Bonnefoy’s writing, representing the natural elements whose presence he sought to illuminate. Often he views the natural world from the unaffected perspective of children—or even from the eyes of Adam and Eve, who, fleetingly, experience that world before its constituent parts are complicated with names. “A poet’s job is to show us a tree, before our mind tells us what a tree is,” Bonnefoy once wrote. It is his most frequently quoted line.

The spareness of his verse steers the reader toward this kind of simplified perception, but it’s in the nature of language to form a network of allusions and associations that crowd out immediate impressions. Few writers have danced with this dilemma as gracefully as Bonnefoy does in a prose meditation from 1972, “L’Arrière-pays.” The title roughly means backcountry or hinterland, but, as the translator Stephen Romer has written, it signifies something more elusive, a country that exists beyond the visible. Part memoir, part criticism, part artist’s statement, the sui-generis work is a stirring treatise on the lures and laments of beauty. We follow Bonnefoy on restless peregrinations in search of masterpieces, from the architecture of India to the Quattrocento paintings of Italy. But the more sublime the landscape or representation, the more he yearns for an idealized “place of absolutes” in which that perfection becomes permanent. Dreams of an inaccessible Eden impinge on his pleasure in the things of the world:

Once I had discovered and praised a particular work, I could more easily recognize its limitations. One retained too much elegance; another was marked, on looking again, by a psychology too facile, read in the expression of grief, pity or love. Awakened, and aware, yes, but not without a kind of impediment, which belonged to our side; they were only a reflection then of what—over there­—shone out in all fullness.

A writer who seeks to synthesize all styles and re-create a vanished wholeness can find no resting place, and Bonnefoy was aware that his own writing would never provide more than frustrated glimpses of transcendence. “I have resolved nothing,” he writes in “L’Arrière-pays,” “which can also explain why I have remained a writer, writing being the wood that piles up as the fire starts to catch.” It’s a measure of his essential generosity that his work never seemed to dead-end in fatalism. It is often wistful, but rarely melancholic, and never embittered. Life, for Bonnefoy, perpetually slips between fragmentation and fullness, but it is experienced less as the process of loss than as a series of arrivals upon the cusp of revelation.

Bonnefoy’s books are quietly plentiful in English, especially his elegantly stripped-down later work. “Second Simplicity,” translated by Rogers and published by Yale University Press, gathers together his poetry and prose between 1991 and 2011, and Seagull Books has been rolling out attractive editions of his books for the past five years, in translations by Rogers, Romer, and Beverley Bie Brahic. Next month, Seagull will publish “Ursa Major,” a brief selection, in Brahic’s translation, of Bonnefoy’s poetry from the final years of his life. The poems take the form of dialogues between a man and a woman—perhaps Adam and Eve in exile from the garden. As always, they revel in the beauty of the physical world:

There are days, my dear, when it strikes me, I am indeed real. I leave you sleeping, I go out, day is breaking, the grass is cold. I take our old road and you are that child who runs ahead of me. Who turns back sometimes, laughing, laughing.

But the paradox of poetry is that putting the moment into words transforms it. As soon as beauty is perceived, it ducks behind a shroud of signs:

It’s true I don’t exist and you don’t exist. We go off; in some places the road is so narrow I have to squeeze up close to you. Who will go first, in all this light? We are laughing, it is nightfall.