Yves Bonnefoy (1923-2016) was one of France’s greatest poets. He published ten major collections of verse, several books of tales, and numerous studies of literature and art. He succeeded Roland Barthes in the Chair of Comparative Poetics at the Collège de France, and was often cited as a leading candidate for the Nobel Prize. His work was translated into scores of languages, and he himself was a celebrated translator of Shakespeare, Yeats, Keats, and Leopardi. The European Prize for Poetry of 2006 and the Kafka Prize for 2007 figured among his many honors. In 2023, the centenary of his birth, his works were published in the prestigious Pléiade series of French authors.
