Per una tomba di Anatole

by Stéphane Mallarmé, Cosimo Ortesta (Translator), Jean-Pierre Richard (Editor)

A moving poetic work addressing a father's pain over the death of his child.

Genres: Poetry, France, Grief, Memoir, French Literature

264 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Stéphane Mallarmé (French: [stefan malaʁme]; 18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.

Reviews

[Steven R. Kraaijeveld]

Do not read these fragments in a public place. Read them in bed, under the sheets, in semi-darkness, with a pillow close to your eyes.

Oh! you understand
that if I consent
to live - to seem
to forget you -
it is to
feed my pain
- and so that this apparent
forgetfulness
can spring forth more
horribly in tears, at

some random
moment, in
the middle of this
life, when you
appear to me.

[Paul]

Beautiful book that links Mallarme's anticipatory postmodernism with his latent romanticism, all in the context of grief laid bare and the need to "say."

[Jeff Jackson]

Heartbreaking in its stutters and ellipses, notes toward a grief that resists language.

[Samira Abed]

Started writing a poem in response to Mallarme's incredible book on grief, love, lingering memories and sons. Will share a portion of this bad poem at the bottom that came freely without much planning or thought.

I respect especially his incredible humanity, to write on his son as not just his son (as in- not just as the loss of this relationship or identity Mallarme imagines for him) but also as an individual person. This is a rare and special thing few people can tap into, I've observed. To love someone fully as themselves, outside of their relationship to you. In these poem's the dead son's future life is also imagined and the speaker even takes on the role of the son himself at certain points. The empathy feels limitless and expansive, beyond what someone like me in grief is usually capable of.

Truthfully it also reminds me of my own father, whose favorite brother died 10+ years ago due to sickness and who's memory lingers strongly in my dad's daily life. These memories are tragic for him, painful, defined by the loss of someone to tragic and terrible illness. Even sweet memories cannot be expressed without the melancholy of this loss. Will it ever feel sweet or comforting to remember this person for him I wonder? I wish that it will be one day, not such a burden to him. I hope my difficult memories can be covered up as well, that I am not defined by tragedy, either of my own doing (the harm I cause of my free will) or from my death (accident or not).

/// Poem///

Like the spirit crossing
an icy river
Shaft of a tree
Brought down, its
Limb sideways, partially
in cool water lapping
limber movement sways
it deeper and out
the wind playing
I know the feeling

Temptation to imagine
To feel breath as touch
As memory not invention
As feeling not caricature

blooming heat in
the head as through liquid
still the fascination
with being inside
full of it
how it escapes
it peters, welcome
back even with pain
again selfish love
to want feeling of any
kind, any kind
of word in presence

to linger please
dawn eyeballs look up
and no ghost floats
so where the memory
is stored is not
corporeal or external,
internal sweet
white edge of the eyeball
that can’t be directly seen

when he holds him
in his mind
his sick body
is it ever pleasant?
To return to the worst
Last moment
Again to see
the worst vision
Of him,
Grey and scabbed
disadvantaged
Weak unfair

Always unfair ever also
Grateful for his brother
Friend, To return
alive inside
Him to float
Feel him floating near
Stable fixture
Touching his sight
again?

[Amira Hanafi]

This beautifully designed edition positions the original French unavoidably underneath the translation on each page. The juxtaposition is genius for Mallarme, whose poems are so utterly dependent on sound that the translations are something entirely other, and one can see & hear that clearly on each page.

[Tosh]

A touchy and perhaps impossible ability to grasp the fear and despair of losing someone, yet Stephane Mallarme through the cool eyes of using his craft or art to embrace and understand such a lost. It's a work that has a beginning but no ending. Death there is an ending but excepting or dealing with death it seems to be an open book.... for some.

[Carolyn]

To watch Mallarmé drown, so willingly relinquishing to the ever-rising sea of his own hot tears. The charcoal heat rolls off the waves and blows the sulphur scent of sorrow against my cheeks. I am crying too, oh Stéphane, your Mace!

Absence and silence as literally unthinkable concerns; Anatole's Tomb gesturing as close to them as language will ever allow.

[david-baptiste]

in many ways my favorite writing by mallarme

[Meghan]

This is the most affecting book I have ever read.

[Zane]

man and
absence —
the twin
spirit he unites
with when he
dreams, longs

— absence, alone
after death, once


the pious
burial of the
body, makes myste-
riously — this
admitted fiction —

[Lanny]

Paul Auster doesn't need any extra praise from me, but this
odd, sad, wonderful book of fragments is really interesting. I've been reading this off and on for about a week now.

[Steven Felicelli]

from the sophisticated aesthete - a gut wrenching homage to his dead child

[Chasity]

Beautiful collection of poems about group. Skillful use of language. Great model of what all can be done with form.

[Abrandon]

really wonderful

[Elizabeth]

This is a text I read over and over again.

[Mattea Gernentz]

"image of me other than me carried off in death! / your future which has taken refuge in me becomes my / purity through life, which I shall not touch" (5).

A searing account of intimate loss, fragmented and raw upon the page. I would recommend this text to anyone who has lost someone dear to illness. Repeatedly, Mallarmé returns to the idea that his son will live on in those who loved him, and I think that's an idea of enduring beauty. There is a deep sadness though without the comfort of eternity in the poet's thinking. For Anatole's Tomb is altogether a deeply moving account of life's ultimate fragility and the great tragedy of a life unlived.

"Death - whispers softly - I am no one - I do not even know / myself (for dead do not know that they are dead, nor even / that they are dying...) / for otherwise my beauty is made up of last / moments - lucidity, beauty, face - of what would be me, / without me" (25).

