Poems

Par Yves Bonnefoy, John Naughton (Relecteur), Stephen Romer (Relecteur) et Anthony Rudolf (Relecteur)

France's greatest poet of the last half century, Yves Bonnefoy wrote many books of poetry and poetic prose, as well as celebrated critical essays on literature and art (to which a second volume will be devoted). At his death in 2016 aged ninety-three, he was Emeritus Professor of Comparative Poetics at the Collège de France. The selection for this volume (and the second one) was made in close collaboration with the poet. The lengthy introduction by John Naughton is a significant assessment of Bonnefoy's importance in French literature.


Bonnefoy started out as a young surrealist poet at the end of the Second World War and, for seven decades, he produced poetry and prose of great, and changing, depth and richness. In his lines we encounter 'the horizon of a voice where stars are falling, / Moon merging with the chaos of the dead'. Fellow poet Philippe Jaccottet spoke of his abiding gravité enflammée.


Bonnefoy knew what translation demands, having himself translated Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, and Keats; Petrarch and Leopardi from Italian; and, from Greek, George Seferis. This volume is edited and translated by three of Bonnefoy's long-time translators –Anthony Rudolf, John Naughton, and Stephen Romer – with contributions from Galway Kinnell, Richard Pevear, Beverley Bie Brahic, Emily Grosholz, Susanna Lang, and Hoyt Rogers.


A dual language edition.

• Langue: Français
• Éditeur: FyfieldBooks
• Date de sortie: 26 sept. 2024
• ISBN: 9781800174702

Yves Bonnefoy

Yves Bonnefoy (1923–2016), regarded as France's greatest poet of the last fifty years, was the author of many volumes of poetry and poetic prose, and numerous books of essays on literature and art, including studies of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Goya and Giacometti. Between 1981 and 2016 he was Professor (and then Emeritus Professor) of Comparative Poetics at the Collège de France, a position he inherited from Roland Barthes. His work has been translated into scores of languages and he himself was a master translator of Shakespeare, Yeats, Keats, Leopardi, Seferis and others. He received a wide variety of literary prizes.

Aperçu du livre

i ii iii

Poems

of

Yves Bonnefoy

edited & translated by

Anthony Rudolf, John Naughton & Stephen Romer

with other translations by

Galway Kinnell, Richard Pevear, Beverley Bie Brahic,

Emily Grosholz, Susanna Lang & Hoyt Rogers

Contents

Title Page

Preface by Anthony Rudolf

Introduction by John Naughton

Attributions

I 1953–1967

From L’Improbable(1959)

from Les Tombeaux de Ravenne / The Tombs of Ravenna (composed 1953)

From DuMouvementetdel’immobilitédeDouve(1953)

Théâtre

Aux arbres

(Ainsi marcherons-nous)

Chapelle Brancacci

Lieu du combat

Lieu de la salamandre

From OntheMotionandImmobilityofDouve

Théâtre

To the Trees

(So we will walk among the ruins’)

Brancacci Chapel

Place of Battle

Place of the Salamander

From Hierrégnantdésert(1958)

Le bel été

(Souvent, dans le silence d’un ravin)

Le pont de fer

Les guetteurs

La beauté

L’imperfection est la cime

Toute la nuit

À la voix de Kathleen Ferrier

(Aube, fille des larmes, rétablis)

Delphes du second jour

Ici, toujours ici

From Yesterday’sWildernessKingdom(1958)

The Beautiful Summer

(Often in the silence of a ravine)

Iron Bridge

The Watchers

Beauty

Imperfection Is the Summit

All Night

To the Voice of Kathleen Ferrier

(Dawn, daughter of tears, restore)

Delphi, the Second Day

Here, Forever Here

From L’Improbable(1959)

Dévotion / Devotions

From Pierreécrite(1965)

La lampe, le dormeur

Une pierre

Une pierre

Une pierre

Une pierre

Une pierre

Une pierre

La chambre

L’épaule

L’arbre, la lampe

Le myrte

Le sang, la note si

L’abeille, la couleur

Une pierre

La lumière, changée

Une pierre

Le livre, pour vieillir

From WordsinStone(1965)

The Lamp, the Sleeper

A Stone (‘He desired’)

A Stone (‘I was quite beautiful’)

A Stone (‘For two or three years’)

A Stone (‘Your leg, deepest night’)

