Poetry and Photography

A short, critical text by poet Yves Bonnefoy on the fraught relationship between poetry and photography, masterfully translated by Chris Turner. The international community of letters mourns the recent death of Yves Bonnefoy, universally acclaimed as one of France’s greatest poets of the last half-century. A prolific author, he was often considered a top candidate for the Nobel Prize and published a dozen major collections of poetry in verse and prose, several books of dreamlike tales, and numerous studies of literature and art.  This volume introduces Bonnefoy's seminal essay on the intricate connections between poetry and photography as they play out against a background of major works in the history of literature. The activity of the photographer has a direct—and sometimes profound—influence on what poetry is seeking to be. And poets, in turn, are duty-bound to understand what that activity consists of and to express their reservations, worries, or approval when confronted with the varied and perhaps contradictory forms photography has taken since the days of the daguerreotype or of Nadar preserving the gaze of Gérard de Nerval, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, or Charles Baudelaire.  Bonnefoy's compact essay focuses on one of the disturbing effects of the earliest photographs: their introduction of a notion of non-being—if not, indeed, nothingness—into the world of images. But it also foregrounds a tale which seems to have picked up figuratively on this effect and examined its dangers with a sense of horror: Guy de Maupassant’s extraordinary short story “The Night,” one of the nightmarish works of his last period of conscious creation.