Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016) + Translation

Yves Bonnefoy at the Collège de France in 2001
(The Telegraph/AP/Getty)

On July 1 of this year, one of the most important--arguably the most important--late 20th century poets of the French language, Yves Bonnefoy--passed away in Paris. Bonnefoy remains little known in the US, I would venture from anecdotal evidence, even though he spent significant amounts of time here, even teaching for a while at a number of universities, including Brandeis, Johns Hopkins, Connecticut, Yale, Williams, and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York; unlike a number of his Francophone contemporaries, his poems are fairly accessible, if quite distinctive from the mainstream of Anglo-American poetics, and most can be found in translation too. In 1981, he was awarded the chair in poetry at the august Collège de France, and taught there for the remainder of his career.

A native of Tours, Indre-et-Loire, France, and an associate of the Surrealists, Bonnefoy might be thought of as the second generation of that movement, though he declined to sign one of their manifestos in 1947, and his poetry stands as testimony to a rather different approach to composition and image-making, even if the Surrealist and prior French influences, including Symbolism, are evident in it. Bonnefoy was not just a major poet, however; he published copiously, creating an imporessive oeuvre that includes criticism, biography, and fiction. One of his chief foci was art history. His book-length prose works include biographies of Alberto Giacometti and Francisco Goya. He also was a translator, primarily of Shakespeare's plays, as well as notable poets including John Donne and W. B. Yeats.

Bonnefoy's first book, Du mouvement et de l'immobilité de Douve, usually translated as On the Motion and Immobility of Douve, though I like the English cognate "movement" better, heralded his entry into the world of letters. It is, like all of his work more or less, a series of highly lyrical, often haunting appeals, alternating between abstract and concrete language, that when read aloud possesses the air of song. Even the book's title is melodic, rhyming, consonant: Bonnefoy signals Douve's presence before calling her name forth in that initial "Du [m]ouve[ment]." I find that so much of his poetry carries this linguistic-semantic resonance, so that even at its most abstract, it is still conveying, in indirect ways, a surplus of meaning.

Nevertheless, Bonnefoy's poetry may puzzle people grounded in the English and American traditions of poetry that is almost always about someone, something, some place, using specific, non-abstract language. This is, in fact, one of many an introductory poetry class will warn budding poets against; alluring as the examples of a Mallarmé or Supervielle--to pick a different generation of poetry--may be, too much abstraction does not a good poem make, even though there are traditions within US poetry in which abstraction flourishes. Bonnefoy's poems often charge the abstraction with a background conflict--a quest, a battle, loss--and dream-like movement, giving them inherent drama that keeps the reader engaged. With Douve, one of the most basic questions is, who is this person to whom the poetic speaker is writing? Who or what is a "Douve"? That alone made me want to read and decipher that text.

8 years ago I had the pleasure of translating a short catalogue essay, on the work of my dear friend J. Eric Hamel, by Bonnefoy, but I have never translated his poetry before. Here, therefore, is my rough translation of my favorite poems of his, "Vrai nom," from his first book. If you read French, you can both see and hear the music, but even if not, try the words and listen to what you hear.  Please forgive any felicities, and do offer your thoughts if you'd like. In tribute, RIP, Yves Bonnefoy!

TRUE NAME

I will name desert this castle that you were,
Night that voice, absence your face,
And when you fall in the barren earth
I will name nothingness the lightning that bore you.

Dying is a country that you loved. I come
But eternally by your dark roads.
I destroy your desire, your form, your memory,
I am your pitiless enemy.

I will name you war and will take
for myself war's liberties and will hold
in my hands your obscure and well-traveled face,
In my heart this country which illuminates the storm.

To appear the deep light requires
an earth profligate and broken by the night.
From a shadowy wood the flame grows bright.
The word itself needs substance,

An inert shoreline beyond all song.
You must overcome death so that you can live,
Blood spilled is the purest presence.

Copyright © John Keene, all rights reserved.

