L’arrière-pays shakespearien dans l’œuvre d’Yves Bonnefoy

The contemporary French poet Yves Bonnefoy has always been attracted by English poetry, especially by Shakespeare’s work. The experience of translating Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets has been a fundamental one for him. The contact with a different culture, a different language and a different sort of poetry – which is defined as the elswhere of the Shakespearean universe – has been an important moment in his poetic experience and has contributed to the development and maturity of his own poetry. Translation – which is first of all a poetic experience to him – is in fact the chance to get in touch with somebody else's poetry and to establish a dialogue with his poetic universe. Bonnefoy’s aim is to find a common path for the poetic search of truth. Therefore, translation is a poetic activity because it is a dialogic experience. Such a dialogue requires not only an attentive understanding of the original text, but also the active participation of the translator. He finds himself endowed with the ethical responsibility of giving birth to a new poetic text in which the seeds of his own poetry are also present. This is why, in Bonnefoy’s translations of Shakespeare’s plays, we can clearly distinguish, on the one hand, the presence of the French poet’s own voice and, on the other, his attempt to open his “speech” to the specific quality of Shakespearean poetry.