My interest in Mallarmé mainly arises from his correspondences with artist Berthe Morisot, but this is a remarkable poetic feat that leaves behind a great shadow of emotion. It's a worthy experience with incredibly piercing lines ("you have struck me and you have chosen your / wound well")—still chilled by the lament of the emptiness without his eight-year-old son sitting on his knee.

"sick in the springtime dead in the autumn - it's the sun / [...] son reabsorbed not gone / [...] fury against the formless" (3).

Now I'm doing more researching about Symbolism and and thinking about this Sartre quote I found: "It's the death of his [Mallarmé's] mother all over again, this mystery of the Disincarnation, the union of a myth and a ritual, seems to found a Christianity in reverse. It's not the Parousia, but Absence that is the hope and aim. What 'was in the beginning' was not the logos, but the vile abundance of Being, Vulgarity; it is neither Creation nor the passage of the Word into the World that we adore, but instead the passage by emaciation of Reality into the Word" (113).

[Nico]

mallarmé’s unfinished notes to a longer work that would be a testimony to the loss of his child, anatole. mallarmé found that not even art could stand testimony to the work of infinite mourning in the absence of his lost child, he wanted to give life back to his lost son through the power of the word, through giving him life in the form of poetry, in the form of art. mallarmé found it impossible to give testament to the fragmented life anatole had, taken away so shortly by sickness, a death that mallarmé blamed himself for. yet, these fragments succeed in giving back the trace of life to his lost child, anatole is the ghost that haunts these pages, these fragments. although the work is “unfinished” so to say, the fragmentary form lends itself beautifully to the fragmented life that anatole had lived, it lends itself to the pained meditation on loss, mourning, death, and absence that mallarmé is capturing. mallarmé conjures the ghost of his child on these pages, to live on forever.

[Christopherseelie]

A singular reading experience. It's like reading the notes on an idea, a private document, rather than "a poem". Nonetheless, there are moments of evocation so moving, so specific to grief and the vacillations between extremes...yet done with incredible absences, blanks, holes in the language where no words could enjoin the fragments, where to speak would be garrulous dramatization. And, he grapples with this problem--speaking to an unspeakable loss--while grappling with the rest of it. This is dense literature; not because of a word count or demanding historical context, because the reader has to fill in what has been passed over in silence.

[Violet]

my younger sister loaned me this book.

auster, i thought, did very little to prepare the reader for the intensity of mallarmé's grief in his introduction to the text, but i liked that he placed the original french directly below his english translations, so that it was clear that he was faithful even to the original punctuation!

child
sister remains, who
will lead to a future
brother
— she exempt from
this grave for
father mother and son
— by her marriage.

also, check this out.

[T Brown]

Wait this was such an interesting work concerning the death of Mallermé's son. He writes about death in such a comprehensibly unconscionable way that is so concerned with the physical plane of existence and how absence is written over the material by the lack of a sound or response. It was also enjoyable for the English and French versions of the poems to both exist on the page for readers in the edition I read from. Also the numbering/the sequencing of the poems affected the poems and the subject matter which I found to be another poetic layer. Despite being an unfinished collection I believe this was one of my favorites from this semester.

[Jomar Canales Conde]

“no — nothing
to do with the great
deaths — etc.
— as long as we
go on living, he
lives — in us
—
it will only be after our
death that he wil be dead
— and the bells
of the Dead will toll for
him”

this is such a raw, affecting, heartwrenching book. in many ways the silences, ellipses, stutterings of the voice speak volumes. grief is unutterable.

[Gabriel Vidal]

This was my first contact with this type of poetry, and Mallarmé itself. Very deep and sad. I needed more sensibility to read those verses that gave me so much reflections around the theme of losing someone, and how the lose can be such a depressive thing in our minds.

[Samantha]

Oh so powerful. A charged work that is not even
"a work" but notes of a scrapped attempt. The gaps in the poems leave so much space for brutal emotion.

This was supposed to be a review, not an update!! Aghh

[Mike]

It’s tough to critique these poems, since they are private, personal jottings that were not intended to be published (they were published after Mallarmé’s death by an heir), based on the death of his son at age eight, so I will set aside my usual commentary.

[mina]

Stephane Mallarmé wrote it for his child who passed away after a long illness. This book carries a profound sense of shattered beauty and immense power.

[Stephen]

2.5/5 Maybe it’s unfair to release unfinished fragments posthumously. Maybe it’s unfair not to. I can’t decide. This one leaves you wanting more. But I’ll dig deeper on him. The shovel hit something solid.

[Josephine]

Beautiful, heartbreaking. A modern Sappho-form.

[Matthew]

"What, the thing I am saying/is true--it is not/only music ----/ etc."

I have recently had a series of fits reading criticism, a professional hazard, and I can imagine what critics might try to say about this poem. Instead, I will follow another recent (and happier) thread: finding books of lyric poetry that deliver beyond music and beyond artifice. Mallarme's inentent to create a vessel for his dead son resonates more deeply because it reamins in fragments, like Sappho's divine laments. And as a poet, well, I have not seen more immediately into another poet's mind, anywhere.

[Alessandro]

A tragic stream of consciousness, p. être the most actual fragmented piece of writing I've ever read. Mallarmé's incapability to cope with his son's death and produce some coherent thoughts is tangible. The content is not as obscure as usual with his production, however the style adopted looks extremely disarranged and...well, fragmented.

[Julian]

read in most secluded area available to you