Background
Stéphane Mallarmé was born in Paris on March 18, 1842.
( A translation by Robert Bononno and designer Jeff Clark...)
A translation by Robert Bononno and designer Jeff Clark of one of Stéphane Mallarmés most well-known and visually complex poems into contemporary English language and design. The book is composed in an elaborate set of type and photography to both honor the original and be an object of delight. Includes the original preface by Mallarmé. Bilingual edition. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842?98) was born in Paris and is widely regarded as one of the most important figures of nineteenth-century French poetry. Jeff Clark's book designs have been praised in the New Yorker, Better Living Through Design, Cool Hunting, Granta, and other venues. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop. Robert Bononno has received two NEA grants for translations of French authors and was a finalist for the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for his translation of René Crevel.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1940696046/?tag=2022091-20
( This is the first translation of a major text by Sartre...)
This is the first translation of a major text by Sartre on one of the greatest modern French poets, Stephane Mallarmé, whom Sartre hailed as a "hero, prophet, wizard, and tragedian." Written in 1953, Sartre's text provides not only an invigorating and convincing interpretation of Mallarmé by also an original overview of French literature in the nineteenth century.
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( The essential work of Mallarmé, collected in a bilingua...)
The essential work of Mallarmé, collected in a bilingual French and English edition. Selected Poetry and Prose of Stéphane Mallarmé presents what can be considered the essential work of the renowned father of the Symbolists. Mallarmés 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 Debussys famous musical composition. In translation, the subtle and varied shades of Mallarmés 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.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811208230/?tag=2022091-20
(A bilingual collection of 55 Stephane Mallarme poems. Tra...)
A bilingual collection of 55 Stephane Mallarme poems. Translated from the French by Daisy Aldan with expositions. Mallarme (1842-1898), renowned French symbolist poet, is famous for his unique approach to poetry, considered today to be brilliant. This new bilingual collection of 55 Stephane Mallarme poems, including one of his masterpieces, "Un Coup De Des" ("A Throw of the Dice"), gives readers a fresh new perspective of Mallarme's genius. Translator Dr. Daisy Aldan discovered and fell in love with Mallarme's work when she was told that her poetry was reminiscent of his. In 1956, she translated "Un Coup De Des" into English for the first time; the result was recognition of Dr. Aldan's unparalleled deep understanding and feeling for Mallarme. Now, more than 40 years later, she has blessed us with To Purify the Words of the Tribe, with expositions, which will surely lead to a deeper comprehension of the poetry of Stephane Mallarme.
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(Contains translated prose pieces by one of the most influ...)
Contains translated prose pieces by one of the most influential figures in 19th-century France on such topics as life, fashion, language, aesthetics, and the performing arts.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0811214516/?tag=2022091-20
( Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) is one of the giants of n...)
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) is one of the giants of nineteenth-century French poetry. Leader of the Symbolist movement, he exerted a powerful influence on modern literature and thought, which can be traced in the works of Paul Valéry, W.B. Yeats, and Jacques Derrida. From his early twenties until the time of his death, Mallarmé produced poems of astonishing originality and beauty, many of which have become classics. In the Collected Poems, Henry Weinfield brings the oeuvre of this European master to life for an English-speaking audience, essentially for the first time. All the poems that the author chose to retain are here, superbly rendered by Weinfield in a translation that comes remarkably close to Mallarmé's own voice. Weinfield conveys not simply the meaning but the spirit and music of the French originals, which appear en face. Whether writing in verse or prose, or inventing an altogether new genreas he did in the amazing "Coup de Dés"Mallarmé was a poet of both supreme artistry and great difficulty. To illuminate Mallarmé's poetry for twentieth-century readers, Weinfield provides an extensive commentary that is itself an important work of criticism. He sets each poem in the context of the work as a whole and defines the poems' major symbols. Also included are an introduction and a bibliography. Publication of this collection is a major literary event in the English-speaking world: here at last is the work of a major figure, masterfully translated.
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(The Poems in Verse is Peter Manson s translation of the P...)
