"Ethos” poetico e immagine autoriale di Yves Bonnefoy nelle prose di “L’hésitation d’Hamlet et la décision de Shakespeare

The relationship with otherness is central to Bonnefoy’s poetic research. For him, the experience
of translating Shakespeare’s work is the possibility of a poetic dialogue with the Bard: such a dialogue
continues in his essays, in his entretien, and through his poetic rewritings of Hamlet. The
volume L’hésitation d’Hamlet et la décision de Shakespeare, analysed from the theoretical perspective
of literary discourse analysis, summarizes the various forms the dialogue with Shakespeare
has taken in Bonnefoy’s prose work. The study demonstrates how the poet forms a dialogical
poetic ethos in each of the textual typologies in the book. In the essay, the dialogical tension that
characterizes Bonnefoy’s poetic ethos is manifested through his rhetorical and syntactic choices
as well as in the melodic breath that runs through the text. In the poetic prose it is manifested
through the building of a collective ethos, that is, a discursive image that projects the existence
of a poetic community of which the reader is invited to be a part. Finally, in the two entretien,
the self-image that the poet modulates is that of an author who has been in dialogue with Shakespeare
for a whole lifetime, reaping in his work the fruits of the poetic legacy he left him.