Volume 54, Number 3 · March 1, 2007
When Night Forgets to Fall
By Charles Simic
The Curved Planks
by Yves Bonnefoy, translated from the French by Hoyt Rogers, with a foreword by Richard Howard
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 229 pp., $24.00
There was a time in this country when every poet and student of literature read some French poetry. To both sophisticates and provincials, Paris was the eternal capital of everything that was new and exciting in the arts. Modern poetry was unimaginable without Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Mallarmé, and many lesser figures whose poems were imitated and continued to be read. Pound, Eliot, Stevens, and other modernists, one learned, owed an immense debt to French poets. Fifty years ago, almost everyone one met in literary circles had some familiarity with the work of Apollinaire, Saint-John Perse, and Paul Valéry. Young poets read Wallace Fowlie's Mid-Century French Poets, where they encountered the poems of Max Jacob, Jules Supervielle, Andre Bréton, Paul Éluard, Robert Desnos, and Henri Michaux. New translations kept appearing. I recall a volume of poems by René Char that came out in 1956, which listed W.C. Williams, Richard Wilbur, William Jay Smith, Barbara Howes, W.S. Merwin, and James Wright as translators. Yves Bonnefoy's own poems came soon after. In 1968, the Ohio University Press published On the Motion and Immobility of Douve, his first book in English translation.
Review, 4051 words
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