The Poems in Verse is Peter Manson s translation of the Poésies of Stéphane Mallarmé. Long overshadowed by Mallarmé's theoretical writings and by his legendary visual poem Un coup de Dés jamais n'abolira le Hasard, the Poésies are lyrics of a uniquely prescient and generative modernity. Grounded in a scrupulous sounding of the complex ambiguities of the original poems, Manson s English translations draw on the resources of the most innovative poetries of our own time these may be the first translations really to trust the English language to bear the full weight of Mallarméan complexity. With The Poems in Verse, Mallarmé's voice is at last brought back, with all its incisive strangeness, into the conversation it started a hundred and fifty years ago, called contemporary poetry.
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( "This is a book just the way I don't like them," the fa...)
"This is a book just the way I don't like them," the father of French Symbolism, Stéphane Mallarmé, informs the reader in his preface to Divagations: "scattered and with no architecture." On the heels of this caveat, Mallarmé's diverting, discursive, and gorgeously disordered 1897 masterpiece tumbles forth--and proves itself to be just the sort of book his readers like most. The salmagundi of prose poems, prose-poetic musings, criticism, and reflections that is Divagations has long been considered a treasure trove by students of aesthetics and modern poetry. If Mallarmé captured the tone and very feel of fin-de-siècle Paris, he went on to captivate the minds of the greatest writers of the twentieth century--from Valéry and Eliot to Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. This was the only book of prose he published in his lifetime and, in a new translation by Barbara Johnson, is now available for the first time in English as Mallarmé arranged it. The result is an entrancing work through which a notoriously difficult-to-translate voice shines in all of its languor and musicality. Whether contemplating the poetry of Tennyson, the possibilities of language, a masturbating priest, or the transporting power of dance, Mallarmé remains a fascinating companion--charming, opinionated, and pedantic by turns. As an expression of the Symbolist movement and as a contribution to literary studies, Divagations is vitally important. But it is also, in Johnson's masterful translation, endlessly mesmerizing.
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Stéphane Mallarmé was born in Paris on March 18, 1842.
After a mediocre beginning at school, young Stéphane excelled in languages (French, Latin, Greek, and English) and obtained his baccalaureate degree in November 1860.
In February 1862 he published his first poem (Placet) in Le Papillon. In September 1863 Mallarmé obtained his certificate for teaching English and at the end of the year went with his wife to Tournon to teach in the lycée there. His teaching career was to last for 30 years and to take him to Besançon (1866), Avignon (1867), and finally Paris (1871). An agonizing spiritual crisis in 1866 led to Mallarmé's complete loss of religious faith and to his austere, half-mystical preoccupation with eternity and le Néant (Nothingness, or Annihilation). In 1875 Mallarmé published Le Corbeau (his translation of Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven) with illustrations by Édouard Manet; and the following year appeared L'Après-midi d'un faune, églogue . .. , one of his most memorable poems. In 1887 appeared Mallarmé's Poésies, and the following year his prose translations of Les Poèmes d'Edgar Poe and of Ten o'Clock, James McNeill Whistler's famous lecture on art. On Jan. 27, 1896, Mallarmé was elected "prince of poets, " succeeding Verlaine. Publications near the end of his life included Vers et prose (1893), La Musique et les lettres (1895), Divagations (1897), and Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard (1897). Mallarmé died at Valvins on September 9, 1898, and was buried 2 days later in the cemetery of Samoreau (Seine-et-Marne). Posthumous publications included a separate edition of Un Coup de dés (1914), Madrigaux (1920), Vers de circonstance (1920), Igitur ou La Folie d'Elbehnon (1925), Contes indiens (1927), and Thèmes anglais (1937). Mallarmé's Oeuvres complètes was published in 1945. Critical Assessment The exquisite qualities of Mallarmé's art are evident both in his poetry and in such prose poems as Plainte d'automne and Frisson d'hiver. Of individual poems (aside from those named earlier) one may cite such examples as Apparition, Les Fenêtres, L'Azur, Brise marine, Soupir, Hérodiade, the more difficult Prose pour des Esseintes, the three Tombeaux (Poe, Baudelaire, Verlaine), and the sonnets Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui, Victorieusement fui le suicide beau, and Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx.
