When Night Forgets to Fall

The Curved Planks

by Yves Bonnefoy,

translated from the French by Hoyt Rogers,

with a foreword by Richard Howard.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 229 pp., $24.00

Charles Simic

There was a time in this country when every poet and student of literature read some French poetry. To both sophisticates and provincials, Paris was the eternal capital of everything that was new and exciting in the arts. Modern poetry was unimaginable without Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarme, and many lesser figures whose poems were imitated and continued to be read. Pound, Eliot, Stevens, and other modernists, one learned, owed an immense debt to French poets. Fifty years ago, almost everyone one met in literary circles had some familiarity with the work of Apollinaire, Saint-John Perse, and Paul Valery. Young poets read Wallace Fowlie's Mid-Century French Poets, where they encountered the poems of Max Jacob, Jules Supervielle, Andre Breton, Paul Eluard, Robert Desnos, and Henri Michaux. New translations kept appearing. I recall a volume of poems by Rene Char that came out in 1956, which listed W. C. Williams, Richard Wilbur, William Jay Smith, Barbara Howes, W. S. Merwin, and James Wright as translators. Yves Bonnefoy's own poems came soon after. In 1968, the Ohio University Press published On the Motion and Immobility of Douve, his first book in English translation.

Later all that changed. In the 1960s, American poets discovered Spanish, German, Polish, Russian, and South American poetry and stopped reading the newer French poets who were nowhere as interesting as Neruda, Vallejo, Parra, Milosz, Herbert, Brodsky, Enzensberger, Ritsos, Holan, Szymborska, Celan, and good many others. While history and the fate of the individual human beings caught in its turmoil mattered for these poets, the same cannot be said for the French. Preoccupied with the very act of writing, convinced that words only speak themselves and have no hold on reality, their anxieties had more to do with the theories of language then in fashion among literary critics in France, for whom the study of poetics was more fascinating than the finished poem.

To think of writing as merely a game of language may seem like a bleak prospect, and yet the delightful poems by Raymond Queneau, Jacques Roubaud, and other members of the experimental group Oulipo demonstrate that it doesn’t always have to be. Still, a view that regards poetry as a closed system, a private language, and an autonomous reality, is not extremely limiting, but mistaken. The surprise is that so many French poets in the generation after René Char were attracted to academic theories that reduced their mother tongue to little more than a dead language. Not Bonnefoy. For him, poems do take us beyond words in their capacity to recall to us the life we share and the experiences we have in common.

Bonnefoy was born in 1923 in Tours. His father was a railroad worker whose job involved assembling locomotives and his mother was a teacher, as her own father had been. Although he started to write at an early age, he went on to study mathematics and philosophy at the University of Poitiers and the Sorbonne. In Paris, after the war, he became involved with Surrealist circles, met Andre Breton, and published his own work in their reviews. His first important collection of poems came out in 1953, and ten more have appeared since. In 1967 he founded, with Andre du Bouchet, Gaetan Picon, and LouisRene des Forets, L'ephemere, a journal of art and literature. Among his

books are studies of Rimbaud, Miró, and Giacometti, a scholarly two-volume account of mythologies of the world, which he edited, and a spiritual autobiography. The Lure and the Truth of Painting (1995), a collection of his essays on classical, modern, and contemporary art, is a great book. Like Baudelaire and Pierre Jean Jouve before him, Bonnefoy reads paintings with the eyes of a poet and the mind of a philosopher. Immensely learned and beautifully written, the essays on Mantegna, Morandi, Giacometti, Hopper, Balthus, and on such subjects as humor and the shadows in the work of Piero della Francesca and Giorgio de Chirico and Byzantine art, often read like prose poems.

Before the appearance of The Curved Planks, there were seven other collections of his poems in translation. This book of his most recent poetry comes with an astute foreword by

this quite apart from accuracy of detail-has a kind of moral obligation to be a metaphysical reflection, the contemplation of one way of thinking by another, the attempt to express from one's own angle the specific nature of that thought. and finally a kind of examination of one's own resources.... Translation becomes a language's struggle with its own nature, at the very core of its being, the quickening point of its growth.'

The essay from which this quote comes, "Shakespeare and the French Poet," was first published in France in

1959. In it, Bonnefoy confidently predicts that French poetry today will be much better prepared than it has ever been to wage this struggle with its own language. He writes:

... There is another, more recent poetry which aims at salvation. It conceives of the Thing, the real object, in its separation from ourselves, its infinite otherness, as something that can give us an instantaneous glimpse of essential being and thus be our salvation, if indeed we are able to tear the veil of universals, of the conceptual, to attain to it.

I imagine it must have seemed that way at the time with poets like Francis Ponge around who had already made that discovery. A poem of his would consist of a meticulous description of an oyster, a candle, a loaf of bread, a cut of meat, a bar of soap, a snail, a potato, or a cigarette.