The Poetics Of Adonis And Yves Bonnefoy

This book examines the work of two major poets who wrote in the second half of the twentieth century, Yves Bonnefoy of France and the Syrian-born Adonis (born Ali Ahmed Said). In conducting close readings of key moments from their respective poetry, the author illustrates how both of these writers, in their own unique ways, construct poetry as a form of spiritual practice, that is, as a way of transforming both the poet's and the implied reader's ontological, perceptual, and creative relationships with their internal and external worlds.

Yves Bonnefoy is the most important and influential French poet to have emerged since the Second World War. Poet, art critic, historian, translator (particularly of Shakespeare), specialist in the problem of the relation of poetry to the visual arts and to the history of religions, Bonnefoy is now considered one of the most distinguished men of letters of his generation. Though Bonnefoy's work is familiar to American scholars, the complexity of his thought and style has created a need for a critical introduction to his work. This first major study of Bonnefoy written in English provides an overview of his entire literary career. Naughton situates Bonnefoy in the context of the existential philosophical tradition that nurtured him and in the poetic and artistic tradition that includes Dante and Shakespeare, Piero and Poussin, Baudelaire and Rimbaud. Bonnefoy's poems appear in both French and English, and all quotations from his prose have been translated. This book will appeal not only to the growing number of students and scholars of French literature interested in Bonnefoy's work, but also to those who study comparative poetry and the relation of poetry to art and to contemporary religious thought.

This title provides a comprehensive selection, covering a period of 40 years, of the poetic writings of France's greatest living poet. The editors have selected work from his six principal collections, including material from his most recent work.

A much-anticipated follow-up to Nothing More to Lose, this is only the second poetry collection translated into English from a vital voice of Arabic literature. “We drag histories behind us,” the Palestinian poet Najwan Darwish writes in Exhausted on the Cross, “here / where there’s neither land / nor sky.” In pared-down lines, brilliantly translated from the Arabic by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, Darwish records what Raúl Zurita describes as “something immemorial, almost unspeakable”—a poetry driven by a “moral imperative” to be a “colossal record of violence and, at the same time, the no less colossal record of compassion.” Darwish’s poems cross histories, cultures, and geographies, taking us from the grime of modern-day Shatila and the opulence of medieval Baghdad to the gardens of Samarkand and the open-air prison of present-day Gaza. We join the Persian poet Hafez in the conquered city of Shiraz and converse with the Prophet Mohammad in Medina. Poem after poem evokes the humor in the face of despair, the hope in the face of nightmare.

Best Literary Translations is a new, annual anthology that celebrates world literatures in English translation and honors the translators who create and literary journals that publish this work. Best Literary Translations 2024 features both contemporary and historical poetry and prose originally written in nineteen languages—including some not commonly seen in U.S. translations, such as Burmese, Kurdish, Tigrinya, and Wayuu—brought into English by thirty-eight of the most talented translators working today. These poems, short stories, essays, and hybrid pieces were drawn from nominated works published in U.S. literary journals during 2023 that spanned more than eighty countries and nearly sixty languages. The four series coeditors, Noh Anothai, Wendy Call, Öykü Tekten, and Kọ́lá Túbọ̀sún, selected the finalists from over five hundred nominations. By spotlighting work from top literary journals, Best Literary Translations honors the excellent literature created every year by a diverse range of authors and translators and will continue to expand the canon of global literatures in English translation, showcasing the bold and brilliant work of contemporary translators and editors annually, for years to come.

In a series of evocative vignettes, celebrated Iraqi poet Majed Mujed lyrically traverses the fraught landscapes of beauty, longing and resistance in a country at war. The Book of Trivialities, originally written in the poet’s native Arabic, is beautifully rendered into English by award-winning translator Kareem James Abu-Zeid.

Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016) was a central figure in post-war French culture, with a lifelong fascination with the problems of translation. Language, for him, was a visceral, intensely material element in our existence, and yet the abstract quality of words distorts the immediate, material quality of our contact with the world. This concern with what separates words from an essential truth hidden in objects involved him in wide-ranging philosophical and theological investigations of the spiritual and the sacred. But for all his intellectual drive and rigour, Bonnefoy's poetry is essentially of the concrete and the tangible, and addresses itself to our most familiar and intimate experiences of objects and of each other. In his first book of poetry, published in France in 1953, Bonnefoy reflects on the value and mechanism of language in a series of short variations on the life and death of a much loved woman, Douve. Douve, though, is the French word for a moat, that uncrossable body which separates us from safety and from danger. With this undercurrent at work we read the poems as if they are about the divide between us and death as much as they are about the divide between us and the untouchable reality of text. This is dangerous writing, fulfilling Derrida's "fatal necessity" by making us substitute the textual sign for reality. In his introduction, Timothy Mathews shows how Bonnefoy's poetics are enmeshed with his philosophical, religious and critical thought.