Information about the author:

Abstract:

In 1958, Yves Bonnefoy published his third poetry collection “Pierre écrite” in collaboration with the painter Raoul Ubac. This title refers to a little-known 5th century Roman artefact in the Lower Alps in France. The text carved in stone says: the former Roman consul Dardanus had forged a path in the mountains to the estate he had founded and had called “Theopolis”. The name of the estate suggests that this sanctuary for the early Christians was a kind of St. Augustine’s “project” of the “City of God” (Civitas Dei) realisation. In the middle 1960s, Bonnefoy with his family settled nearby, in the village of Valsaintes, in an abandoned 18th century monastery converted into a peasant farm later, that he rebuilt. Thereafter he called this dwelling “a church and a granary at the same time”, thus deliberately likening it to his favourite place in Florence, Orsanmichele, which also had gone through a series of metamorphoses from sacred space to “profane” and back: a convent in the 8th century, it became a grain market in the 13th century, in the 14th century the building was again given to the church, and then it again gained an “earthly” purpose becoming a crafts association centre. Bonnefoy’s poetry created in this house has the main subject: the relationship between the profane and the sacred. The motif of stone is one of the most important in it.