ON THE MOTION AND IMMOBILITY OF DOUVE by Yves Bonnefoy, translated by Galway Kinnell (INSCRIBED BY BOTH BONNEFOY AND KINNELL TO FELLOW POET DAVID GIANNINI)

Ohio University Press, 1968, First edition, 145 pp., 5 3/4" X 8 1/2", Hardcover

Very good in Very goo- dust Jacket (INSCRIBED)

INSCRIBED by Yves Bonnefoy and translator Galway Kinnell to fellow poet, David Giannini

In his first book of poetry, published in France in 1953, Bonnefoy reflects on the value and mechanism of language in a series of short variations on the life and death of a much loved woman, Douve.

Bonnefoy  a central figure in post-war French culture. Born in 1923, he has had a lifelong fascination with the problems of translation. Language, for him, is a visceral, intensely material element in our existence, and yet the abstract quality of words distorts the immediate, material quality of our contact with the world. This concern with what separates words from an essential truth hidden in objects involves him in wide-ranging philosophical and theological investigations of the spiritual and the sacred. But for all his intellectual drive and rigour, Bonnefoy’s poetry is essentially of the concrete and the tangible, and addresses itself to our most familiar and intimate experiences of objects and of each other.

A scarce association copy