L’ethos di Yves Bonnefoy poeta e traduttore, tra riflessione teorica e pratica poetica e traduttiva

Eminent poet and translator Yves Bonnefoy authored both significant translations and rich theoretical reflections on the problem of translating poetry. The way Bonnefoy defines the poetic subject will be compared to Meschonnic’s and Berman’s thoughts on translation. I will also show that Bonnefoy’s reflection on the poetic subject is similar to Benveniste’s. For the latter, who develops a theory of poetic discourse in his manuscripts on Baudelaire’s poetic language, this poetic subject is responsible for an enunciation which has a specific poetic form that reveals itself at a translinguistic level. Benveniste’s thinking on poetic discourse is similar to Bonnefoy’s metonymic concept of the poetic sign. Without knowing Benveniste’s manuscripts on poetry, Bonnefoy defines the translator as a poetic subject in a way that invites to extend the linguist’s reflection to translation studies. This allows us to rethink, both on a practical and a theoretical level, the implications of translating poetry. The presence of the poetic subject reveals itself in a specific way in the grain of a translated text through what I will call, by taking inspiration from Amossy’s and Maingueneau’s thinking, the ethos of the poet as translator. This ethos is the image of the self of the poet that he projects in his translated discourse and that crystallizes at a translinguistic level. I will analyse an excerpt from one of Shakespeare’s plays translated by Bonnefoy, so as to give an example of what I will call a «double» discursive image projected by translation. I will also show that Bonnefoy’s translation experience reveals new possibilities of his poetic writing. His ethos as a poet and translator becomes the source of inspiration of a recent poetic prose, "La tâche du traducteur".