De “L’Arrière-pays”

Abstract

These pages constitute the critical tribute and poetic testimony of a writer’s reading of L’Ar-rière-pays. Deliberately subjective, less sensitive to the speculative character than to the auto-biographical and aesthetic dimension of Y. Bonnefoy’s work, and in particular to the motif of ut pictura poesis, this linear traversal of L’Arrière-pays superimposes landscapes either seen or painted, memories of travel and writing, atmospheres and sources of inspiration. Referring back to the first reading, fifty years earlier, of a book which now shows unstuck pages and a worn cover, this rereading evokes a common hinterland that is real and imaginary, pictorial and literary, where the paths of the two writers intersect, diverge and intertwine.