A French Shakespeare for English Readers: Yves Bonnefoy

Abstract

‘There is a world elsewhere …’ Itis not possible to do justice to either the complexity of Yves Bonnefoy's view of Shakespeare or to its fundamental simplicity. He is a writer whose prose makes an immediate appeal to the reader whilst inviting slow and prolonged meditation: though we soon feel at home with him, we sense that it will take time and thought to understand him properly. Like the French poets who have meant most to him, such as Rimbaud and Valéry, he offers us not just a style but a practice of thinking, a particular way of exercising our minds. To him, language is always an instrument for inner discovery; his lucidity belongs more to the spirit than the reason. The most clear-cut images in his poetry are the most suggestive. For this reason, he takes care not to juxtapose French and English literature in the dogmatic, either/or way that more conventional critics so easily fall into. What drew him to Shakespeare was the way his ‘superb English … harbored a great deal of our own approach to poetry: the grand words of Latin origin, but also, and even more important, something of that resonant space that French poetry often maintains between words to allow their range of meaning a wider scope’ (Shakespeare and the French Poet). French poetry and English may be very different, but there is a sense in which their aspirations coincide.