Product Description
For decades readers and critics have acclaimed Yves Bonnefoy as France's greatest living poet. His most recent book of verse, The Curved Planks, crowns an oeuvre that has won him the highest international honors. More than any other single work, this sequence embodies the astonishing variety of Bonnefoy's art. A rich fabric of themes, styles, and genres, it balances aesthetic complexity with heartfelt directness.
This bilingual edition of The Curved Planks sets the French texts alongside English versions by the noted translator Hoyt Rogers, who has collaborated closely with Bonnefoy in crafting poems that re-create the freshness and vision of the originals. This volume also includes a preface by the renowned poet and critic Richard Howard and essays by the translator that situate The Curved Planks in the author's body of work. All assist in introducing the English-language reader to Bonnefoy's profound poetic gift.
Product Details
- Amazon Sales Rank: #852677 in Books
- Published on: 2007-03-22
- Original language:
French
- Dimensions: .73" h x
5.55" w x
8.32" l,
.70 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 229 pages
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
The first poetic associations of Bonnefoy, an octogenarian French poet often mentioned in the same breath as Paul Valéry, were with the French surrealists, but he has long since been a maverick of French verse, crafting stanzas as simple as they are resonant and rooted in everything from modernism to medieval song. This sequence, composed of short series of poems that take in every form from prose to rhyme, centers, as Richard Howard notes in a baroque preface, on renewal, taking the myth of Ceres as a point of origin: "she still/ Stops at night/ Under rustling trees,/ And knocks at closed doors." Hoyt—who provides a long afterword, a translator's note and a bibliography—offers a translation that is solid and clear, and that allows for play among word and phrase senses: "the limitless space of clashing currents, of yawning abysses, of stars." (Apr.)
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Review
"Yves Bonnefoy is one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime--more than half a century now, and still counting. These recent poems, superbly translated by Hoyt Rogers, attest to his enduring greatness." --Paul Auster
"I have been deeply impressed, reading Hoyt Rogers' translations of Yves Bonnefoy's Les Planches Courbes. They are much more than English versions of these strong and delicate originals--they are recreations that become distinct poems in English, a true and loving homage to their source." --Alastair Reid
About the Author
Yves Bonnefoy has published numerous studies of literature and art, as well as an extensive dictionary of mythology. His work has been translated into many languages, and he is a celebrated translator of Shakespeare and Yeats. He lives in Paris.
