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Tribute to Yves Bonnefoy

by Carlo Ossola

Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016)

Born in Tours on June 24, 1923, Yves Bonnefoy died in Paris on July 1st, 2016. From 1981 to 1993, he held the chair of Études comparées de la fonction poétique at the Collège de France; his lectures were published in the volume Lieux et destins de l'image, by Editions du Seuil, in 1999. For many years, he led and directed the Fondation Hugot colloquia on "La conscience de soi de la poésie", which were the focus of passionate and inspired reflection on the role of literature in the present day, and the very center of activity of our Institut d'Études littéraires. He spanned the 20th century with the freshness of an ever auroral language, spoken with a Leopardian trepidation (one of his permanent points of reference), contemplating a creation blossoming on its own wounds.

Bonnefoy has softened our present and restored the rhythm of harmony to the darkness of the past:

At my home in Urbino between night and day
To Saint-Yves de la Sagesse.
[...]
To the painters of the Rimini school. I wanted to be a historian out of anguish for your glory.
I would like to erase history out of concern for your absolute [1].

Bonnefoy traveled, listened, taught at the Collège de France, wrote about art, poetry, photography and music, translated Shakespeare, Keats, Petrarch, Pascoli and Leopardi, frequented and conversed with the classics, and befriended whatever of the present world was worth preserving; but what best defines him is the humanity embodied in his words and his gaze, a pronunciation - even before it is writing - of the expectation of the other. Bonnefoy's words come to meet us and remain on the threshold, in the simplicity of a "here" that grounds their presence, "determination and courage", as he says of the morally essential form of Morandi and Giacometti [2].

Bonnefoy's arrival at the Collège de France was not an easy one: Georges Blin had prepared for it at length, and his introductory text, which remained in manuscript and was recently rediscovered by Christophe Labaune, bears witness to his hesitations, his commitment, and the difficulties arising from the implicit comparison with Paul Valéry. This text, which should be published, goes straight to the point - from the very first pages - with a concern for "writing" that has the scrupulosity and elegance of virtuosity:

At this point, where the vacancy of a chair is, in its destiny, similar to the influx of a vocation, all I would have to do would be to recall, in due order or by sector, the major contracts of a work and the element of a personality, if in the case of Yves Bonnefoy the presentation did not seem, as if by paradox, as difficult as it was idle. He has said that "presence decides", but what can the presenter do when one of the parts is missing and, to paraphrase a rather decisive Notice itself, there is a risk of arousing that analogy of desolation which, in his eyes, is "the gathering where the celebrable has been missing" [3].

Georges Blin would later publish an excerpt in Commentaire [4], where this part would not appear, replaced nonetheless by a definition as dazzling as it is tormented:

Bonnefoy's fractured logic theorizes the unity of appeal [5].

Indeed, Bonnefoy's poetics are basically coherent, from Traité du pianiste and La Nouvelle Objectivité (1946) to L'Improbable (1980). Let's recall a passage from the 1946 treatise:

All means are good to unmask the object and decontaminate space. The poetry of the future will be the exploitation of these means. It will liberate the mind from logical paralysis, and transform the relationships between man and society that objects imply [6].

This already heralds the battle against the sterile vanity of the "conceptual", which we'll find as an exergue to L'Improbable et autres essais:

I dedicate this book to the improbable, that is, to what is.
To a spirit of vigilance. To negative theologies. To a desired poetry of rain, expectation and wind.
To a great realism, one that aggravates rather than resolves, that designates the obscure, that holds clarity to be an ever-tearing cloud. It is concerned with a high, impracticable clarity [7].

It's the realism of "incarnation" against all conceptual "excarnation", as Bonnefoy emphasized in L'Arrière-pays [8]: it's no longer a question of " thinking the absolute , but of thinking about it from the heart of our existence as we have to live it", in the constant constraint of "a conceptualized speech that doesn't know how to give life" [9].

A poetics that brings together the immediacy of the gaze, the gratuity of the impulse, the call to the other, the risk and ephemerality of the gift:

I give you these verses, not because your name
Can ever flourish, in this poor soil,
But because trying to remember,
These are cut flowers, which makes sense.
[...]
Who wants to have, sometimes, the visit, owes it to himself
To love in a bouquet that only has an hour.
Beauty is only an offering at this price [10].

Bonnefoy's poetry is antignostic, if we define gnosis as "any way of perceiving the world in which we live as insufficient or even bad, and this by remembering another reality, this one good, satisfying, which could have existed or will be able to do so, but then beyond the present times or rather even by transgression and dissipation of time itself, which would only be one of the darkest aspects of human dereliction [11]". Bonnefoy's poetry is a "gift of the gratuitous", the focus of a maturing light:

[...]
O earth, earth,
Presence so willing, so given,
[...]
So much desire for you, perfect earth,
Were not meant to ripen like fruit
In its moment of ecstasy detaches itself
From the branch, from matter, pure flavor [12] ?

