Robert (Elwood) Bly (1926- )Poète, traducteur, et éditeur.
Robert Bly est né le 13 décembre 1926 à Madison, dans l'ouest du Minnesota en 1926, de parents norvégiens. Il s'engagea dans la Marine en 1944 et passa deux années dans le service. Après une année au St. Olaf College, au Minnesota, il transfera à Harvard et se joignit à un groupe d'écrivains célèbre, encore étudiants à l'époque, dans lequel on trouve Donald Hall, Adrienne Rich, Kenneth Koch, John Ashbery, Harold Brodky, George Plimpton, et John Hawkes. Il gradua en 1950 et passa quelques années à New York, vivant pauvrement.
En 1954, il étudia deux ans à l'Université de l'Iowa dans un atelier d'écriture avec W. D. Snodgrass, Donald Justice, et d'autres. En 1956, il reçut une bourse de la fondation Fulbright afin de voyager en Norvège et de traduire la poésie norvégienne en anglais. Il traduisit plus tard des oeuvres de l'allemand, de l'espagnol et de du suédois.
En 1966, il co-fonda l'association des écrivains américains contre la guerre du Vietnam War et fut un des leaders de l'opposition à la guerre parmi les écrivains. When he won the National Book Award for The Light Around the Body, he contributed the prize money to the Resistance. Durant les années 1970, il publia plus d'une dizaine d'ouvrages célébrant le pouvoir du mythe, de la poésie indienne, et de la méditation.
Son ouvrage le plus connu, Iron John: A Book About Men, est un best-seller international et a été traduit en plusieurs langues.
Il vit sur une ferme de l'ouest du Minnnesota avec sa femme Ruth Ray et ses trois encfants. Il a reçu plusieurs prix et distinctions honorifiques dont : le National Book Award pour The Light Around the Body (1967) ainsi que des bourses du Guggenheim, Rockefeller, et du National Endowment for the Arts.
I go to the door often.
Night and summer. Crickets
lift their cries.
I know you are out.
You are driving
late through the summer night.
I do not know what will happen.
I have no claim on you.
I am one star
you have as guide; others
love you, the night
so dark over the Azores.
You have been working outdoors,
gone all week. I feel you
in this lamp lit
so late. As I reach for it
I feel myself
driving through the night.
I love a firmness in you
that disdains the trivial
and regains the difficult.
You become part then
of the firmness of night,
the granite holding up walls.
There were women in Egypt who
supported with their firmness the stars
as they revolved,
hardly aware
of the passage from night
to day and back to night.
I love you where you go
through the night, not swerving,
clear as the indigo
bunting in her flight,
passing over two
thousand miles of ocean.Robert Bly
After writing poems all day,
I go off to see the moon in the pines.
Far in the woods I sit down against a pine.
The moon has her porches turned to face the light,
But the deep part of her house is in the darkness.Robert Bly, tiré de Eating the Honey of Words (1999)
The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (extraits)
Do you remember the night Abraham first saw
The stars ? He cried to Saturn: "You are my Lord!"
How happy he was! When he saw the Dawn Star,
He cried, ""You are my Lord!" How destroyed he was
When he watched them set. Friends, he is like us :
We take as our Lord the stars that go down.
We are faithful companions to the unfaithful stars.
We are diggers, like badgers; we love to feel
The dirt flying out from behind our back claws.
And no one can convince us that mud is not
Beautiful. It is our badger soul that thinks so.
We are ready to spend the rest of our life
Walking with muddy shoes in the wet fields.
We resemble exiles in the kingdom of the serpent.
We stand in the onion fields looking up at the night.
My heart is a calm potato by day, and a weeping
Abandoned woman by night. Friend, tell me what to do,
Since I am a man in love with the setting stars.Robert Bly, tiré de The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (2001)
- Official Robert Bly Web site : http://www.robertbly.com/
- Modern American Poetry - The Robert Bly Page : https://www.modernamericanpoetry.org/poet/robert-bly
- Robert Bly : https://collections.mnhs.org/mnauthors/10001255
- Poetry Foundation - Robert Bly : https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-bly
- Academy of American Poets - Robert Bly : https://poets.org/poet/robert-bly
- Poem Hunter - Robert Bly : https://www.poemhunter.com/robert-bly/
- Poems by Robert Bly : https://www.shigeku.org/xlib/lingshidao/waiwen/bly.htm
- Books by Robert Bly : http://www.robertbly.com/b_poetry.html
Bibliographie :
- William Virgil Davis, Understanding Robert Bly (1988)
- William Virgil Davis (ed.), Critical Essays On Robert Bly (1992)
- William Virgil Davis, Robert Bly : The Poet and His Critics (1994)
- Victoria Harris, The Incorporative Consciousness of Robert Bly (1992)
- Richard Jones, Kate Daniels (eds), Of solitude and silence : writings on Robert Bly (1981)
- Howard Nelson, Robert Bly : An Introduction to the Poetry (1984)
- Joyce Peseroff (ed.), Robert Bly : When Sleepers Awake (1984)
- William H. Roberson, Robert Bly : a primary and secondary bibliography (1986)
- Thomas R. Smith (ed.), Walking Swiftly : Writings and Images on the Occasion of Robert Bly's 65th Birthday (1992)
- Richard P. Sugg, Robert Bly (1986)
Oeuvres poétiques :
- Silence in the Snowy Fields (1962)
- The Light Around the Body (1967)
- Sleepers Joining Hands (1973)
- Jumping Out of Bed (1973)
- For the Stomach : Selected Poems (1974)
- Point Reyes poems (1974)
- This Body Is Made of Camphor and Gopherwood (1977)
- Old Man Rubbing His Eyes
- This Tree Will Be Here for a Thousand Years (1979)
- The Man in the Black Coat Turns (1981)
- Loving a Woman in Two Worlds (1985)
- Selected Poems (1986)
- Angels of Pompeii (with Stephen Brigidi)
- What Have I Ever Lost by Dying ? : Collected Prose Poems (1992)
- Meditations on the Insatiable Soul (1994)
- Morning Poems (1997)
- Eating the Honey of Words : New and Selected Poems (1999)
- Snowbanks North of the House (1999)
- The Night Abraham Called to the Stars (2001)
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