Image and Presence: Yves Bonnefoy's Inaugural Address at the College de France

Abstract

Translator's note: Born in Tours in 1923, Yves Bonnefoy the most important French poet to have emerged since the Second World War. He also a literary and art critic of the first rank, a distinguished translator of English poets, particularly of Shakespeare, and a specialist in the problem of the relationship of poetry to the visual arts. His recent election to the College de France, the prestigious center of scholarship founded in 1530 by Francois I to counterbalance the power of the ecclesiastically dominated Sorbonne, official recognition of his contributions to contemporary French intellectual life. Bonnefoy fills the seat vacated by the untimely death of Roland Barthes. He the first poet elected to the College since Paul Valery. text which follows Bonnefoy's inaugural lecture at the College, an address he delivered in December, 1981. (The present translation based on a slightly revised and augmented version of the text published by the Mercure de France.) As may have been expected, Bonnefoy devotes special attention to his illustrious predecessors, Valery and Barthes, and to the linguistic and semiological approaches to the text each man did so much to inspire. And beyond them, Bonnefoy seeks to define the position of poetry with respect to the other disciplines, while acknowledging the problem of the poet's right to speak with authority about the very art he practices. Echoes from Bonnefoy's wide-ranging preoccupations resonate in his inaugural address. His constant questioning of the status of the imaginary a central dimension of his remarks, and his work as translator of Shakespeare reflected in a meditation on Hamlet and the question of abolition, as well as in a more general discussion of the problematics of the stage or theater of writing. precise philosophical vocabulary of the address emerges from an academic formation in philosophy and from the particular influence of the Philosophie de l'Existence (Kierkegaard, Shestov, Heidegger). It in part in this philosophy that Bonnefoy finds the vocabulary for a description of a vision full of both tragic darkness and the painful light of hope. The really modern act, Bonnefoy wrote more than twenty years ago in his book on Rimbaud, is to want to establish a 'divine' life without God.