“The School of the Respect”: Yves Bonnefoy and the Translation of Petrarch’s Sonnets

Abstract

Yves Bonnefoy, the most famous French poet of the second part of the XXth century, was also a translator. He mainly translated English texts, and among them the whole work of Shakespeare. He has developed, in essays and interviews, his vision of the translation, and at the end of his life partially dedicated to the study of Italian Art (Renaissance, Baroque, Modern Art), he translated twenty one sonnets of Petrarch. In this article we propose to show the coherence of the work of Yves Bonnefoy. He developed an ethics of poetry that also included translation, defined as “the school of the respect” (towards the author of the source text, towards oneself and towards readers). For his translation of Petrarch’s sonnets he chose words, rhythms, and phrases that were found in his collections of poems. The violence and the theatricality of these sonnets resemble those of Douve or In the lure of the Threshold. As a result, while translating faithfully, he links Petrarch’s verses to his own, in the continuity of his own work.