A Stone (‘Fall but softly rain upon this face’)

A Stone (‘Childhood was long by the grim wall …’)

The Bedroom

The Shoulder

The Tree, the Lamp

Myrtle

Blood, the Note B

The Bee, the Colour

A Stone (‘A fire goes before us’)

The Light, Changed

A Stone (‘We used to cross these fields’)

The Book, for Growing Old

II 1968–1977

from L’Arrière-pays/ TheArrière-pays(1972)

From Dansleleurreduseuil(1975)

Le fleuve

Dans le leurre du seuil

Deux barques

from L’épars, l’indivisible

From TheLureoftheThreshold(1975)

The river

The Lure of the Threshold

Two Boats

from The Scattered, the Indivisible

From Récitsenrêve/ DreamTales(1987)

L’égypte / Egypt (composed 1977)

Les Découvertes De Prague / The Prague Discoveries (composed 1977)

Rue Traversière (composed 1977)

Second Rue Traversière (composed 1977)

III (1978–1988)

From Récitsenrêve/ DreamTales(1987)

L’origine De La Parole / The Origin of Utterance (composed 1980)

La Décision D’être Peintre / The Decision to be a Painter (composed 1982)

L’artiste Du Dernier Jour / The Artist of the Last Day (composed 1985)

Suries Ailes de la Musique / On the Wings of Song (composed 1985)

Sur de Grands Cercles de Pierre / On Some Large Stone Circles (composed 1985)

From Cequifutsanslumière(1985)

Le souvenir

L’adieu

Le miroir courbe

Passant auprès du feu

Le puits

L’orée du bois

Dedham, vu de Langham

L’agitation du rêve

From IntheShadow’sLight(1985)

The Memory

The Farewell

The Convex Mirror

Passing by the Fire

The Well

The Edge of the Woods

Dedham, seen from Langham

The Restlessness of the Dream

IV 1989–2000

From Debutetfindelaneige(1991)

Hopkins Forest

La seule rose

From BeginningandEndoftheSnow(1991)

Hopkins Forest

The Only Rose

From LaVieerrante/ TheWanderingLife(1993)

Le canot de Samuel Beckett / Beckett’s Dinghy

De vent et de fumée

Wind and Smoke

V 2001–2010

From LesPlanchescourbes/ TheCurvedPlanks(2001)

The Curved Planks

La maison natale

The House where I was Born

From Goya,lespeinturesnoires/ Goya:TheBlackPaintings (2006)

Section VI, Chapter 3

From Lalonguechaînedel’ancre(2008)

Ales Stenar

Le tombeau de Giacomo Leopardi

Mahler, Le Chant de la terre

Le tombeau de Stéphane Mallarmé

Sur trois tableaux de Poussin

Un souvenir d’enfance de Wordsworth

From TheAnchor’sLongChain(2008)

Ales Stenar

Leopardi’s Tomb

Mahler, The Song of the Earth

Tomb of Stéphane Mallarmé

On Three Paintings by Poussin

A Childhood Memory of Wordsworth’s

VI 2011–2016

from L’Heureprésente/ ThePresentHour(2011)

Une Mise en Scène D’hamlet / First Draft for a Production of Hamlet

Hamlet en montagne / Hamlet in the Mountains

from L’heureprésente(2011)

L’heure Présente

The Present Hour

from LeDigamma/ TheDigamma(2012)

God in Hamlet

The Digamma

The Digamma: A Final Note

The Great Voice

From PoèmespourTruphémus(2013)

Un café

Les tableaux

D’autres tableaux

From PoemsforTruphémus(2013)

A Café

The Paintings

Other Paintings

Notes on the Contributors

Index ofTitles

IndexofFirstLines

About the Author

Copyright

ix

Preface

anthony rudolf

Yves Bonnefoy’s work for well over sixty years has been a two-track adventure in poetry and prose that has few equals since Baudelaire and Leopardi. Few poets have had a ‘second’ oeuvre in prose so intertwined with their poetry, so rich in signs and wonders, so complex and yet so trustful of readers. It was time to bring the two tracks together in one collection. Bonnefoy has observed that poetry, which, unlike prose, ‘knows its own mendacity’, is ‘the memory of truth’. The phrase ‘unlike prose’ is thus tested in the present volume and might have to be reworded as ‘unlike critical prose’. The reason is that this book, like the forthcoming French Pléiade edition of Bonnefoy’s work, contains not only poetry as such but also what he himself calls the poetic prose he was writing around the time he composed various groups of poems. His comment has logically to refer to his critical prose, which will form a companion Carcanet volume in due course, containing some of his lengthy and remarkable essays on a wide range of topics including Rimbaud and Shakespeare, Yeats and Borges, Mozart and artists such as Piero della Francesca and Edward Hopper.

