Feature Articles

Influential French poet Yves Bonnefoy receives 2007 Franz Kafka Prize
by Joshua Winant, Manager, Collection Management Services

Yves Bonnefoy was awarded the Franz Kafka Prize for 2007 in Prague's Old Town Hall on October 30th, making the French poet and essayist the seventh recipient of this prestigious Czech literary award. Founded by the Franz Kafka Society, the annual award includes a $10,000 cash prize and is selected by an international jury for, "its humanistic character and contribution to cultural, national, language, and religious tolerance, its generally human validity and its ability to hand over a testimony about our times." The Society was formed soon after the collapse of communism to promote the work of Kafka and other German and Jewish writers from Prague. Past recipients include 2 Nobel Prize winners for Literature; Elfriede Jelinek and Harold Pinter.

Bonnefoy himself has been mentioned frequently as a Nobel candidate for a body of work which extends far beyond his dozen books of poetry. He is recognized by many to be the most important modern European poet and has written a vast number of essays on the act of writing poetry. These reflections are not limited to the creative processes of writers but also include the viewpoints of painters. He has written on the works of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, and Nerval, as well as Poussin, Delacroix, Miro, and Giacometti. He has also translated the works of Donne, Keats, Leopardi, and Yeats, and is considered the pre-eminent French translator of Shakespeare.

In what appears a deliberate juxposition to his highly intellectual art criticism, Bonnefoy's own work is characterized by the use of simple words and simple images. Complexity doesn't enter in until the images begin to build upon one another, ultimately bridging the reader to a world beyond, in between, or maybe just beneath language. For Bonnefoy, this place is a dimension of the present moment which is not fleeting, but permanent and attainable. And he sees this to be the task of poetry, to name this permanence by restoring things to the meaning intended for our passing existence.

Bonnefoy does not consider the world his poems create to be conceptual or unreal, super real or surreal. It was writers of Surrealist movement in Paris soon after WWII that first turned him from his studies in mathematics and philosophy to poetry, and he published his first book as part of that literary movement. However, his second and most acclaimed collection, On the Motion and Immobility of Douve, was a conscious separation from the Surrealist tradition. The poem below from that book illustrates how Bonnefoy uses concrete images to anchor his elusive themes of lover/nature, art/life, and death/incarnation.

You had to
Ruin the naked face in the marble,
Hammer at every beauty every form,

Love perfection because it is the threshold
But deny it once known, once dead forget it.

Imperfection is the summit.

Translator Anthony Rudolf says, "Bonnefoy is a modern and great poet insofar as he recognizes and articulates the collapse of traditional orders and forms of sacred meaning; at the same time, refusing both credulity and cynicism, he seeks to remedy the sense of ruin." If commentary like this wasn't enough to sway the jury of the Franz Kafka Prize, and I were asked to offer a quote which bears Bonnefoy's witness to our post WWII era, it would have to be this single line from his essay on Rimbaud, "We only have being because of this desire in us which never obtains and which never gives up."