Stéphane Mallarmé was the master of the symbolist writers in France. His poetic theories and difficult, allusive poems separated him from the general public but won him intense admiration within the circle of his initiates. He was known also through his famous "mardis" (Tuesday receptions from 9 to midnight in his home at 89 Rue de Rome), which flourished into the 1890s and brought together over the years many of the most significant writers, musicians, and artists of the time.
( "This is a book just the way I don't like them," the fa...)
( This is the first translation of a major text by Sartre...)
( A translation by Robert Bononno and designer Jeff Clark...)
(Contains translated prose pieces by one of the most influ...)
(Stéphane Mallarmé was the most radically innovative of ni...)
( Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) is one of the giants of n...)
( Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) is one of the giants of n...)
(The Poems in Verse is Peter Manson s translation of the P...)
( The essential work of Mallarmé, collected in a bilingua...)
(A bilingual collection of 55 Stephane Mallarme poems. Tra...)
Mallarmé liked images of snow, ice, swans, gems, mirrors, cold stars, and women's fans. There is often a burning sensuality under the austere form of his poems; but there are also numerous overt images of chastity, sterility, and artistic impotence. In Un Coup de dés Mallarmé used typography to dramatize his words and enhance their imaginative suggestiveness. He saw the poet's function as being, above all, "to give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe. " He claimed to have come to understand "the intimate correlation of Poetry with the Universe" and hinted that he was beginning where Baudelaire left off. Finally, he carried his ideal so far that, as he admitted, his art became "a dead end. "
Quotations:
“Everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book. ”
“A roll of the dice will never abolish chance. ”
“To define is to kill. To suggest is to create. ”
“The flesh is sad, alas, and I have read all the books. ”
“It is the job of poetry to clean up our word-clogged reality by creating silences around things. ”
“The world exists to end up in a book. ”
“Everything that is sacred and that wishes to remain so must envelop itself in mystery. ”
“In reading, a lonely quiet concert is given to our minds; all our mental faculties will be present in this symphonic exaltation. ”
“The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book. ”
“It is in front of the the paper that the artist creates himself. ”
“I have made a long enough descent into the void to speak with certainty. There is nothing but beauty--and beauty has only one perfect expression, Poetry. All the rest is a lie. ”
“There is only beauty / and it has only one perfect expression / poetry. All the rest is a lie /except for those who live by the body, love, and, that love of the mind, friendship. For me, Poetry takes the place of love, because it is enamored of itself, and because its sensual delight falls back deliciously in my soul. ”
“I should point out, creating one's own style, as much as is required to illustrate one of the aspects, the golden seam of language, involves beginning again at once, in a different manner, adopting the guise of a pupil when one risked becoming pedantic - thus by a shrugging of one's shoulders, disconcerting some with their genuflecting stance, and immortalizing oneself in multiple, impersonal, or even anonymous forms in response to the gesture of arms raised in stupefaction. ”
“Yes, I know, we are merely empty forms of matter, but we are indeed sublime in having invented God and our soul. So sublime, my friend, that I want to gaze upon matter, fully conscious that it exists, and yet launching itself madly into Dream, despite its knowledge that Dream has no existence, extolling the Soul and all the divine impressions of that kind which have collected within us from the beginning of time and proclaiming, in the face of the Void which is truth, these glorious lies!”
“The poet Mallarmé listened to the painter Degas complaining about his inability to write poems even though “he was full of ideas. ” “My dear Degas, ” Mallarmé responded, “poems are not made out of ideas. They’re made out of words. ”
Mallarmé was not a sterile artist; he was one of the most exquisite poets of the century.
His liaison with Maria Gerhard led to their marriage on Aug. 10, 1863, and to the birth of a daughter, Françoise Geneviève Stéphanie (in November 1864), and a son, Anatole (1871 - 1879).
