The Wandering Life

The first English translation of Yves Bonnefoy’s account of his life as a traveller.

Yves Bonnefoy was an ardent voyager throughout his life. His constant journeys and sojourns abroad, from Italy and England to America and India, left an indelible mark on his oeuvre. Tellingly, he entitled one of his major books La Vie errante (1993). The Wandering Life now appears in translation for the first time, to celebrate the centenary of the author’s birth. Central to his development, this work crystallizes the traveller motif as a metaphor for aesthetic exploration. It also founds a new poetic technique: that symphonic interweaving of verse and prose which characterises the final twenty years of his creation. In a shorter but equally important companion piece, Another Era of Writing, Bonnefoy reframes the voyage as a philosophical quest, a far-reaching dialogue between language and reality.

‘Bonnefoy is well known for obscuring the boundaries between verse and prose just as he often confronts the representational issues that both vex and liberate the so-called sister arts of poetry and visual art.’—World Literature Today