This is not, however, a panic world, a nature naturans of which poetry would be the memorial extension, but on the contrary - and ever more precisely in this final achievement - the gathering of the existing in the pure transparency of an "accent du vécu", in its most minute essence:

And it is now before me, around me, in me, the world as it shows itself when it unravels from dream, thing after thing withdrawing into itself, reducing itself to its appearance, giving life back to that other and only evidence which are the crowing of the cock, the barking of a dog on the road, the noise in the distance of a passing car.

Yves Bonnefoy, like a 20th century Leopardi, has taken on the latter's most audacious legacy: that of making the universe of forms pass into the icon of silence, like an ascetic Morandi of language :

How have you lived? Be your mirror
The window, the bed of the empty room [13].

He does not turn (as a Gnostic, precisely) towards a lost Eden, but rises to the treetops whose thorny foliage tears him apart. Let's quote the final apologue, Voix à la cime des arbres:

[Eve:] I have seen, she says.
[Adam:] What? Elsewhere, I saw elsewhere. Very small. Clouds that don't move. Houses.
And to offer Adam from elsewhere, this fruit of the tree. Let's go up again!
Ah, so many branches, so many leaves, so much fruit! They push aside branches to reach higher and higher. They look into the distance, this time together. This is the "real life" variant.
They won't be coming down again. Children are playing up there, squabbling, with shouts and laughter the like of which is unheard on earth.
They barely pay attention to the stones that fall on them from who knows where in the highest part of the world. Stones of various colors and sizes that bounce off branches, sometimes breaking them. Sometimes they kill.
This is the "treetop" variant [14].

To rise is to accept contracture and injury, to let oneself be ploughed: "In words that still remember // So many and so many things that time / Has harshly ploughed with its claws [15]" - "Hands clutching only at light." Bonnefoy's poetry, then, is no idyll. It points to the myth beyond the form in which it consoles itself (and us). No reading of Hélène's beauty has been more radical than Bonnefoy's :

Who, except perhaps Pâris, has ever seen her?
All the porters knew was the great reddish stone,
Rough and cracked
They had to climb, sweating and swearing,
To the ramparts, before the night.

This rock,
This sand of origin, disintegrating,
Is it Hélène? These clouds, these red gleams
One does not know if in the soul or in the sky?

The truth perhaps, but kept kills,
Not even Stésichorus admits it,
Behold: Helen's semblance was but a fire
Built against the wind on a beach [16].

Yves Bonnefoy was also the most intense interpreter of 20th century Italian culture, not only in Rome 1630 or L'Arrière-pays, but also in his embrace of the medicine that flows from contemplated pain, as exemplified in Sur une pietà by Tintoret:

Never was pain
Was ever more elegant in these grilles
Black, devoured by the sun. And never was
Elegance was a more spiritual cause.

Here, "Desire tore the veil from the image". Or, in a posthumous text published in the last few days, he speaks of Florence and Ravenna as the purest mirror of all poetic demands:

In other words: this city in winter, its poorly-lit streets on the poor side of the river, what did it teach me, if not that Ravenna would soon prove to me through the paradox of its mosaics and tombs : namely that what is, what even is alone to be, is the person in his here and now, prey to this great mystery; and, on the other hand, that poetry is what remembers this, what seeks to recreate in conceptual discourse [...] a relationship of living speech of the person with his own finitude and that of close beings [17] ?

Perhaps the secret of Yves Bonnefoy's poetry is the human desire, the human suffering, the human hope that burns away the image that represents them, and presents itself - begging and faithful like Ulysses - to the land of the return to oneself, to the garden of the lived and the loved, even if it is the final, weakened echo of a voice:

I celebrate the gray-hued voice
That hesitates in the distance of a song lost
As if beyond all pure form
Another song trembles, and the only absolute one.
[...]
You seem to know both shores,
Extreme joy and extreme pain.
There, among those grey reeds in the light,
You seem to draw from the eternal [18].

He waged a struggle against the self-evident, definitive given, as he vigorously wrote in the brief but essential foreword to L'Improbable et autres essais:

I dedicate this book to the improbable, that is, to what is. To a spirit of vigilance. To negative theologies. To a desired poetry of rain, expectation and wind. To a great realism, one that aggravates rather than resolves, that designates the obscure, that holds clarity to be an ever-tearing cloud. Concerned with a high, impracticable clarity.

