Yves Bonnefoy

Historical and critical publications beginning in 1954, including a monograph on *Mural Paintings of Gothic France *. These works later took the form of collections of critical essays ( *The Improbable and Other Essays *; *The Red Cloud *; *The Truth of Speech *; *Conversations on Poetry *; *Remarks on Drawing *; *Drawing, Color, and Light *; *Sous l’horizon du langage* ) or monographs ( *Rome, 1630*; *Giacometti: A Biography of a Body of Work*; *Goya: The Black Paintings*; *Breton at the Forefront of Himself*; *Our Need for Rimbaud* ). Sharing the same focus as his poems, these works explore the various forms and eras of artistic creation, shedding light on the awareness that poetic activity possesses of itself. These go hand in hand with his work as a translator of Shakespeare (to date, some fifteen of Shakespeare’s works have been translated, each preceded by a preface), the poetry of Yeats ( Forty-Five Poems by Yeats ), Keats, Leopardi, and Petrarch, as well as studies on poetic creation and critical reading and reflections on translation: Theater and Poetry: Shakespeare and Yeats; The Metaphysical Imagination; The Strategy of the Enigma; The Alliance of Poetry and Music; The Community of Translators; The Community of Critics.

Beginning in 1960, Yves Bonnefoy was regularly invited to teach at universities in France and abroad. He served as an associate professor at the Vincennes University Center (1969–1970), at the University of Nice (1973–1976), and at the University of Aix-en-Provence (1979–1981); he also taught at the City University of New York, Brandeis University, Yale University, Williams College (Williamstown, USA), and the University of Geneva.
Elected in 1981 as a professor at the Collège de France, holding the chair in Comparative Studies of Poetic Function, he taught there until 1993. Abstracts of his lectures were compiled by Éditions du Seuil in *Lieux et destins de l’image: un cours de poétique au Collège de France (1981–1993) * (Places and Destinies of the Image: A Course in Poetics at the Collège de France), as well as an anthology of the series of closed symposia on “the self-awareness of poetry” that he organized during those years at the Hugot Foundation of Collège de France: *The Self-Consciousness of Poetry: An Anthology of the Hugot Foundation Colloquia*.
He served as co-editor of the journal *L’Éphémère* throughout its run (1966–1972). At Flammarion, he directed the “Idées et Recherches” series and was the principal editor of the *Dictionnaire des mythologies et des religions des sociétés traditionnelles et du monde antique*.

Yves Bonnefoy has received numerous awards, including the Critics’ Prize (1971), the Grand Prize for Poetry from the Académie Française (1981), the Grand Prix of the Société des Gens de Lettres (1987), the Grand Prix national de Poésie (1993), the Cino del Duca Foundation Prize (1995), and, in other countries, the Montaigne Prize (1978), the Balzan Prize (1995), and the Kafka Prize (2007).
He was awarded honorary doctorates by the University of Neuchâtel, the American College in Paris, the University of Chicago, Trinity College (Dublin), and the Universities of Edinburgh, Rome, Oxford, and Siena.

His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. It was the subject of exhibitions at the National Library in 1992, at the Château de Tours Museum in 1993, at the Jenisch Museum in Vevey (Switzerland) in 1996, and at the Museum of Fine Arts and the Château de Tours in 2005. A Cahier de l’Herne dedicated to Yves Bonnefoy was published in 2010.