Yves Jean Bonnefoy (June 24, 1923 – July 1, 2016) was a French poet and art historian.
He also published a number of translations, most notably the plays of William Shakespeare which are considered among the best in French. He was professor at the Collège de France from 1981 to 1993 and is the author of several works on art, art history, and artists including Miró and Giacometti. The Encyclopædia Britannica states that Bonnefoy was ″perhaps the most important French poet of the latter half of the 20th century.″
NO DOUBT
Yves Bonnefoy
No doubt there is still at the end of a long street
Where I walked as a child a pool of oil,
A rectangle of thick death under the black sky.
Since then, poetry
Has divided its waters from other waters
No beauty, no color can hold it,
It anguishes for iron and night.
It nourishes
A long yearn of dead river bank, an iron bridge
Leaping for the other bank into still darker night
Is its only memory and its only love.
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THE MUSEUM
Yves Bonnefoy
A clamor, in the distance. A crowd running under the rain beating
down, between the canvases the sea wind set clattering.
A man passes crying something. What is he saying? What he
knows! What he has seen! I make out his words. Ah, I almost understand!
I took refuge in a museum. Outside the great wind mixed with
water reigns alone from now on, shaking the glass panes.
In each painting, I think, it’s as if God were giving up
on finishing the world.