Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016) is recognized as the greatest French poet of the past fifty years. By the time of his death, he had published eleven major collections of poetry in verse and prose, several books of tales, and numerous studies of literature and art. Yves Bonnefoy was awarded the Prix Goncourt of Poetry in 1987. John Naughton is a professor of Romance languages and literatures at Colgate University. He is the principal translator of Bonnefoy's work into English.
One of the most esteemed of contemporary French poets, Bonnefoy keeps his highly philosophical poetry tangible through a detailed sense of wonder at the universe, as in his famous early poem, ``Place of the Salamander'': ``How I love that which awaits the hour of its victory/ And holds its breath and clings to the ground.'' Selected from six books of poetry written over four decades, many of these translations are new; much of the work-including the 1991 collection, The Beginning and the End of the Snow-is published in English for the first time. Naughton's stimulating though academic introduction outlines Bonnefoy's movement from the abstract-as in his early explorations of a feminine symbol of mortality he called ``Douve''-to finding more rooted, joyous inspiration from the French countryside he inhabited for years. Since the 1980s, Bonnefoy's prose poems, such as Where the Arrow Falls, maintain in a more narrative form his unique, opulent alloy of natural imagery and existential questioning. The English and French versions face; translators besides the editors include Galway Kinnell and Richard Stamelman, all of whom have delivered the English with measured clarity. (Oct.)
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