The Curved Planks: Poems - Softcover

Bonnefoy, Yves

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374530750 ISBN 13: 9780374530754

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007

Synopsis

For decades readers and critics have acclaimed Yves Bonnefoy as France's greatest living poet. His most recent book of verse, The Curved Planks, crowns an oeuvre that has won him the highest international honors. More than any other single work, this sequence embodies the astonishing variety of Bonnefoy's art. A rich fabric of themes, styles, and genres, it balances aesthetic complexity with heartfelt directness.

This bilingual edition of The Curved Planks sets the French texts alongside English versions by the noted translator Hoyt Rogers, who has collaborated closely with Bonnefoy in crafting poems that re-create the freshness and vision of the originals. This volume also includes a preface by the renowned poet and critic Richard Howard and essays by the translator that situate The Curved Planks in the author's body of work. All assist in introducing the English-language reader to Bonnefoy's profound poetic gift.

About this title

About the Author

Yves Bonnefoy has published numerous studies of literature and art, as well as an extensive dictionary of mythology. His work has been translated into many languages, and he is a celebrated translator of Shakespeare and Yeats. He lives in Paris.

From Publishers Weekly

The first poetic associations of Bonnefoy, an octogenarian French poet often mentioned in the same breath as Paul Valéry, were with the French surrealists, but he has long since been a maverick of French verse, crafting stanzas as simple as they are resonant and rooted in everything from modernism to medieval song. This sequence, composed of short series of poems that take in every form from prose to rhyme, centers, as Richard Howard notes in a baroque preface, on renewal, taking the myth of Ceres as a point of origin: "she still/ Stops at night/ Under rustling trees,/ And knocks at closed doors." Hoyt—who provides a long afterword, a translator's note and a bibliography—offers a translation that is solid and clear, and that allows for play among word and phrase senses: "the limitless space of clashing currents, of yawning abysses, of stars." (Apr.)
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Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0374530750
• ISBN 13: 9780374530754
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256