‘A way among the words’: intimacy, desire and communication in the poetics and poetry of Yves Bonnefoy

Une façon de dire, qui ferait
Qu’on ne serait plus seul dans le langage.

A way among the words, that would be
The end of our solitude in language.

OF THE GENERATION of poets who began to write in the France and Belgium of the 1950s, Yves Bonnefoy, then in his thirties, is now perhaps the most widely celebrated. His early poetry exhibits a flair and savagery of image which earned him the approbation of the Surrealists, with whom he associated for a time; but thread for thread, the violence and eroticism of this poetry was matched by the philosophical questions he made his own from very early in his career. His first book-length publication, Du mouvement et de l’immobilité de Douve (1953), recently translated in the Bloodaxe Contemporary French Poets series as On the motion and immobility of Douve (1992) by Galway Kinnell, begins abruptly with the image of a lover ambiguously fleeing from death and running exultant through the country of her death:

Je te voyais courir sur des terrasses,
Je te voyais lutter contre le vent,
Le froid saignait sur tes lèvres.

Et je t’ai vue rompre et jouir d’être morte ô plus belle
Que la foudre, quand elle tache les vitres blanches de ton sang.

I saw you running on the terraces,
I saw you fight against the wind,
The coldness bled on your lips.

And I have seen you break and rejoice at being dead – O more beautiful
Than the lightning, when it stains the white windowpanes of your blood.

The linguistic closure of the poetic image in relation to the real and its abolition of being as presence are perennial concerns of the poet. In a lecture titled ‘Sur la fonction du poème’ (On the function of the poem)[See note [ii]], Bonnefoy explored the question which underlies this first and subsequent books of poetry and his numerous critical works: the possibility of maintaining in poetic language an openness toward presence. The work of poetry is to cultivate that openness through what he has elsewhere referred to as its ‘work on desire’. Ideally, poetry would work to unravel the desires of reader and writer alike for the realization and recognition of their own subjectivities in language, in order to allow what is conceived of as a simpler, or, in Bonnefoy’s terms, second desire to emerge. The ‘second desire’ attaches the subject to others in a relationship of ‘communication’. For Bonnefoy, communication is the site of our intimate and mutual recognition of the relation of human existence, the existence of each of us, to death and the loss of presence.

After gesture, verbal language is the means by which we formulate demands and requests to others for the fulfilment of our needs and desires. It is indispensible in the establishment of intimate relations with the other.

> Read on at jacketmagazine.com [Published in No. 14, July 2001]