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Cover of A Sacerdotal Poetics

A Sacerdotal Poetics

Yves Bonnefoy’s Reforging of W. B. Yeats

  • Arts & Literature
  • Publisher: Pickwick Publications (Wipf and Stock)
  • Published: 2023

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Publisher's Description

This book offers a new way of understanding the old conflict between iconophiles and iconoclasts by exploring the way images in poetry are used by one poet, W. B. Yeats, and his translator, Yves Bonnefoy. Using the phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion as a tool of interpretation, the book suggests further that translation is a significant act in which one entire theological world of a Protestant poet may become a completely different, Catholic one when the translation is performed by a culturally Catholic poet. For Bonnefoy, therefore, the act of translation becomes a profound act of hope.


Endorsements (4)

“Sacerdotal Poetics invites readers on a luminous journey into what occurs when one poet discovers another, and, in the process of translating their work, finds themselves ‘discovered’ in the act of translation, as it were. We are in Wills’s debt for the ways she lures us into the complex labyrinth where poetics, theological reflection, and translation mingle and even on occasion sing.”

Mark S. Burrows

“This fascinating book celebrates the divine ‘given flesh’ in the world. This ‘incarnation’ is encountered in poetics, translation, and the myriad ‘everyday sacraments’ that grace living and embody hope. It presents a scholarly yet intimate picture of one poet reaching out to another and generating, out of this encounter, new poetry that reconfigures, blesses, and exceeds the original creation.”

Heather Walton

“This book offers a fascinating investigation of the translation of W. B. Yeats’s poetry by a major French poet, Yves Bonnefoy (1923–2016). Opening up a space for reflection on the role of a ‘sacramental poetics’ in the translation process, beyond spiritual and metaphysical divergences, the discussion leaves the reader with a renewed sense of hope.”

Olivier Salazar-Ferrer

“This original book draws together an astonishing wealth of thought and scholarship. At its heart is a study in poetics and the vision of two great poets, W. B. Yeats and Yves Bonnefoy, as one translates the verse of the other. Two great sacramental visions are revealed, Protestant and Catholic in their origins, each explored through the thought of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Marion.”

David Jasper

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