Stéphane Mallarmé

Collected Poems and Other Verse

'sense too definite cancels your indistinct literature' St--eacute--;phane Mallarm--eacute--; was the most radically innovative of nineteenth-century poets. His writings, with their richly sensuous texture and air of slyly intangible mystery, perplexed or outraged many early readers; yet no writer has more profoundly influenced the course of modern poetry - in English as well as in French. In both form and content, his poems created new ways of conveying existential doubt, fragmentation, and discontinuity. This is the fullest collection of Mallarm--eacute--;'s poetry ever published in English, and the only edition in any language that presents his Po--eacute--;sies in the last arrangement known to have been approved by the author. Apart from verse, it includes all the prose poems and the unique, unclassifiable Un Coup de d--eacute--;s... (A Dice Throw...). The lucid, wide-ranging introduction and invaluable notes help an understanding of this astonishing poet's work.

«Comprendre Mallarmé a toujours paru difficile. Mais c'est que dès qu'il s'agit de lui, qui fut un des fondateurs de notre modernité, il ne faut pas hésiter à se référer pourtant à ce qui peut en paraître si éloigné : les grandes structures de la pensée archaïque. Celle-ci, en effet, cette longue et omniprésente tradition qu'a commencé de démanteler en Europe à la fin de la Renaissance le nouvel esprit scientifique, ancrait le besoin de connaître dans l'existence comme elle va, autrement dit dans le temps, avec pour horizon et énigme les moyens limités de la condition humaine, et le hasard des événements, et la fatalité de la mort. C'est par analogie avec ses situations de l'exister quotidien que les aspects que nous dirions les plus matériels du monde étaient abordés : choses que l'on percevait de ce fait comme des êtres, enchaînements qui semblaient dictés par un dessein, un vouloir. Et c'est donc de par l'intérieur de l'événement ou de l'objet qu'on avait l'impression d'accéder à leur raison d'être, à leur sens ; et sans avoir perdu pour autant contact avec leur apparence la plus immédiatement sensorielle, alors encore non simplifiée par les instruments de mesure. Par exemple, la passiflore était comprise, dans l'univers médiéval. On avait reconnu dans ses organes floraux une représentation abrégée - une image en miroir - des instruments de la Passion, chiffres eux-mêmes du salut, de la Providence. Et ce savoir préservait donc toute la présence sensible de cette fleur, il en voyait la couleur, il en respirait le parfum. Les couleurs, les odeurs, les sons restaient vifs dans l'idée de la passiflore ou du ciel étoilé, aussi riches ceux-ci apparaissaient-ils de significations symboliques ; et pour peu qu'on approfondît cette lecture de signes, on pouvait donc déboucher sur une expérience d'unité sans quitter le plan des réalités sensibles : l'expérience même que Mallarmé dans ses premiers textes appellera une extase. Mallarmé qui a ressent durement, dès ses débuts de poète, que la connaissance ne s'élabore plus, de notre temps, que de l'extérieur, qu'elle réifie tout ce qu'elle touche, que les parfums, les couleurs, les sons ne soient donc pour nous que des émergences privées de tout sens profond, désordonnées.» Yves Bonnefoy. [payot.ch].

Poésies

Collects a sampling of the verse, letters, essays, and critical reviews of the nineteenth-century French writer, Stephane Mallarme

Selected Poetry and Prose

Stephane Mallarme

"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.

The Author's 1897 Arrangement ; Together with "Autobiography" and "Music and Letters"

Divagations

An immensely moving poetic work addressing inconsolable sorrow: a father's pain over the death of his child. Bilingual.

A Tomb for Anatole

poésie

Pour un tombeau d'Anatole

Un lance de dados jamás abolirá el azar

Selected Prose Poems, Essays, and Letters

Collected Poems and Other Verse. Oxford World's Classics

Dikter

Mallarme, The Poems of

Oleh Zujewskyj

Poesies

the author's 1897 arrangement together with "Autobiography" and "Music and letters"

A translation by Robert Bononno and designer Jeff Clark of one of Stéphane Mallarmé’s 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.

A Roll of the Dice

The French poet Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) was modernism's great champion of the book as both a conceptual and material entity: probably his most famous pronouncement is 'everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.' The Book was Mallarme's total artwork, a book to encompass all books. Frequently quoted, sometimes excerpted, but never before translated in its entirety, The Book is a visual poem about its own construction, the scaffolding of a cosmic architecture intended to reveal 'all existing relations between everything.'

The Book

During his lifetime, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) was recognized as one of the greatest living French poets. He wrote extensively on themes of reality and his desire to turn away from it, marrying form and content in revolutionary ways that departed drastically from the more tightly controlled French tradition. Despite his status as one of the first modernists, much of Mallarmé’s radicalism has been lost in translation. Finally, in this new collection by Blake Bronson-Bartlett and Robert Fernandez, the magic and mastery of form and diction, so striking in Mallarmé’s French verse, comes to life in English. Drawing from Poésies (1899), Un coup de dés (A Cast of Dice), and the “Livre” (the “Book”—the overarching conceptual work left unfinished at the death of the poet), this collection captures Mallarmé’s true linguistic brilliance, bringing the poems into our current history while retaining the music, playfulness, and power of the originals.

Poems and Selections from the "Livre"

Azure

Charles Baudelaire

Edgar Allan Poe

Michel Forest

Le Chat Noir et Autres Contes

Jill Anderson

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.

Mallarmé in Prose

Joris Karl Huysmans

Paul Valéry

André Breton

"An anthology of fugitive writings by Edgar Allan Poe, with appreciations by Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, Paul Valery, J.K. Huysmans.

Stéphane Mallarmé

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