And the original French:

VRAI NOM

Je nommerai désert ce château que tu fus,
Nuit cette voix, absence ton visage,
Et quand tu tomberas dans la terre stérile
Je nommerai néant l'éclair qui t'a porté.

Mourir est un pays que tu aimais.
Je viens
Mais éternellement par tes sombres chemins.
Je détruis ton désir, ta forme, ta mémoire,
Je suis ton ennemi qui n'aura de pitié.

Je te nommerai guerre et je prendrai
Sur toi les libertés de la guerre et j'aurai
Dans mes mains ton visage obscur et traversé,
Dans mon cœur ce pays qu'illumine l'orage.

La lumière profonde a besoin pour paraître
D'une terre rouée et craquante de nuit.
C'est d'un bois ténébreux que la flamme s'exalte.
Il faut à la parole même une matière.

Un inerte rivage au delà de tout chant.
Il te faudra franchir la mort pour que tu vives,
La plus pure présence est un sang répandu.

Copyright © the estate of Yves Bonnefoy, 2016. All rights reserved.

Spring Semester Classes Begin

This post is of zero interest to anyone beyond my students and me, I know, but Spring 2013 semester classes began today, first thing this morning to be exact, and I'm excited about both of them, but especially about my undergraduate literature class, which incorporates some material I've taught before but many new texts as well. That class is officially an English and African American Studies class on The Black Arts Movement, satisfying two distinct registrations (and I thus have two Blackboard sites, which is a little disorienting), and covers not only aspects of the movement itself, but several antecedent moments (The Harlem Renaissance, Négritude, Black American poetry of the 1950s) and successors (a Spike Lee film, Public Enemy's music, and Kia Corthron's play Force Continuum). At the core of the course we'll be delving into a great deal of Amiri BarakI've included a good deal of  scholarly, critical and theoretical material (by figures from Alain Locke and W. E. B. DuBois to more recent scholars and authors like Cheryl Clarke, Howard Rambsy II, Cherise Pollard, and Lorrie Smith, as well as primary), including some primary documents by Larry Neal, Amiri Baraka and others. It's a decent-sized class (anywhere from 18-26 students, depending upon how many stay enrolled, and smaller is always better for the students and their professor) and thus manageable. The second course is one all members of the African American and African Studies teach in rotation, Introduction to African American Studies (Part II), which spans the period from Reconstruction through today, and which draws a pretty sizable enrollment. Right now I have about 45-50 students, but one asked about the amount of reading (up to 200 pages a week, from an array of texts, including historical and critical studies in a range of fields, primary documents by the likes of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X, and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and creative works), so perhaps the numbers will slim down by next week. As with my fall classes my students come from a range of backgrounds, though the majority are black (African American, African, Caribbean, mixed race, etc.), latino (many Afro-Latino), and Asian-American (South Asian and East Asian), which I learned quickly lent a very different cast to the conversations we had about the course material. I expect no less this semester. We begin with Booker T. Washington's Up From Slavery, a book I haven't read in many years, and rereading it in preparation for the class has reminded me why I enjoyed it so years ago, and how rich and complex our history--black history, American history--truly is.

Remembering Piri Thomas

Piri Thomas

When I was growing up, the division of reading in my home went like this: my father read newspapers, and my mother read books. (Both read magazines.) My mother read all kinds of books, but especially novels, most of them romances after a certain point, but among her non-romance stash my favorites were novels by Alice Walker, James Baldwin, Sidney Sheldon, William Styron, and Kyle Onstott. Roots, by Alex Haley, whom my mother says is a paternal relative of mine, made its appearance around the time of the famous miniseries, but I don't recall my father picking it up, and I didn't touch it until several years later, so initially annoyed was I by (mostly white) classmates who took glee in calling me "racines" (roots, in French, one of the two foreign languages I had to study in 7th grade), which rhymed with my last name, and then was truncated to "Rasss." (Eventually I took it in stride, as I did other witty permutations on my name.) Haley's The Autobiography of Malcolm X, which I did occasionally peek at based on my fascination with its eponymous subject, also sat on the living room bookshelf. There were, however, a few books other than the Bible that I knew my father periodically read at some point read, and of them, three gravitated from living room to the top of his bureau and back. Those were Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice; Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land; and Piri Thomas's Down These Mean Streets.

