Bonnefoy’s
Great Snow
The Beginning and End of the Snow
Yves Bonnefoy
tr. Alan Baker
Leafe Press/Bamboo Books
A thousand
considerations of snow, nothing unsystematic, a fuller compilation in its way
than the expert René Char, this survey of a mopping-up operation.
The French texts
are not here, U. of Chicago Press has them, which explains a discursive tendency
among the translations, toward explanation. “Noli me tangere”
has this,
Mais même dire non serait de lumière.
which becomes this,
But
even to say “no” would be a gift of light.
instead of this,
But
even saying no would be from light.
Infelicities of translation
are wrested by the poems away from significance except as interstices. Baker
has the benefit of having seen other translators at work,
he makes this less a dull exercise in piled-up English phrases.
The compressed language
suitably breaks apart in conscious effects to give the results desired, sky or
snowfall, a precise map of a range of metaphors that can encompass a literary
critique or a memoir or a weather report.
Baker’s
translation slips past preciosity and garble to consistently hit the notes Bonnefoy
has largely set. Most translations are inaccurate,
this one follows Bonnefoy as a matter of preference, rather than setting him on
the mantelpiece.
“The Great
Snow” is a suite of short poems culminating in,
The
chipmunk. our simple neighbour,
Or
is he already roaming in the crunching snow and the cold?
I
see tiny footprints by the door.
which is very
picturesque and gets, by the very least considerable of means, an acclimatization.
“The Torches”
rubs two sticks or words together in an Albers-study. “Hopkins Forest”
ponders a sort of dead end,
Page
after page:
It
was nothing but indecipherable signs,
Mixed
shapes without sense,
Vague
patternings
And underneath a whiteness of the abyss
As
if what we call mind fell there, soundlessly,
Like
a snowfall.
Yet I turned the pages.
“Everything
and Nothing” in three parts has the end of winter as “almond
blossom, another snow.” Lastly, ”The Only
Rose” in four parts concludes with the famous prescription,
The trampled snow is the only rose.
Errors in the translation
are pardonable for the thrust of the work towards and not away from the original, some readily available French texts counsel the
advisability of a revision.