The six sections of this book have been created for the sake of convenience and manageability, although there is a certain logic to the ordering. The reader will notice that only the verse (and the alternate prose parts of ‘Theatre’) have the original French on the facing page. This was for reasons of space but it also implies a logical distinction between verse poetry and prose poetry or poetical prose. Nor is there any escape from the loss, even the violence, entailed in using extracts from poetry books conceived and structured as architectonic wholes. The books are artfully orchestrated ensembles that seek to contain and to reconcile opposing forces. Nonetheless, we hope that the reader will turn to the complete books already available in English translation, all of which contain the French originals.

Poets’ prose has been essential to the life of literature in France for more than two hundred years because poetry became, in Bonnefoy’s xwords, ‘a very calculated, self-conscious form, and thus at a far remove from everyday speech – from which it followed that a number of experiences that might have become poetry were left behind by verse and had to seek other means of expression, most notably in prose. And indeed they did. For example, the eminently poetic feeling for nature, which in England is active in the poetry of Wordsworth and Keats, has found its home in French in […] the prose of Rousseau, Joseph Joubert, de Guérin or Chateaubriand.’ (from an essay written as a reply to an Oxford lecture, mainly about Bonnefoy, by Christopher Ricks).

Like Rilke’s Duino Elegies, Bonnefoy’s poetry names and celebrates the fundamental things, the simple things, of our world. Like that of Wordsworth, ‘a man speaking to men’, his poetry incarnates what it means to be a human being – one who thinks life, who thinks death, who thinks art, who thinks thought. At the same time, the extraordinary energy and potency of Bonnefoy’s prose, ‘sa gravité enflammée’, in the fine phrase of Philippe Jaccottet’s, are the result of a tension. This tension is, to simplify, between presence and concept: concepts are arrogant excarnations born of gnostic duality, denying presence, finitude and mortality. In The Arrière-pays (an excerpt is included in the present volume), the tension is brought to its most extreme, in that it impinges on the poet’s own spiritual journey. Italy and its art generate a way of thinking about concept and presence, about abstraction and finitude. There is a kind of synthesis, Bonnefoy concludes, in Poussin (who lived in Rome for sixteen years) and his search for the key to a ‘musique savante’.

Conceptual thought, which is ‘the original sin of knowledge’, always runs the risk of reductiveness to a single aspect (as in science and law), always runs the risk of abstraction or idealisation of what Rimbaud calls ‘rough reality’, the risk of alienating the gaze, in a word, the risk of dogma and fetishisation. Poetry guards against this by mirroring these dangers in a perpetual agon, for only thus can presence make itself felt in plenitude. ‘Poetry is an unceasing battle between representation and presence’, Bonnefoy writes in an essay where he confronts these issues and admits to having polemicised in earlier writings in a way which would be misunderstood by some readers. In his introduction to the present volume, John Naughton, xithe most important Bonnefoy scholar outside France, explores the manifold implications of the poet’s thinking in his poems and the way the poems and prose imbricate each other.

Bonnefoy has commented on the way the eminent translator Pierre Leyris would discuss translations ‘word by word, with the patience which springs from the heart allied to the intelligence’. This was while they were both engaged in a major Shakespeare project involving several translators. In turn, the patience referred to is evident in the work of Bonnefoy translators loyal to him over many years, rewarding his support and generosity with their affection, gratitude and best work. Indeed, for this volume, unlike the forthcoming volume of critical prose, it has not been a question of soliciting new translations. We have often had the good fortune to select from several good versions of the same poem and have not hesitated to use the work of different translators even in sequences of poems. We hope that new and existing readers of Bonnefoy will explore the many-sided work of the senior figure who started out as a young surrealist at the end of the war and, for seventy years, continued to produce poetry and prose of such depth and richness. We experience ‘The horizon of a voice where stars are falling, / Moon merging with the chaos of the dead’.

