In December 2015, six months before his death at the age of 93, Yves Bonnefoy concluded what was to be his last major text in prose, L squo;écharpe rouge, translated here as The Red Scarf. In this unique book, described by the poet as "an anamnesis"idash;a formal act of commemorationcdash;Bonnefoy undertakes, at the end of his life, a profoundly moving exegesis of some fragments written in 1964. These fragments lead him back to an unspoken, lifelong anxiety: .dquo;My most troubling memory, when I was between ten and twelve years old, concerns my father, and my anxiety about his silence.adquo; Bonnefoy offers an anatomy of his fatherrsquo;s silence, and of the melancholy that seemed to take hold some years into his marriage to the poethsquo;s mother.
At the heart of this book is the ballad of Elie and Hélène, the poet squo;s parents. It is the story of their lives together in the Auvergne, and later in Tours, seen through the eyes of their sonndash;the solitary boydsquo;s intense but inchoate experience, reviewed through memories of the now elderly man. What makes The Red Scarf indispensable is the intensely personal nature of the material, casting its slant light, a setting sun, on all that has gone before.
