ABSTRACT
The French have long had a problem with Shakespeare, even as Anglo-Americans have long had a problem with Racine. It is into this unending story of animosity, attraction, misunderstanding, and occasional reciprocal influence, that one of the most influential French poets, Yves Bonnefoy, has arrived with twelve penetrating essays on Shakespeare's plays and the problems involved with translating them. Shakespeare and the French Poet is meticulously argued and extremely stimulating. The book contributes to bicultural understanding by exploring the perceptual and semantic mechanisms at work in the French and English languages as they collide in the task of translation. Bonnefoy has perused much of the secondary literature about the plays, but first and foremost he has translated them with painstaking devotion and thereby gained precious insights into both the original and his own native tongue. Bonnefoy has clearly found nourishment, solace, and courage in his mentor's confrontation with the "intuition of nothingness" that "darken[ed] and fragment[ed] all of Elizabethan consciousness."
