Collected Poems

by Stéphane Mallarmé

un coup de des...

a throw of the dice...

'bout time i got down and dirty w/ some marllarme...

Genres: Poetry, France, French Literature, Classics, Fiction, 19th Century, Literature

282 pages

First published January 9, 1899

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 Godin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Whenever Possible, it's always great to get hold of French poetry written in the original language.
Reading in English ain't bad either, after all, I am English, and collection features the best of both worlds. The English translations running parallel with the original French text.
Mallarmé, one of the founders of modern European poetry and a key figure in modernism, writes with a diverse range of themes which are a mixture of the light and airy to the dark and mischievous. His style has clearly had an influence on many other writers over time. From his early twenties until the time of his death, Mallarmé produced poems of astonishing originality and beauty, many of which have become classics. Whether writing in verse or prose this collection bubbles with supreme artistry and wonder. Most of this work flows eloquently, bedazzling the reader. But I felt the last third, didn't quite match the first two, and it's only fair, as there are three or four other French poets I prefer to Mallarmé, to give four stars and not five. But some wonderful poetry still lies within.

Of the many, I leave 'Summer Sadness' as a taste below.

'The sunlight warms a languid bath on the sand
in your gold hair, wrestler asleep; it sears
the incense from your hostile visage, and
mingles an amorous potion with your tears.

The never-varied calm of this white glow
made you say, timid kisses, in distress;
'Never shall we become one corpse below
the pleasant palms and ancient wilderness!'

Yet that hair is a tepid river to
drown undisturbed the soul obsessing us
and find the void that you have never known!

I shall taste kohl wept from your eyes, and thus
see if it gives this heart stricken by you
the impassivity of sky and stone.

[E. G. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Introduction
Note on the Text and Translation
Select Bibliography
A Chronology of Stéphane Mallarmé

Poésies / Poetical Works
--Salut / Toast
--Le Guignon / Ill Fortune
--Apparition / Apparition
--Placet futile / Futile Petition
--Le Pitre châtié / A Punishment for the Clown
--Les Fenêtres / The Windows
--Les Fleurs / The Flowers
--Renouveau / Renewal
--Angoisse / Anguish
--[«Las de l'amer repos . . .»] / ['Weary of bitter rest . . .']
--Le Sonneur / The Bell-Ringer
--Tristesse d'été / Summer Sadness
--L'Azur / The Blue
--Brise marine / Sea Breeze
--Soupir / Sigh
--Aumône / Alms
--Don du poème / Gift of the Poem
--Hérodiade: Scène / Herodias: Scene
--L'Après-midi d'un faune / A Faun in the Afternoon
--[«La chevelure vol . . .»] / ['The hair flight of a flame . . .']
--Sainte / Saint
--Toast funèbre / Funerary Toast
--Prose (pour des Esseintes) / Prose (for des Esseintes)
--Éventail (de Madame Mallarmé) / Fan (Belonging to Mme Mallarmé)
--Autre éventail (de Madame Mallarmé) / Another Fan (Belonging to Mme Mallarmé)
--Feuillet d'album / Album Leaf
--Remémoration d'amis belges / Remembering Belgian Friends
--Chansons bas / Cheap Songs
--I (Le Savetier) / I (The Cobbler)
--II (La Marchande d'herbes aromatiques) / II (The Seller of Scented Herbs)
--Billet / Note
--Petit Air I / Little Ditty I
--Petit Air II / Little Ditty II

Plusieurs Sonnets / A Few Sonnets:
--[«Quand l'ombre menaça . . .»] / ['When the shade threatened . . .']
--[«Le vierge, le vivace . . .»] / ['This virginal long-living . . .']
--[«Victorieusement fui . . .»] / ['The fine suicide fled . . .']
--[«Ses purs ongles très haut . . .»] / ['With her pure nails . . .']

--Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe / The Tomb of Edgar Allan Poe
--Le Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire / The Tomb of Charles Baudelaire
--Hommage [«Le silence déjà funèbre . . .»] / Homage ['Already mourning . . .']
--I («Tout Orgueil fume-t-il du soir . . .») / I ('Does every Pride . . .')
--II («Surgi de la croupe et du bond . . .») / II ('Arisen from the rump . . .')
--III («Une dentelle s'abolit . . .») / III ('A lace vanishes . . .')
--[«Quelle soie aux baumes de temps . . .»] / ['What silk with balm from advancing days . . .']
--[«M'introduire dans ton histoire . . .»] / ['To introduce myself into your tale . . .']
--[«A la nue accablante tu . . .»] / ['Stilled beneath the oppressive cloud . . .']
--[«Mes bouquins refermés . . .»] / ['My old tomes closed upon the name Paphos . . .']

