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COPYRIGHT 2006 Associated University Presses
Shakespeare and the French Poet, by Yves Bonnefoy, edited by John Naughton. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. Pp. xix + 283. Paper $22.50.
As the carefully chosen title suggests, this book is more than a study of Shakespeare. It records the lifetime, and still ongoing, engagement with Shakespeare by a major foreign poet (today's most scandalous omission from the list of Nobel laureates), who, in translating him, has meditated successively on the lessons for contemporary poetry and contemporary living, to be learned from his plays and poems, and who has reflected abundantly, not simply on the problems of translating Shakespeare, but on what precedes these problems: the differing projects for poetry in England and in France and the divergent incitements to poetry, owing to their divergent philosophies, to be found in the English and French languages. Yves Bonnefoy's imaginative and sustained negotiating, as poet, translator, thinker and critic, with a literary giant, is, as far as I know, among all world literatures, unique.
One is aware, in the opening seven chapters--highly original and personal responses to nine of the plays--of the relation being created between Shakespeare and Bonnefoy. The basic assumption is that the collapse of a medieval unity of being within a sacred order changed the function of poetry, which becomes, for the first time with Shakespeare and henceforth, in principle, for the whole of the modern period, "to make manifest what is hidden beneath the impoverished forms of everyday thinking, beneath the dissociations and alienations imposed by science and culture," in the pursuit of "a deep, universal order, the order of life," of "plenitude in the very heart of an empty world." Individuals take on a new importance, not as isolated and competing selves but as knots of experience in quest of being--of the authentic "I"--and of each other. Brutus's "taper" becomes the sign, in the course of a beautiful and poetic pondering on certain quiet scenes in Julius Caesar, of the small light of consciousness abroad in a world dangerous to truth. Iago's jealousy is seen as without limit, since what he envies murderously in Othello is the latter's apparent possession of a being of which he is himself deprived. Bonnefoy's concern, in Shakespeare, for people's responses to "their feelings about themselves as beings [...] in the world," for the search not so much for what one is as for who one is, for a self-presence deeper than the fabrications of language and of society, makes for a kind of ontological criticism, less precise, perhaps, but more fundamental in intention than the study of character, of psychology.
Similarly, personal relationships become the mutual quest for the truth of being. Here is another way of going below surfaces, with the intuition of a writer, though, inevitably, not all readers will be convinced by all the...
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