Yves Bonnefoy – Passerby Poems

How fortunate to find this poem while walking tiny cobbled streets in Paris! I had just turned from the rue Clovis to the rue Descartes on the way to rue Mouffetard in le Quartier Latin and there it was.

It is not often that your first reading of a poem is in large brown type on the side of a building, but that was how I first read Yves Bonnefoy. From the start, it was as if the words were speaking directly to me, the passerby.

Fittingly, to the right of the poem was a scraggily little tree that was not much to look at and probably had the rough sort of life I can only imagine trees would have in a big city.

I thought of Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his lime tree bower prison and the important attitude adjustment I learned from him so very many years ago:
“Henceforth I shall know
That nature ne’er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there,
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty!”

To the left of the poem, there was a blue tree mural painted by Belgian artist Pierre Alechinsky, who was commissioned for the work by the City of Paris in 2000. He wanted Yves Bonnefoy’s poem to accompany his art.

I had never heard of Yves Bonnefoy before. It turned out he was a 92-year-old French poet, essayist, translator, editor, and professor of such clout that there was talk of him as a potential Nobel prize winner. Born in Tours, he moved to Paris in 1943 where he studied mathematics and philosophy at the Sorbonne and was briefly part of the surrealist group of artists before following his own path. He became well known after the publication of his first major work of poetry in 1953: On the Motion and Immobility of Douve.

He’s reported to have said, “One should not call oneself a poet. It would be pretentious. It would mean that one has resolved the problems poetry presents. Poet is a word one can use when speaking of others, if one admires them sufficiently. If someone asks me what I do, I say I’m a critic, or a historian.”

Back home, I ordered two books of his poetry:  The Anchor’s Long Chain, which was published in 2008 and includes the blue tree wall poem, and Rue Traversière, which was originally published in 1977.

Frequently blurring the line between prose and poetry, his writing feels freed of boundaries and brings you to imaginative and sometimes confusing worlds with fleeting surprises of familiarity and truth, not unlike the sun coming in and out from the clouds. And you keep reading in eager expectance of the sun’s return in golden rays of words that beam of truth. There is much about listening and engaging in the present experience of the tangible. There is exploration of the act of naming as a way to create meaning. And there is some grappling with God.

I just found out that he died in July 2016, four months after I first read his words on the building in Paris. I wonder where he was that day. Could I have passed him somewhere on the street or walked right under his window?

I leave you with a translation of one of what I call his Passerby Poems. There is another that begins “Passerby, do you want to know / how the guest of this tomb died” that I highly recommend reading and is found in The Anchor’s Long Chain.

Passerby, these are words. But instead of reading
I want you to listen: to this frail
Voice like that of letters eaten by grass.
Lend an ear, hear first of all the happy bee
Foraging in our almost rubbed-out names.
It flits between two sprays of leaves,
Carrying the sound of branches that are real
To those that filigree the unseen gold.
Then know an even fainter sound, and let it be
The endless murmuring of all our shades.
Their whisper rises from beneath the stones
To fuse into a single heat with that blind
Light you are as yet, who can still gaze.
Listen simply, if you will. Silence is a threshold
Where, unfelt, a twig breaks in your hand
As you try to disengage
A name upon a stone:
And so our absent names untangle your alarms.
And for you who move away, pensively,
Here becomes there without ceasing to be.
(translated by Hoyt Rogers)