The former always stands out for me because of Eldridge Cleaver's handsome, striking face on the cover, and its poetic title. I would sometimes pick the book up and stare it, and then read the back flap and say to myself, this is one of those men's books, black men's books, a book about the 1960s and early 1970s and all the things that had gone down then, that this survivor had bravely written about.  The cover image and title together exuded a ferocity and frustration that I recognized in my father, in older male relatives and other black men near my father's age. I didn't read the book, though, because I thought of it as one of my father's books, something I shouldn't be reading--though I had no hesitation in reading Walker, or Baldwin, or Onstott--and didn't. I felt similarly about Brown's. The same was true of Thomas's book, which though also there in the house I didn't crack; its title alone was a warning: I may have originally assumed those "mean streets" were somewhere in St. Louis, or if not there, Chicago or some similar Midwestern city, until I read the book's back cover and saw that Thomas was writing about "Spanish Harlem," which I knew, because of the "Harlem," meant New York City and black people, though I had no concept of where in New York Harlem or Spanish Harlem for that matter was. But the back cover write-up suggested that the story the novel's pages contained was a harsh one, a man's story, and since this was one of my father's books and actually did appear to be read from time to time, I did no more than glance at it and try, when I had picked it up, to make sure it lay exactly where I had found it lest he notice that it had been disturbed even an inch.

I finally read Down These Mean Streets when I was in college, not as part of the curriculum of any course but because I was trying to read all kinds of things I felt I should be reading or have read (like Roots, and The Autobiography of Malcolm X), as opposed to things I'd been assigned to read in junior high and high school (Macbeth, Lord of the Flies, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Lysistrata, Le noeud de vipères) or out of my own unclassifiable interests (Teach Yourself Sanskrit, The French Lieutenant's Woman, Ulysses, Annie Allen) or as part of my college syllabi (Harmonium, Tender Buttons, The Conquest of New Spain, Ariel). As I proceeded through Thomas's account of his early life and youth as a Puerto Rican-Cuban (born Juan Pedro Tomás, in 1928) in Depression era and post-war America, I glimpsed what my father might have seen in the book, the common points despite their different heritages, backgrounds and experiences. My father was not from El Barrio; my father, as far as I knew, could not speak more than a few words of Spanish; my father never went to jail on drug charges. But Thomas's story of struggling to find his place in a city, a society and a world that had little interest in or place for him; his journey, as a latino man of African descent (among other ancestries), from the ghetto, to finding and asserting his presence and voice, against and through multiple invisibilities; his narrative of becoming a man, which was also at its core a narrative of becoming and being, I could see spoke directly to my father, as Haley/Malcolm X's, Brown's and Eldridge Cleaver's books did, and it spoke immediately to me. Thomas's love of books, of libraries, of the power of being able to travel to other places through literary texts, spoke even more directly to my mind and soul.

