The Light, Changed by Yves Bonnefoy
We no longer see each other in the same light,
We no longer have the same eyes, the same hands.
The tree is closer, and the water’s voice more lively,
Our steps go deeper now, among the dead.
God, who are not, put your hand on our shoulder,
Rough cast our body with the weight of your return,
Finish blending our souls with these stars,
These woods, these bird cries, these shadows and these days.
Give yourself up in us the way fruit tears apart,
Have us disappear in you. Reveal to us
The mysterious meaning in what is merely simple
And would have fallen without fire in words without love.
- Translated by John Naughton
The Light, Changed (La Lumière, Changée) is originally from Yves Bonnefoy’s 1965 collection, Words in Stone (Pierre Écrite), some of which is reprinted in Carcanet’s dual-text collected poems, Yves Bonnefoy, 1:Poems, edited by lead editor Anthony Rudolf, John Naughton and Stephen Romer, with contributions from six others.
The collection opens with John Naughton’s English translation of The Tombs of Ravenna, a prose meditation, composed in 1953, suggesting Bonnefoy’s intense preoccupation with a paradoxical concept of unity between stone and light. The younger poet’s experience of visiting these tombs (Dante’s is one of them) was deeply imprinted on his memory: “I go back in my mind towards Ravenna as to the source of a light … In Ravenna, nothing tarnishes the purity of the great burst of light, without which, as I have learned, one cannot live.”
In the series of highly charged short poems in Words in Stone, it’s as if the mystical and aesthetic qualities of the tombs were reformed. Stone becomes a stone, humble and earthy. Love poems, as many seem to be, are almost “revelations of divine love” (to borrow the words of Julian of Norwich), filtered through a physical relationship conceived as a sacrament. Many of the poems have an addressee, and, in the first group of the series, The Lamp, The Sleeper, this figure appears as some kind of saviour. The form of the second-person plural pronoun used is the intimate one. The figure, though a presence of great power and comfort, might exist as a presence only in the speaker’s imagination, burning there like a lamp during a dark night. In a group of poems in which the title of each is simply “Une Pierre”, each stone becomes the speaker: it may also represent God, an animal, the Earth itself, the poet. The identity is always fluid, death-haunted. One of the stone poems, consisting of a single couplet, is especially beautiful in Anthony Rudolf’s translation: “Fall but softly rain upon this face. / Put out the humble clay lamp slowly.” (“Tombe, mais douce pluie, sur le visage. / Éteins, mais lentement, le très pauvre chaleil.”)
The poem, The Light, Changed, occurs towards the end of the series, and its opening, gently punning assertion “We no longer see each other in the same light” could initially suggest that a mature, no-longer-idealised stage in a romantic relationship had been reached. The lovers have shared a commitment for many years, and feel impelled, now that their “steps … go deeper … among the dead”, to renew their sacrament. Since, for the spokesperson, God does not exist, there has to be a new kind of sacrament, revealed through matter. However, “we” could represent a bigger collective, a congregation that encompasses a nation, or humanity itself at a stage of evolution perceived as late and endangered. Then, like a secular translation of the traditional Lord’s Prayer, the poem becomes a plea murmured on behalf of us all.
The second stanza invites the “Dieu qui n’est pas” to return. Presence is evoked through weight and proximity – the density of “these” stars and woods and the contrastingly weightless “bird cries” and shadows. The speaker implores God to “finish blending our souls” with these elements, significantly adding “days” to his list. Translating “ébauche” into “rough cast”, Naughton inventively combines the idea of making a rough outline with an actual substance, the builder’s roughcast. The poem suggests our organic resorption into nature is somehow unsatisfactory: as a process, it requires an end product, a point of complete existence and rest (stone, instead of stones).
Paradox is at the core of Bonnefoy’s imaginative intelligence, reflecting his background in philosophy and mathematics as well as poetry. Sam Sacks writes interestingly in the New Yorker about the poet’s “American side” and his culture-transcending solution to the question, “Could poetry both freely create and rationally assert?” In answer, perhaps, Bonnefoy continues to draw on his earlier surrealist influences. In the third stanza of The Light, Changed, a startling simile almost intrusively reshapes the non-God: “Give yourself up in us the way fruit tears apart.” A reader can more easily go along with the idea of being blent into stars and woods by a God-shaped force of nature, than with the idea of God as a single fruit that might be torn apart, chewed, swallowed, digested. Transubstantiation has rarely been evoked with such delicious, juicy, invigorating coarseness. And of course it’s a two-way metaphor, turned inside out when the speaker demands that “we” too should be effaced, consumed.
Bonnefoy, as Sacks says, unites opposites: he succeeds in grounding the dream, and fluently moving between the symbolic and physical. “God, who are not, put your hand on our shoulder” reveals the process in a nutshell. Physicality wins easily over abstraction in those fleshly, almost stone-solid images of “your hand” and “our shoulder.” At the end of the poem, we shift again into the more abstract realm, but the abstractions are made to glow through the word that best mediates between abstract and concrete: fire. “Reveal to us / The mysterious meaning in what is merely simple / And would have fallen without fire in words without love.”