Anecdotes ou Poèmes / Anecdotes or Poems
--Le Phénomène futur / The Future Phenomenon
--Plainte d'automne / Autumn Lament
--Frisson d'hiver / Winter Shivers
--Le Démon de l'analogie / The Demon of Analogy
--Pauvre Enfant pâle / Poor Pale Child
--La Pipe / The Pipe
--Un spectacle interrompu / An Interrupted Performance
--Réminiscence / Reminiscence
--La Déclaration foraine / The Announcement at the Fair
--Le Nénuphar blanc / The White Water Lily
--L'Ecclésiastique / The Ecclesiastic
--La Gloire / Glory
--Conflit / Conflict

--Poème: Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard / Poem: A Dice Throw At Any Time Never Will Abolish Chance

Appendix 1: Poems Uncollected by Mallarmé

--Soleil d'hiver / Winter Sun
--L'Enfant prodigue / The Prodigal Son
-- . . . Mysticis umbraculis / . . . In the Mystical Shadows
--Sonnet [«Souvent la vision . . .»] / Sonnet ['Often the Poet . . .']
--Haine du pauvre / Hatred of the Poor
--[«Parce que de la viande . . .»] / ['Because a bit of roast . . .']
--Le Château de l'espérance / The Castle of Hope
--[«Une négresse par le démon secouée . . .»] / ['A negress aroused by the devil . . .']
--Hérodiade: Ouverture / Herodias: Overture
--Dans le Jardin / In the Garden
--Sonnet [«Sur les bois oubliés . . .»] / Sonnet ['When sombre winter . . .']
--[«Rien, au réveil, que vous n'ayez . . .»] / ['Nothing on waking . . .']
--Sonnet [«O si chère de loin . . .»] / Sonnet ['O so dear from afar . . .']
--[«Dame Sans trop d'ardeur . . .»] / ['Lady Without too much passion . . .']
--[«Si tu veux nous nous aimerons . . .»] / ['If you wish we shall make love . . .']

Types de la rue / Street Folk:
--Le Marchand d'ail et d'oignons / The Seller of Garlic and Onions
--Le Cantonnier / The Roadmender
--Le Crieur d'imprimés / The Newsboy
--La Femme du carrier / The Quarryman's Wife
--La Marchande d'habits / The Old Clothes Woman
--Le Vitrier / The Glazier

--Éventail (de Méry Laurent) / Fan (Belonging to Méry Laurent)
--Hommage [«Toute Aurore même gourde . . .»] / Homage ['Every Dawn however numb . . .']
--Petit Air (guerrier) / Little Ditty (Warlike)
--[«Toute l'âme résumée . . .»] / ['All the soul that we evoke . . .']
--Tombeau [«Le noir roc courroucé . . .»] / Tomb ['The black rock, cross . . .']
--[«Au seul souci de voyager . . .»] / ['For the sole task of travelling . . .']
--Hérodiade: Le Cantique de saint Jean / Herodias: Canticle of John the Baptist

Appendix 2: Vers de circonstances / Occasional Verses

--Les Loisirs de la poste / Postal Recreations
--Éventails / Fans
--Offrandes à divers du Faune / Presenting the Faun to Various People
--Invitation à la soirée d'inauguration de la Revue indépendante / Invitation to the Inaugural Soirée of the Revue indépendante
--Toast [«Comme un cherché de sa province . . .»] / Toast ['As a man sought from his own province . . .']

Explanatory Notes
Index of Titles and First Lines

[Tosh · Rating 5 out of 5]

Is Mallarme even translable? Besides that point this coffee table sized book is wonderful. Mallarme wrote poetry like a visual artist - and one of the reasons why Marcel Duchamp was a big fan of his work.

The way the poems were layed out on the page were just as important as the text itself. A work about ideas than feelings. Fantastic!

[Preetam Chatterjee · Rating 4 out of 5]

I remember the first time I truly “read” Stéphane Mallarmé. It was post-2002, sometime in the early monsoon, in the dim blue light of a college library where the smell of damp paper clung to my consciousness like the perfume of forgotten meaning. I had read him before, or so I thought—skimmed him in translation, glossed over his obliquities, flinched at his hermeticism. But something had changed in me. Or perhaps something had finally quietened. I had begun reading Sanskrit poetics more seriously by then—Kalidasa, Bhartrihari, and the Kashmiri Shaivites. That is when Mallarmé stopped being an enigma and started to sound like an echo. A whisper in an ancient tongue.

Mallarmé is not a poet you read for clarity. He believed “to name an object is to suppress three-quarters of the enjoyment...to suggest, therein lies the dream.” This was not a coy literary gimmick but a spiritual imperative. His poetry—famously dense, elliptical, and strangely sensual—feels like it hovers just outside the threshold of comprehension. And that’s the point. His fragments don't yield; they glimmer, they retreat, they seduce.