Thomas at University
of Chicago, delivering
a flow, 1969

Down These Mean Streets, originally published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1967, is now a classic. Raw, poetic, sometimes infuriating, sometimes shocking, but always enthralling, Thomas's autobiographical novel tackled, among its many themes, the racial and ethnic diversity and attendant tensions both within and outside latino communities, a focus that many subsequent writers and scholars have picked up, but which the contemporary mainstream US media still cannot fully grasp or comprehend.  Its portrait of Spanish Harlem was also different from some of the idealized depictions that had preceded it (cf. West Side Story), and inspired many subsequent writers, latino and non-latino, to write their own stories. Thomas became quite famous for this book, to which he published a sequel, 7 Long Times (Arte Público, 1994). He also released other works, such as Savior, Savior, Hold My Hand (Doubleday, 1972) and Stories From El Barrio (Freedom Voices, 2005)  He was also a poet, and recorded and issued CDs of his poetry, performed in a style he called flow, akin to rap's precursors such as the spoken-word poetry and songs of Gil Scott-Heron, The Last Poets, Felipe Luciano, Lou Rawls, and Oscar Brown, Jr.  His CDs were Sounds of the Streets and No Mo' Barrio Blues. He wrote and talked with young people all over the country about his own experiences, about being a Puerto Rican and latino in this country, about the history of Puerto Rico/Borinquen, about being a convict and an ex-con and the role that race and ethnicity play in the US penal system, about challenging the social logic and law of racism, whose effects he and many millions of others have suffered since this country's earliest days, and above all, about the necessity of "unity," a word he used when he spoke to young people, which is to say about finding commonalities and connections amid, across and despite differences.

Piri Thomas's vital voice left us yesterday, October 17, 2011, but it is unlikely to be forgotten anytime soon. We still have his words, in text and CD form, online and on libraries shelves, and, as I remember growing up, on bookshelves and bureaus. His vision and wisdom, captured in his novel, lives on and endures--vivirán y durarán--in heads, in hearts, in souls.

Via the Wayback Machine

c. 1997

When I first started blogging in 2005 I had no idea who my blog visitors were outside of very rough statistics or posts in my comment section.  I still don't know exactly, apart from commenters or people who tell me in person, but it's quite easy now to view the weekly, monthly or yearly stats and get an idea. To give an example, this week my top 5 most visited posts have been 2007 Rugby World Cup (always high on the list since it first appeared, and I have a strong idea why), Poem: Julia de Burgos's "To Julia de Burgos" (also usually quite high, and it makes me especially proud that my blogpost about one of Puerto Rico's most important poets, an Afrolatina, tends to be regularly sought out), Poem/Translation: Claudia Roquette-Pinto (my translation of one of her many exquisite poems), Review: Homme au bain (Man at Bath) (my review of Christophe Honoré's film, which features a discussion of M. François Sagat, whose name I suppose generates the searches), and The High Line (my 2009 photos from a visit to one of New York City's contemporary treasures).

This week the top referring sites are all Google (US, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, South Africa, India), no surprise there, but the top key searchwords bringing people to the site are a surprise: "a julia de burgos translation," "homme au bain," "roberto bolano," "mamuka gorgodze" [მამუკა გორგოძე] (? - yes, I had to look him up; he's a star of Georgia's 2011 Rugby World Cup team), "a julia de burgos," and "martin puryear."  Again, how wonderful that people are searching out films, writers and visual artists and coming across this site. J's Theater readers are overwhelmingly from the US, but the next highest groups of page viewers this week come from the UK, France, Canada, Australia, Germany, New Zealand, and Brazil. Hello to all of you! Most viewers (40%) are using Internet Explorer on Microsoft Windows (66%), but Firefox (23%) and Safari (17%), once in the single digits, have crept up, as have the number of Macintosh (25%) and Linux (4%) viewers. iPhone, Android and iPad readers together make up about 3% of readers, which is 3% more than existed a few years ago.

My old web page banner

Before the blog, which I began in 2005, I did have an earlier Web presence, and the main way I knew who visited--beyond the Stat counter --was through the emails I would receive from time to time letting me know that a reader had taken interest in some aspect of my site.  I wantonly gave that out, and never received a single nastly post. Instead, I heard from people who shared my interests in architecture, who wondered what it was like to peer down through the glass floor in Toronto's CN Tower, and who wanted to offer thoughts on who'd win the Cy Young Award in each league. Via the Wayback Machine, the Internet archive, I came across my old page, which I started in 1997 while still in school, and which is archived, with selected posts and updates in 23 "captures," from 1998 through 2001.  Alma mater NYU's servers hosted it, and after I departed their urban groves they shut it down, though by that point it had already been preserved in Net amber. Interestingly enough, one of the first students I taught at the university knew about me and my work via that old website. She mentioned one my animated gifs, a poem I'd created in that format (another remains), and I was amazed that she'd come across it. This was pre-Google, so it might have been Yahoo! or one of the older search engines that summoned it up.