Yves Bonnefoy died on 1 July 2016, shortly after his ninety-third birthday. The selections for this volume (poetry and poetic prose) and, to some extent, for volume two (critical essays), were made by him in conjunction with the editors. He did not choose the translations, saying he had full confidence in our judgment. It is a great sadness that he did not live to see the publication of these two books in a language he loved and which he translated into French with such distinction and mastery. This essay and John Naughton’s were written before Yves Bonnefoy died. xii

Introduction

john naughton

Yves Bonnefoy is widely recognised as the most important French poet of the post-war era and as one of the most significant European writers of the last sixty years. His work is wide-ranging and diverse and includes poems in verse, poems in prose, fiction, literary and art criticism, and translations of Shakespeare, Donne, Keats, Leopardi, and Yeats. Bonnefoy is also the editor of the acclaimed Dictionnaire des Mythologies et des religions des sociétés traditionnelles et du monde antique. He has been a regular visitor to the United States, where he has been a guest professor at such places as the City University of New York, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Wesleyan, Brandeis, Williams College, and the University of California. He has lectured in many places in Europe, as well as in Japan, Great Britain, and Ireland. He has won the Prix Montaigne, the Prix Goncourt, the Prix Balzan, and the Hudson Review’s Bennett Award among other prizes and has been the recipient of many distinctions, including honorary doctorates from Oxford, Trinity College (Dublin), the University of Chicago, the University of Edinburgh, and the University of Rome. In 2001, he was made a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Born in Tours in 1923 and educated there until the end of his teens, Bonnefoy lost his father, a railway foreman, when he was only thirteen. After his father’s death his mother took a job as a teacher at a grade school outside Tours and looked after the education of her son. Bonnefoy eventually received an advanced degree in mathematics and philosophy before coming to occupied Paris in 1943. There he became involved in the surrealist circles, met and was admired by André Breton, and edited his own small review, called – with appropriate iconoclasm – La Révolution la nuit, after the painting by Max Ernst. He also married and taught mathematics and science for a time. The publication in 1953 of his first major book of poetry, Du Mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve (On the Motion and Immobility of Douve), immediately placed him at the forefront of the new generation of French poets. Here was a voice, as even the somewhat xivresistant Jean Grosjean admitted, to be listened to with ‘the most serious attention’.

Inevitably the question was raised: who or what is Douve? A mysterious feminine presence, her death, physical decomposition, and resurrection put one in mind of the romantic notion enunciated by Edgar Allan Poe that ‘the death […] of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world’. And her relation to the poetic narrator would seem also to support Poe’s conviction that ‘the lips best suited for such are those of a bereaved lover’.

On the other hand, she seems intimately related to the poetic process itself, to the nature of inspiration and to the impact of death on inspiration. Now, death is a category in this poem that involves recognition not only of the fate of flesh – the opening sequence, called ‘Théâtre’, deals with physical decomposition with a brutal frankness reminiscent of Villon – but also of the inertia and life-lessness of established representation. The constant resurrections of Douve, however, her almost Ovidian metamorphoses, are the poetic expression of the recurrent but ephemeral moment of epiphanous vision, which retreats from what would try to capture or express it: ‘… à chaque instant je te vois naître, Douve, / À chaque instant mourir’. (‘each moment I see you born, Douve, / Each moment die’). Poetic utterance is not equal to the reality it seeks to articulate; what it touches dies from its touch, only to be resurrected as an unreachable domain, inexhaustible and eternally elusive. The French word douve means ‘moat’ or ‘ditch’. But the word also contains the notion of opening (d’ouverture), ‘tenté dans l’épaisseur du monde’ (‘attempted in the thickness of the world’), and poetry’s refusal to resign itself to the impossible is the reminder that Douve is associated with the human spirit, with those spiritual aspirations suggested by the English word ‘dove’, traditional symbol of the Holy Spirit whose origins are mysterious (d’où: where from?). Douve seems also to be a reflection of Bonnefoy’s idea of présence, which is the momentary apprehension of the fundamental unity of all being. This experience is always fleeting; it will, Bonnefoy tells us in his essay ‘Les Tombeaux de Ravenne’ (‘The Tombs of Ravenna’), ‘be lost a thousand times, but it has the glory of a god’. xv

To the extent that it is present, the object never ceases disappearing. To the extent that it disappears, it imposes, it cries out its presence.

