Yves Bonnefoy in 1987: “Poetry is what frees us from dreams”
Interview by Maurice Olender
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Yves Bonnefoy, in Paris in 1988. ANDERSEN ULF/SIPA
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Interview Poet and translator Yves Bonnefoy (died 2016) explains in this scholarly interview how poetic language intensifies the experience of the world.
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By crowning Yves Bonnefoy on September 14, the Goncourt jury will choose consecration and not discovery. A professor at the Collège de France, after Paul Valéry and Roland Barthes, he is undoubtedly, with René Char, the best-known and most recognized living poet. In the inaugural lecture for his chair of Comparative Studies of the Poetic Function, he asked: "Is it not imprudent to entrust to someone who practices poetry, even if they know the value of scientific reflection, the analysis of the very act they are performing?" A contradiction very well overcome because creation and criticism coexist without drama in his work. And no doubt even enrich each other. Passionate about myths and religions – he led a hundred researchers to produce the monumental “Dictionary of Mythologies” (Flammarion, 1981) – but also a lover of nature and a great connoisseur of contemporary poetry, Yves Bonnefoy talks here with Maurice Olender
Since you have been teaching at the Collège de France, you have led a two-part life.Yves Bonnefoy That's true, and it's not without its problems. Speech that aims to explain is first and foremost an explication of its own words; it brings to the level of the shareable notion what is hidden in their depths, in short it expends itself - while speech that wants to become a poem is an accumulation of the most furtive data or even...
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