Allegories of Poetic Translation in Yves Bonnefoy's 'Dream Stories'

Abstract

Translation is an essential part of Yves Bonnefoy's work. But his originality in this field lies in the critical studies that have regularly accompanied his translations and in his reflection on the act of translation, developed in various essays and interviews. Departing from his conception of translation as a poetic activity, based on the distinction between the ‘translation of meanings’ and the ‘translation of the essence’, we approach the analysis of two poetic short stories, ‘Première ébauche d’une mise en scène d’Hamlet’, and ‘Hamlet en montagne’ included in L’heure présente (2011), which we approach both as ‘translations in a broad sense’, according to the definition proposed by the poet, as a prolongation and deepening of the understanding of the text through poetic writing, and as allegorical fictions of the process of translation.