With a humble acceptance of human frailty: "Yes, by even error, / Who goes, // Yes, by simple happiness, the broken voice [19]"; with a look of light beyond the ruins:

Is this still a church? These pilasters
Have flickered in the fire's embrace.
Nothing but blackened plaster what once was their ridge,
Angels and fruit have closed their eyes.
And the nave is deserted. A statue,
Of a saint, half-naked, stands alone.
The fire has done its work on her too.
Outside, however, the city, all its noise.
Who despairs, let him enter here, it's more than a god
This absolute that wandered in the flame.
It was almost being, this wind that took
In the calcination of a light.
Love this sanctuary, my friends,
Where signs unravel, it's almost dawn [20].

He was the poet of friendship and fidelity, who gathered around him the paths of men and the voices of classics: Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Dante, Petrarch, Leopardi. His legacy will be a difficult one, an immense legacy of generosity, modesty, high ethical standards and disarmed tenderness:

And it's true, my friend, when all is gone
Something remains. Our fingers touch
Our fingers touch strings together, in the invisible.
[...]
I am, I am not. Not to be
Blossoms that I remain close to you.
You will sleep, I am within you, I watch [21].

What do I have to bequeath? What I have desired,
[...]
The god in us that we never had [22].

Carlo Ossola, November 27, 2016.

Notes

[1] Y. Bonnefoy, Dévotion, in L'Improbable et autres essais, Paris, Mercure de France, 1980.

[2] Y. Bonnefoy, Remarques sur le regard. Picasso, Giacometti, Morandi, Paris, Calmann-Lévy, 2002.

[3] Y. Bonnefoy, Dans le leurre du seuil, Paris, Mercure de France, 1975.

[4] G. Blin, "Vers Yves Bonnefoy", Commentaire, vol. 4, no. 20, 1982, pp. 683-687.

[5] Y. Bonnefoy, Ibid. p. 683.

[6] Y. Bonnefoy, La Nouvelle Objectivité, 1946; republished in Traité du pianiste et autres écrits anciens, Paris, Mercure de France, 2008, p. 129-134; the quotation is on p. 133.

[7] Y. Bonnefoy, L'Improbable et autres essais, Paris, Mercure de France, 1980; then Paris, Gallimard, 1992, p. 9 (we quote the latter edition).

[8] "Et pourtant le combat n'était pas fini, en moi, contre la force d'excarnation"(L'Arrière-pays, Paris, Gallimard, 2005, p. 65).

[9] Y. Bonnefoy, L'Absolu et ses effigies, I; in La Beauté dès le premier jour, Paris, William Blake & Co., 2009; both quotations on page 39.

[10] Y. Bonnefoy, Afin que si mon nom..., poem from Raturer outre, Paris, Galilée, 2010, p. 16.

[11] Y. Bonnefoy, La Poésie et la Gnose, Paris, Galilée, 2016, p. 16.

[12] Y. Bonnefoy, Ce qui fut sans lumière, I, Le souvenir, Paris, Gallimard, 1985.

[13] Y. Bonnefoy, D'autres tableaux, in Ensemble encore, Paris, Mercure de France, 2016.

[14] Y. Bonnefoy, Voix à la cime des arbres, in Ensemble encore, op. cit.

[15] Y. Bonnefoy, Le tout, le rien, II, in Début et fin de la neige, Paris, Mercure de France, 1991.

[16] Y. Bonnefoy, De vent et de fumée, in La Vie errante, Paris, Mercure de France, 1993.

[17] Y. Bonnefoy, Cappella Brancacci. Florence et la poésie, in La Renaissance italienne, edited by N. Ducimetière and M. Jeanneret, Paris, Somogy, 2016, p. 41-54; the quotation is on page 51.

[18] Y. Bonnefoy, in the voice of Kathleen Ferrier, in Hier régnant désert, Paris, Mercure de France, 1958; Gallimard, 1982.

[19] Y. Bonnefoy, L'épars, l'invisible, in Dans le leurre du seuil, op. cit.

[20] Y. Bonnefoy, Après le feu, poème de Ensemble encore, Paris, Mercure de France, 2016, p. 81.

[21] Y. Bonnefoy, Ensemble la musique et le souvenir, II.

[22] Y. Bonnefoy, Ensemble encore, last verse, op. cit.

References

Printed
Ossola C., "Hommage à Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016)", L'annuaire du Collège de France, Paris, Collège de France, n° 116, 2018, p. 669-704.

Digital
Ossola C., "Hommage à Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016)", L'annuaire du Collège de France, Paris, Collège de France, n° 116, 2018, online July 2, 2018, https://doi.org/10.4000/annuaire-cdf.13734.