"Let This World Endure"
from Yves Bonnefoy's
The Curved Planks
translated from the French
by Hoyt Rogers

Yves Bonnefoy:

Yves Bonnefoy has published seven major poetry collections, numerous studies of literature and art, and an extensive dictionary of mythology. His work has been translated into many languages, and he is a celebrated translator of Shakespeare and Yeats. He lives in Paris. (Photo by Martine Franck)

Hoyt Rogers:

Hoyt Rogers translates poetry and other literary works from the French, German, and Spanish. He is also the author of a book of poems, Witnesses, and a volume of criticism, The Poetics of Inconstancy. He lives in the Dominican Republic.

About The Curved Planks:

For decades readers and critics have acclaimed Yves Bonnefoy as France's greatest living poet. His most recent book of verse, The Curved Planks, crowns an oeuvre that has won him the highest international honors. More than any other single work, this sequence embodies the astonishing variety of Bonnefoy's art. A rich fabric of themes, styles, and genres, it balances aesthetic complexity with heartfelt directness.

This bilingual edition of The Curved Planks sets the French texts alongside English versions by the noted translator Hoyt Rogers, who has collaborated closely with Bonnefoy in crafting poems that re-create the freshness and vision of the originals. The volume also includes a foreword by the renowned poet and critic Richard Howard and two comprehensive essays by the translator; all assist in introducing the English-language reader to Bonnefoy's profound poetic gift. The author himself has called this edition of The Curved Planks "more than a translation – a work in its own right."

"Yves Bonnefoy is one of the rare poets in the history of literature to have sustained the highest level of artistic excellence throughout an entire lifetime – now more than half a century of work, and still counting. These recent poems, superbly translated by Hoyt Rogers, attest to his enduring greatness."
— Paul Auster

"Yves Bonnefoy represents contemporary French poetry at its classic best – sober and yet soaring, full of invocation and desire: 'Let this world endure... Let this world remain.' This volume – thanks to Hoyt Rogers, Richard Howard, and the guidance of Bonnefoy himself – is a splendid celebration of this particular craft: the curved planks of its prow are shaped like a mind."
— Mary Ann Caws

"I have been deeply impressed, reading Hoyt Rogers's translations of Yves Bonnefoy's Les planches courbes. They are much more than English versions of these strong and delicate originals – they are re-creations that become distinct poems in our language, a true and loving homage to their source."
— Alastair Reed

"The Curved Planks is the crowning achievement of a major French poet who has much to say to our troubled times: Yves Bonnefoy continues to explore the possibilities of hope, to assay the significance of the here and now, to chronicle the dual 'presence' of emptiness and plenitude. Hoyt Rogers has composed fluent, engaging translations that reveal a profound respect for the original poems – and for the man who wrote them."
— John Taylor

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