As readers of Bonnefoy, it is important for us to note that, however tempting it is to use his essays as keys to the poems, he has always insisted on ‘the disparity […] between the realm of the image and that of the formulation’.

Gaëtan Picon, writing of the new French poets who had emerged after the Second World War, said of them that they felt totally disinherited from all poetic tradition. Marked by war, by a history ‘so monstrous that it denies all poetic possibility’, the new generation of poets, in Picon’s view, felt ‘separated from the word it might be, from the universe it might name’. Appropriately, Picon placed the efforts of the new poets ‘between the fact of ruin and the desire for reconstruction’. Some of these notions may be felt in certain of the poems of Douve.

Ainsi marcherons-nous sur les ruines d’un ciel immense,

Le site au loin s’accomplira

Comme un destin dans la vive lumière.

Le pays le plus beau longtemps cherché

S’étendra devant nous terre des salamandres.

Regarde, diras-tu, cette pierre:

Elle porte la présence de la mort.

Lampe secrète c’est elle qui brûle sous nos gestes,

Ainsi marchons-nous éclairés.

So we will walk among the ruins of a boundless sky,

The horizon will unfold

Like a destiny in the quickened light.

The most beautiful country sought so long

Will stretch before us, land of the salamanders. xvi

You will say, look at this stone:

It carries the presence of death.

Secret lamp, it burns beneath us

As we move along, and so we walk in light.

[translated by Anthony Rudolf]

The first line, on one level at least, seems to speak of a painful period of decline – the end of a certain idealist tradition, the repudiation of the now invalid images of romantic reveries. The heavens, which have collapsed with their images, represent precisely the infinite imaginaire, which is the extreme form of alienation. On the other hand, the ‘ruins’ of the first line of the poem already point to the guiding stone that will appear at the end of the text.

The future tense of the initial verbs is suggestive of the search or quest for meaning in an age of spiritual eclipse. The ‘site’ of which the poem speaks indicates the ground upon which the future dwelling will be established. This ground is the land of the salamander, spirit of resurrection, survivor of fire and flood, and symbol for Bonnefoy, through its silent, unpretentious adherence to earth, of ‘all that is pure’. This land, which a misguided longing may have ‘sought’ unknowingly, is perhaps nothing so much as the simple evidence before us, its most common features – water, stone, tree – improbable and completely sustaining presences for the vision purified of an unbounded nostalgia, or, put another way, infused with the energy normally expended on transcendence and dream.

The exhortation of the last stanza is the poet’s determination to convert the futurity of the projected quest of the first two parts of the poem into a present apprehension of both limitation and plenitude. This intuition is granted, as it so often is in Bonnefoy’s work, by the stone, which he views as the ‘exemplary form of the real’. Bonnefoy’s stones are reminiscent of those sepulchres in Poussin’s Et in Arcadia Ego paintings, which rise up as a reminder of death’s presence even in Arcadia to control an absent-minded absorption in nature’s splendours; they have something, too, of those skulls in Georges de la Tour that seem, more than the light from the nearby candle, to be the real source of the illumination on the penitent’s face. Recognition of finitude is the ‘secret’ source of grounding and orientation xviiin the poem. It is what now illuminates the poetic effort, the act of ‘knowing and naming’. The lamp of stone will accompany the poet through all his future wanderings, casting a dark but unmistakable light along his path. The poet will hold tight to this secret source in a kind of marriage with consciousness (‘le mariage le plus bas’).

Et si grand soit le froid qui monte de ton être,

Si brûlant soit le gel de notre intimité,

Douve, je parle en toi; et je t’enserre

Dans l’acte de connaître et de nommer.

And however great the coldness rising from you,

However searing the ice of our embrace,

Douve, I do speak in you; and I hold you close

In the act of knowing and of naming.

[Galway Kinnell]

Douve works out a shattering death rite. But if it deals in destruction, if it seeks to shatter the safe enclosures provided by representation and idea, if it means to restore us to a primitive sense of mystery and awe in the presence of the simplest of things, and with death as its starting point, it does so in a largely mythic, a-temporal setting. In short, while the poem sets out to record the devastations of being and the travail of becoming, it does so without incorporating a sense of existential time, or of the poet’s own specific place in it. The critic Jean Grosjean complained that Douve was primarily concerned with literary problems and that its heroine appeared to have passed through too many universities. Although the criticism is both harsh and misguided, it points to a judgment that will be levelled against Bonnefoy in varying forms throughout his career and to which I will return.

