Sometimes you feel like sitting back and setting yourself the hopeless task of directing a question of some moment to a dead poet of real substance.

Prose
Yves Bonnefoy
(Carcanet, 456 pp, £30)
Tablet bookshop price £27 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Michael Hamburger: A Reader
Michael Hamburger
(Carcanet, 587 PP, £25)
Tablet bookshop price £22.50 • Tel 020 7799 4064

Sometimes you feel like sitting back and setting yourself the hopeless task of directing a question of some moment to a dead poet of real substance. What exactly did a lifetime of poeticising and prosing amount to in the end? Two substantial books, long and spiritually nutritious reads for these straitened times, give us answers of a kind to that question.

The French poet Yves Bonnefoy was ­thoroughly pan-European in spirit. This wide and full selection of his prose, which ranges through evaluations of art and literature of a very particular, high-French density and ­seriousness, brought to life in remarkable translations which seem to capture near ­perfectly the spirit, the tone and even the rhythms of the originals, takes us on an aerial ­intellectual flight through the worlds of
Piero della Francesca, Racine, Shakespeare, Baudelaire and many more. Any Francophile will find this book utterly fascinating.

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