The Red Scarf

An intensely personal and profoundly moving review of Bonnefoyâ?¿s childhood memories. 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, Lâ?¿Ã©charpe rouge, translated here as The Red Scarf. In this unique book, described by the poet as "an anamnesis"â?¿a formal act of commemorationâ?¿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: â??My most troubling memory, when I was between ten and twelve years old, concerns my father, and my anxiety about his silence.â?? Bonnefoy offers an anatomy of his fatherâ?¿s silence, and of the melancholy that seemed to take hold some years into his marriage to the poetâ?¿s mother.   At the heart of this book is the ballad of Elie and Hélÿne, the poetâ?¿s parents. It is the story of their lives together in the Auvergne, and later in Tours, seen through the eyes of their sonâ?¿the solitary boyâ?¿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. Â