Translator’s Note: Two Poems by Yves Bonnefoy

In Yves Bonnefoy’s remarkable poetic prose of Le Grand Espace, concerning the Louvre and its Great Space in all its complications—of placing, maintaining, viewing—he cites one of Poussin’s lessons, perhaps the most flavorful, offered by his Autumn, in a room with the four seasons. What is its meaning?

That the fruit you have grown, which has been your work, which is going to grace the festive table, is far greater than the earthly fruit, the one the dictionaries speak of. And that poetry is painting the real fruit.

Artifice falls away. Truth deals with something beyond aesthetics. Like a child, “who will have grown from image to image, from desire to desire, with impatience first, arrogance, self-illusion, bitter need for violence. And who enters here, astonished.” Those words are themselves full of fruit. Just as the poem of the museum here goes beyond any physical construction, to deal with truth. The poem is itself the festive table.

The real fruit. The very term, taken seriously, as we have to take all the words in a poem, all the paintings in a museum, is a true terror, like any word, struggling to evade our grasp, having its own life and story, as in the texts I struggled to translate here: “They spoke to me.” We can’t measure up to the word. Nervousness ensues.

In some sense, the painter is always ultimately responsible, “restoring serenity to words. He calms the poet’s anguish.” For, as we read, here and now, about those and any words really listened to, really read: “They spoke to me” and to us, indeed, and whoever they might have been, and whatever they might have said, in such a universe as that of the poem and the museum. Words and figures bear their history, and ours, their violence barely containable, their impossible incompleteness signaled everywhere, in each painting, in each poem.

Let’s start over then, and listen, to the story complete in these two texts and yet always not. It’s far beyond artifice.