Stéphane Mallarmé

The great French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), who changed the course of modern French literature, suffered many tragedies, but the cruelest blow of all struck in 1879, when his beloved son Anatole died at the age of eight. His unbearable grief inspired him to attempt a major work. A Tomb for Anatole presents the 202 fragments of Mallarmé’s projected long poem in four parts, by far the poet’s most personal work, and one he could never bring himself to complete. To speak publicly of his immense sorrow, Mallarmé concluded, “for me, it’s not possible.” Paul Auster notes in his excellent introduction that facing “the ultimate horror of every parent,” these fragments “have a startling, unmediated quality.” Unpublished in France until 1961, this work is very far from the oblique, cool “pure poetry” Mallarmé is famous for, poetry that sought to capture––painstakingly––l’absente de tous bouquets (the ideal flower absent from all bouquets). The fragments of A Tomb for Anatole instead show Mallarmé at his most radical and fierce. “For here we find a language,” Paul Auster comments, “of immediate contact, a syntax of abrupt, lightning shifts… so densely charged that these tiny particles of language… somehow leap out of themselves and catch hold of the succeeding cliff-edge of thought.”

This volume contains never-before translated prose selections by the father of the Symbolist movement, one of the most influential cultural figures of 19th-century France. Mallarmé’s letters to leading French intellectuals and artists of the time appear with his pieces on language and aesthetics, as he considers the state of contemporary French literature. There are also lighter reflections on life, fashion, and the performing arts (some of Mallarmé’s fascinating essays on the ballet are included here). A number of sections are devoted to Mallarmé’s great magazine of wit and opinion, La Dernière Mode, or The Latest Fashion, every page of which he wrote himself under various pseudonyms of both genders. As the translator and editor of this volume Mary Ann Caws puts it: “It is Mallarmé as inventor whom this volume celebrates.” Mallarmé’s portraits of poets and artists (including Tennyson, Poe, and Manet) also contribute to this long-awaited volume, a collection of prose highlighting Mallarmé’s multiplicity of voices and variety of forms.

Selected Poetry and Prose of Stéphane Mallarmé presents what can be considered the essential work of the renowned “father of the Symbolists.” Mallarmé’s major elegies, sonnets, and other verse, including excerpts from the dialogue “Hériodiade,” are all assembled here with the French and English texts en face. Also included (not bilingually) are the visual poem “Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance” and the drama “Igitur,” as well as letters, essays, and reviews. Although his primary concern was with poetry, the aesthetics of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) has touched all the arts. During the last twenty years of his life, his Paris apartment was a major literary gathering place. Every Tuesday evening, standing beneath the portrait of himself by his friend Edouard Manet, the poet addressed reverent gatherings which included at various times Paul Valery and André Gide, among many others. The American painter James Whistler was influenced by these “Mardis,” and one of the best-known poems in the present collection, “The Afternoon of a Faun,” inspired Claude Debussy’s famous musical composition. In translation, the subtle and varied shades of Mallarmé’s oeuvre may best be rendered by diverse hands. Editor Mary Ann Caws, the author of books on René Char, Robert Desnos, and various aspects of modern French writing, has brought together the work of fourteen translators, spanning a century, from the Symbolists and the Bloomsbury group (George Moore and Roger Fry) to Cid Corman, Brian Coffey, and other contemporary poets and writers.