John Naughton – författare

This selection spans four decades and draws on all of Bonnefoy's major collections. The translations, many of them new, are presented alongside the original French. Naughton's introduction looks at the evolution of Bonnefoy's poetry from 1953 to 1993.

Our society has gone through a weird, unremarked transition: once a novelty, the Net is now something that we take for granted, like mains electricity or running water. In the process we've been surprisingly incurious about its significance or cultural implications. How has our society become dependent on a utility that it doesn't really understand? John Naughton has distilled the noisy chatter surrounding the internet's relentless evolution into nine clear-sighted areas of understanding. In doing so he affords everyone the requisite knowledge to make better use of the technologies and networks around us, as well as highlighting some of their more disturbing implications.

The Internet is the most remarkable thing human beings have built since the Pyramids. John Naughton''s book intersperses wonderful personal stories with an authoritative account of where the Net actually came from, who invented it and why and where it might be taking us. Most of us have no idea how the Internet works, or who created it. Even fewer have any idea what it means for society and the future. In a cynical age, John Naughton has not lost his capacity for wonder. He examines the nature of his own enthusiasm for technology and traces its roots in his lonely childhood and in his relationship with his father. A Brief History of the Future is an intensely personal celebration of vision and altruism, ingenuity and determination and, above all, of the power of ideas, passionately felt, to change the world.

France’s greatest poet of the last half century, Yves Bonnefoy wrote many books of poetry and poetic prose, as well as celebrated critical essays on literature and art (to which a second volume will be devoted). At his death in 2016 aged ninety-three, he was Emeritus Professor of Comparative Poetics at the Collège de France. The selection for this volume (and the second one) was made in close collaboration with the poet. The lengthy introduction by John Naughton is a significant assessment of Bonnefoy’s importance in French literature.Bonnefoy started out as a young surrealist poet at the end of the Second World War and, for seven decades, he produced poetry and prose of great, and changing, depth and richness. In his lines we encounter `the horizon of a voice where stars are falling, / Moon merging with the chaos of the dead’. Fellow poet Philippe Jaccottet spoke of his abiding gravité enflammée. Bonnefoy knew what translation demands, having himself translated Shakespeare, Donne, Yeats, and Keats; Petrarch and Leopardi from Italian; and, from Greek, George Seferis. This volume is edited and translated by three of Bonnefoy’s long-time translators –Anthony Rudolf, John Naughton, and Stephen Romer – with contributions from Galway Kinnell, Richard Pevear, Beverley Bie Brahic, Emily Grosholz, Susanna Lang, and Hoyt Rogers.