The Curved Planks: Poems

This is a wonderful book. A volume that You may find whispers at first and then comes alive as You read each line. Bonnefoy's poetry is A MUST and, here, presented alongside the French text ~ You can't go wrong.

I first read Bonnefoy's poetry in a translation workshop a few years ago -- one of my classmates did some beautiful versions from "The house where I was born," a sequence in this book. Reading the whole book at last, I must admit to a slight disappointment -- "The house where I was born" is still a powerful sequence, I like the title poem, and the longer verse meditations generally come off well, but the shorter lyric poems don't translate. With the help of the facing pages format -- and some rudimentary French -- you can kind of see what these poems are trying to do, but that doesn't bring them to life as poems. (Also, compared with say Eastern European poetry, French poetry is fundamentally quite familiar in its style. The failed translations aren't outlandish, just flat.) The translation is workmanlike, sometimes pedestrian but rarely awful (there are some irritating internal rhymes that are clearly absent in the French) -- certainly adequate for the longer poems. The introduction by Richard Howard is a helpful guide to the themes of these poems, but I wish he had said more about the technique and cadences. (The hideously overwritten and over-italicized first paragraph is not representative.) All that said, one does get a pretty good sense of Bonnefoy's vision, which is fascinatingly bare. Howard describes him as a poet of "natural energies" rather than objects, which is basically right -- the objects, like the stones (nine of the poems are titled "A Stone") and the curved planks that are a bulwark against "the unthinkable," are defined in terms of the energies that destroy them. The human characters are present largely as emotions -- a child's fear of the dark, Ceres' longing for her children -- and this stripping of material detail from the world is poetically very effective, especially in "The house where I was born."

It's a terrific idea to publish a bilingual edition, with the French on one page and the English facing it, so the layman can go back and compare, see what liberties Hoyt Rogers has taken with the original. And also, what a good idea if a person wanted to teach himself French! I've learned many new vocabulary words just by scouring the text two pages at a time. Richard Howard contributes a preface that's okay, but doesn't really add anything that isn't later added, in two capacious afterwords, by translator Rogers, who first puts PLANKS in context of Bonnefoy's previous poetry, and then talks about translation very acutely. Of course, such an essay is bound to smack of the self congratulatory, as he pats himself on the back time and again for choosing just le mot juste, but given that, it is an essay of acute interest, for we learn why, for example, Rogers imports the unusual, specifically romantic word "Bee-Loud" into his version of Bonnefoy. It's because Bonnefoy himself translated Yeats twenty years ago, and the word "bee-loud" in Yeats' "Innisfree" poem inspired YB into a drastically quirky original, to which Rogers now tips his chapeau. All in all an extraordinary document of close feeling. Bonnefoy, the grand old man of French poetry, now must be nearing 80 or 90, but in some ways this writing has the fresh breath of a baby. The "curved planks" (the "planches courbes") are those of a boat, the boat on which St. Christopher earned his miraculous medal, the boat of the child, Wordsworth's boat from THE PRELUDE, and should we have used the word "barque" instead (for it's as often "barque" as "bateau" in the original)? You get the feeling that for Bonnefoy, global warming has already occurred, for the earth is laden with water, pummeling water that wears away the stone. Critics call his work lapidary, but it is a world strangely softened by time, ocean and children, not their innocence precisely but their need to play, to show one things, to lead the way into the night. At times I was reminded of the US artist slash janitor Henry Darger, for when Bonnefoy gets onto the subject of children, well, they're like blinders to a headstrong cheval. All in all, a fine piece of work. Rogers explains that this book is the final volume in Bonnefoy's second trilogy, not that he's suggesting that such things are strictly formulated. It makes me want to read the others, like passing my fingers across the stones in the graveyard, as did the red-headed, blind heroine of M. Night Shyamalan's underrated THE VILLAGE (2004).