Poetry and Photography

The international community of letters mourns the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France’s greatest poets of the last half-century. A prolific author, he was often considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize and published a dozen major collections of poetry in verse and prose, several books of dream-like tales, and numerous studies of literature and art. His oeuvre has been translated into scores of languages, and he himself was a celebrated translator of Shakespeare, Yeats, Keats, and Leopardi.

Poetry and Photography is Bonnefoy’s seminal essay on the intricate connections between the two fields as they play out against a background of major works in the history of literature. Bonnefoy is concerned not just with new concepts that photography introduces to the world of images, but also with the ways in which works like Maupassant’s “The Night” perpetuate these concepts. A short, critical text on different forms of artistic creation, masterfully translated by Chris Turner, the volume is an invigorating read.

Yves Bonnefoy?(1923–2016) was a poet, critic, and professor emeritus of comparative poetics at the College de France. In addition to poetry and literary criticism, he?published numerous works of art history and translated into French several of Shakespeare’s plays. Chris Turner?is a writer and translator who lives in Birmingham, England. He has translated Jean-Paul Sartre’s?The Aftermath of War,?Portraits,?and?Critical Essays?and Andre Gorz’s?Ecologica?and?The Immaterial,?all published by Seagull Books.