*

Bonnefoy’s next book of poems, Hier régnant désert (Yesterday’s Wilderness Kingdom), published in 1958, would in fact deal with the poet’s own crisis in consciousness. ‘What I accused in myself,’ he would write in his autobiographical work L’Arrière-pays (1972), xviii‘what I thought I could recognise and judge, was the pleasure of creating artistically, the preference given to created beauty over lived experience’. ‘I saw correctly’, he goes on to say, ‘that such a choice, in devoting words to themselves, in making of them a private language, created a universe which guaranteed the poet everything; except that by withdrawing from the openness of days, by disregarding time and other people, he was in fact headed towards nothing except solitude.’ This assessment in part explains the repeated attacks on formal beauty that are found in this work, as for instance in the poem ‘L’imperfection est la cime’ (‘Imperfection is the Summit’).

Il y avait qu’il fallait détruire et détruire et détruire,

Il y avait que le salut n’est qu’à ce prix.

Ruiner la face nue qui monte dans le marbre,

Marteler toute forme toute beauté.

Aimer la perfection parce qu’elle est le seuil,

Mais la nier sitôt connue, l’oublier morte,

L’imperfection est la cime.

There was this:

You had to destroy, destroy, destroy.

There was this:

Salvation is only found at such a price.

You had to

Ruin the naked face that rises in the marble,

Hammer at every beauty, every form.

Love perfection because it is the threshold,

But deny it once known, once dead forget it.

Imperfection is the summit.

[ar]

Hier régnant désert reflects more suffering and self-doubt than do any of Bonnefoy’s other works. It is also the most painfully self-conscious. xixInterrogation of methods, the effort to constitute a ‘self’, the struggle with the question of time, the search for artistic values, for new departure – the problems that pervade Hier régnant désert represent the difficult coming of age of the poet and translate his struggle to establish both a poetic and an ethical identity.

As is the case in all of Bonnefoy’s poetic works – and their moral dimension resides in this – Hier régnant désert seeks to master the problems it presents and to balance one set of forces with another. The painful awareness of entrapment in a dark night of the soul (‘I was lost in the silence I gave birth to’), the recognition of the night-mare-haunted child one has been, give way to a renewed sense of self-mastery, since these acknowledgements constitute responses and seek to convert, as Bonnefoy wrote a few years later in his study of Rimbaud, ‘what one endures into what one takes on, suffering into being’. The entire movement of this work is to reconnect with that dawn which is ‘the daughter of tears’, and to restore ‘the footstep to its true place’. The radiantly confident poems that end the book, inspired in part by a trip the poet made to Greece, are a sign of this renewal.

Ici l’inquiète voix consent d’aimer

La pierre simple,

Les dalles que le temps asservit et délivre,

L’olivier dont la force a goût de sèche pierre.

Here the unquiet voice agrees to love

Simple stone,

Flagstones time enslaves, delivers,

The olive tree whose strength tastes of dry stone.

[ar]

*

If Yves Bonnefoy’s first two books of poetry are marked by a solitary and stoical vigilance, by an icy sleeplessness and constriction, his third book, Pierre écrite (Words in Stone, 1965), is striking precisely because of its contrasting expansiveness and trust, and because of xxthe sudden presence of a beloved other who appears in the opening poems of the book – ‘smiling, pristine, sea-washed’ – like some Venus from her shell, and whose ‘frail earthly hands’ untangle ‘the sorrowful knot of dreams’. A new fullness and confidence pervade Pierre écrite, and the poet can exclaim:

Nous n’avons plus besoin

D’images déchirantes pour aimer.

Cet arbre nous suffit, là-bas […]

We no longer need

Harrowing images in order to love,

That tree over there is enough […]

[Richard Pevear]

Why this confidence? Part of the explanation undoubtedly lies in the maturation upon which the poems repeatedly insist. Bonnefoy’s translation of Hamlet appeared the same year as Hier régnant désert, surely Bonnefoy’s ‘greyest’ book. Some years later (1978), Bonnefoy wrote an important essay called ‘Readiness, Ripeness: Hamlet, Lear’, in which he remarks that Hamlet confronts a world without meaning and hence feels that ‘a single act still has some logic and is worthy of being