The Red Scarf: Followed by Two Stages and Additional Notes
An intensely personal and profoundly moving review of Bonnefoys childhood memories.
In December 2015, six months before his death at the age of 93, Yves Bonnefoy concluded what was to be his last major text in prose, Lécharpe rouge, translated here as The Red Scarf. In this unique book, described by the poet as an anamnesisa formal act of commemorationBonnefoy undertakes, at the end of his life, a profoundly moving exegesis of some fragments written in 1964. These fragments lead him back to an unspoken, lifelong anxiety: My most troubling memory, when I was between ten and twelve years old, concerns my father, and my anxiety about his silence. Bonnefoy offers an anatomy of his fathers silence, and of the melancholy that seemed to take hold some years into his marriage to the poets mother.
At the heart of this book is the ballad of Elie and Hélène, the poets parents. It is the story of their lives together in the Auvergne, and later in Tours, seen through the eyes of their sonthe solitary boys intense but inchoate experience, reviewed through memories of the now elderly man. What makes The Red Scarf indispensable is the intensely personal nature of the material, casting its slant light, a setting sun, on all that has gone before.
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In December 2015, six months before his death at the age of 93, Yves Bonnefoy concluded what was to be his last major text in prose, Lécharpe rouge, translated here as The Red Scarf. In this unique book, described by the poet as an anamnesisa formal act of commemorationBonnefoy undertakes, at the end of his life, a profoundly moving exegesis of some fragments written in 1964. These fragments lead him back to an unspoken, lifelong anxiety: My most troubling memory, when I was between ten and twelve years old, concerns my father, and my anxiety about his silence. Bonnefoy offers an anatomy of his fathers silence, and of the melancholy that seemed to take hold some years into his marriage to the poets mother.
At the heart of this book is the ballad of Elie and Hélène, the poets parents. It is the story of their lives together in the Auvergne, and later in Tours, seen through the eyes of their sonthe solitary boys intense but inchoate experience, reviewed through memories of the now elderly man. What makes The Red Scarf indispensable is the intensely personal nature of the material, casting its slant light, a setting sun, on all that has gone before.
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