Crossing Cultural and Aesthetic Frontiers: Yves Bonnefoy and the Dynamics of Haiku

Abstract

Ever since the opening of the ports of Japan to the West in 1854, French authors have participated in a fruitful dialogue of East-West exchange, to which the work of Yves Bonnefoy adds an engaging dimension. Bonnefoy, who reads Japanese and has spent time in Japan, has carried on throughout his career an equivocal relationship with Japanese aesthetics, especially notable in his complex views on haiku. Early on, Bonnefoy critiqued the form as a hollow discursive structure inattentive to the crucial referential relationship between art and world that he underscored in his own work as primary. Yet, interestingly, critics have described similarities between Bonnefoy's poetry and Japanese haiku, and indeed Bonnefoy later recanted his negative critique of the form. In the 1989 essay, 'Du haïku', he argues in fact that haiku embodies pure presence, expressing a kind of third dimension, situating itself in the space of the world and in the mind's eye, as it communicates the plenitude of being.