In my personal preamble, I included the following:

One truly scary sign is when one company owns a publishing house, newspapers, a movie studio, TV and radio stations, and on and on! And several companies (Rupert Murdoch's behemoth empire, Sony, Time Warner, etc.) now fit this description. We have to be vigilant as consu mers, as citizens, and one small step is keeping informed through organs such as Media Watchdog, reading everything you can, and resisting the increasing industrialization of our consciousness(es). So PLEASE READ a good book, magazines, newspapers, and buy them if you can from your local INDEPENDENT BOOKSTORE, and articles and pieces on the Web. Whatever you do, don't surrender without a fight! RESIST! 

I'm proud to say I was calling out media consolidation and Rupert Murdoch quo ante. I admit to having not visited Media Watchdog (update: which no longer exists) in many years, though. In subsequent updates I removed most of the polemics and offered readers a less combative welcome. The final accessible main page is from 2001, just before I headed to the university for the first time. From it as from the earlier pages, you could reach my distinct pages set aside for books, sports, art (fascinating to me that some of the drawings have vanished, but one of Charles Bernstein remains), and poetry. Hmm, doesn't this all sound familiar?  Also, because I'd finally figured out how to create frames and tables (remember when those were the hot new thing?) in Html, I'd set up an "Notable African Americans" page, with those frames. This was pre-Wikipedia, so such pages weren't so easy to come by. I did update it a few times. Most of the links appear to have disappeared. Checking Wikipedia today, I note that there are pages for all the people I wrote entries for, including fairly obscure folks like composer Robert Nathaniel Dett, whose music my friend Byron M. turned me onto.

One of the drawings from my MIT days, c. 1989

Many of the files stored on NYU's server(s) are no longer accessible, so my 5 pages of photos from my first trip to Brazil (we went to Salvador da Bahia and Rio de Janeiro in 2000, and ran into Sonia Sanchez and her son twice, once in each city!), are mere ghost traces. Though the captions remain I had to think for a minute about what they may have looked like, though in no time I recalled one of them featuring some of the enthrallingly grotesque statuary in Salvador da Bahia's Ordem Terceira de São Francisco, the monastery just off the Terreiro de Jesus, in Salvador's upper city.  Think ropes--velvet--of blood emanating from Jesus Christ's hands, stigmated palms, horror-film grimaces on the faces of Saint Francis and his life-size peers lining the room, and you start to get the picture.  C couldn't bear to spend more than a few minutes anywhere near these marvelously horrible creations, nor in the ossuary downstairs, but having grown up Roman Catholic and had more than a little exposure to the gory tales of numerous saints' martyrdoms, I found these fascinating. Other photos featured capoeristas, Rio tourist sites (the Rio page is riddled with grammatical and factual errors--Oscar Niemeyer did not design the city's new cathedral, though our guide told us this), and at some point I will have to scour my desk in NJ for the original prints--since I think this might have been just before I got ahold of a digital camera--to find them and scan them in. They also feature my dreadlocks, now a year gone, at their earliest stages. The memories!

One of the old poems, "Super Matrix," that appeared on old website, c. 1998

As Wayback Machine searches make clear, there's more of our earlier web presence than we might imagine, and things persist on the Net perhaps not eternally, but for a much longer time than they once did when they appeared only in print form or when they were passed along in the form of spoken or whispered tales and gossip. I do miss the informality, freedom and directness of that earlier pre-Google, pre-social networking site world, though. I also wonder what has happened to some of the people I used to correspond with, that is, the ones I wasn't fortunate enough to befriend and stay in contact with, no matter how far away they physically were.