Prose

Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016), a major poet, was equally a seminal essayist and thinker. This companion volume to Yves Bonnefoy: Poems contains what he regarded as his foundational essays, as well as a generous selection from all periods. In his art criticism, as in his literary essays, Bonnefoy manages that rare thing: to impart metaphysical urgency to each discreet encounter with a painting or a poem, born of his constant quest for intensity, for 'presence'. Whether he is examining an early Byzantine fresco, a Shakespeare play, a Bernini angel, a drawing by Blake, a poem by Rimbaud, the exigency, the high seriousness and the challenge is the same: to affirm presence, and finitude, against all forms of life-sapping conceptual thought. If they cannot always deliver ecstasy or hope, the great poets, argues Bonnefoy, are pledged to 'intensity as such', sustained by 'une mélancolie ardente'.

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. Stephen Romer was born in Hertfordshire in 1957 and read English at Cambridge. For many years he has lived in France, where he was Maître de Conférences at Tours University from 1990-2024. He has taught in the US and has held Visiting Fellowships at Cambridge and Oxford, where he has twice served as RLF Fellow. He is currently Lecturer in French at Brasenose College, Oxford. He has published four full collections and Set Thy Love in Order, a new and selected came out in 2017. He has published several anthologies and volumes of translation, notably of Yves Bonnefoy, whose Poems and Prose (2017/2020) he co-edited for Carcanet. With Patrick McGuinness he won the 2024 Scott-Moncrieff Prize for The Day’s Ration by Gilles Ortlieb (Arc, 2023). A volume of criticism, Chaos and the Clean Line: Writings on Franco-British Modernism (Legenda, MHRA/Cambridge) came out in 2024. He has recorded his poetry for the Poetry Archive. He was made FRSL in 2011, and Chevalier de l’ordre des arts et des lettres in 2021. Born in London in 1942, Anthony Rudolf has two children and three grandchildren. He is the author of books of literary criticism (on Primo Levi, Piotr Rawicz and others), autobiography (Silent Conversations and The Arithmetic of Memory) and poetry (Zigzag, The Same River Twice and collaborations with artists), and translator of books of poetry from French (Bonnefoy, Vigée, Jabès), Russian (Vinokourov and Tvardovsky) and other languages. He has edited various anthologies. His essay on R.B. Kitaj was published by the National Gallery in 2001, and he has published essays and shorter texts on other painters. He is Paula Rego's companion and her main male model. He has completed a volume of short stories and is now at work on two new memoirs. He is co-editor and one of the translators of two new Yves Bonnefoy selections for Carcanet Press. Rudolf’s reviews, articles, poems, translations, obituaries and interviews with writers have appeared in numerous journals. He has been an occasional broadcaster on radio and television and was the founder of Menard Press, now dormant after nearly fifty years and 170 titles. After a lifetime of day jobs to top up his freelance activities, he became Visiting Lecturer in Arts and Humanities at London Metropolitan University (2000-2003) and Royal Literary Fund fellow at the Universities of Hertfordshire and Westminster (2003-2008). He is Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres (2004), Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature (2005) and Fellow of the English Association (2010). John Naughton is Harrington and Shirley Drake Professor of the Humanities at Colgate University. He has authored or edited seven books in the area of modern French poetry, including The Poetics of Yves Bonnefoy (1984) and Shakespeare and the French Poet (2004). His translations have been honoured by the British Poetry Book Society and by the Modern Language Association. He has received the medal of the Collège de France in Paris for 'distinguished contributions to the study of French literature'.