For a long time, this made Mallarmé feel foreign—too French, too Decadent, too opaline. But once I began viewing his symbolic mysticism through the lens of Indian rasa theory and dhvani, he suddenly felt like a kindred soul to Kalidasa or Bhartrihari. Take Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard—a poem that isn’t so much read as inhabited. Its visual structure, typographical play, and semantic dispersal made it seem like a philosophical yantra, a meditation device, not unlike the suggestive poetics of Meghadūta, where clouds carry not just messages but moods, absences, and deferred desires.

The parallels between Mallarmé and Sanskrit poetics are uncanny and profound.

Kalidasa, the poet of shadows and monsoon silences, taught us that what is unsaid—vyangya—is often more powerful than the overt. When the yaksha in Meghadūta longs for his beloved, the landscape becomes the language, the silence becomes the speaker. Mallarmé, too, was a poet of ellipsis. His lines often feel like they’re hiding something deliberately, inviting you to taste absence, not fill it.

In Bhartrihari, especially in the Vākyapadīya, language is not merely a vehicle for meaning—it is a living, self-referential paradox. It both constructs and undermines reality. When Mallarmé obsesses over “pure poetry” and the autonomous power of the word—he is touching that same ontological fire. His verse operates like śabda, with its power not rooted in syntax but in resonance. Both poets recognize language as sacred yet flawed, capable of invocation but not of control.

Abhinavagupta, the great Kashmiri aesthete, spoke of rasāsvāda—the aesthetic experience not as understanding but as immersion. He argued that the pleasure of poetry is in the evocation (dhvani), the mood, the savoring of suggestion. Mallarmé believed likewise. In his universe, meaning is not transmitted but teased, not revealed but experienced through nuance. His ideal was to “paint not the thing itself but the effect it produces.” You might say: rasa before artha.

Even Amaru, whose erotic verse (in Amaruśataka) is layered with philosophical undertones, shares Mallarmé’s talent for cloaking the carnal in the cosmic. Desire, in both their works, is not just physical—it is linguistic, metaphysical, unresolvable. There is always a gap between what is wanted and what is spoken.

Reading Mallarmé through Sanskrit lenses didn’t just enhance my understanding—it rehabilitated my reading habits. I stopped looking for “closure” or “explanation.” I began listening for dhvani, for aftersounds, for the spiritual shimmer behind the verbal veil. Mallarmé taught me that poetry is not just articulation—it is invocation.

One night during the Covid lockdown in 2021, I re-read Mallarmé's Brise marine. The world outside was chaos—ambulances, isolation, death—but Mallarmé's lines offered an eerie kind of consolation. “La chair est triste, hélas! et j’ai lu tous les livres.” ("The flesh is sad, alas! and I have read all the books.") It felt like the anthem of that year. His yearning to escape the heaviness of being through the weightlessness of meaning reminded me again: poetry is not escape, but elevation.

Much like Bhartrihari’s melancholy detachment, or Kalidasa’s exilic longing, Mallarmé’s despair is beautiful because it is deliberate. It is sculpted. And that, perhaps, is the deepest dhvani of all.

In an age of tweets and summaries, Mallarmé remains an act of resistance. He slows you down. He asks for attention, contemplation, surrender. He doesn’t teach you about anything. He teaches you how to read again—with your whole being. And for that, I owe him a lifetime’s gratitude.

[Heather · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wish I could read French, but unfortunately it's not one of the languages that I've studied. Mallarme is notoriously untranslatable, however this particular edition is well respected and does include the French text on the left hand side, so it can, at the very least, provide you with the option of getting a feel for how it was meant to sound. I think that Mallarme's poetry is brilliant in that it is so extraordinarily self-reflexive. On the other hand, Mallarme seems to be an alchemist with language, capturing an intensity with words that have been transformed from their original states into something uncanny and luminous. There are contemporary writers that I prefer, but they owe a great deal of credit to this maverick 19th century poet.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

All the stars.

I can't, without inadequacy and attendant embarrassment, expose myself by pretending to review this. Mallarme knew any heart worth a beating was always-already broken, so all that remains is to shatter the mind into marvelous smithereens. Immediate tear-jerking lyricism is gauche; Mallarme's method slips inside the faults and fontanelles from your pate down, down, down, quaking seismic chasms from the cranial epicenter whose aftershocks collapse the rib cage. He is the patron saint and poet laureate of the disenchanted yet indomitable will to totality, word for word.

On the tangible level, I was at first disappointed to find that half the pages here are given to Commentary. That was stupid. Of me, that is. Weinfield's labors of translation and elucidation are impeccable, so sensitive to the aesthetic demands of the subject that his hand scarcely leaves a trace. Some of the poems are more inviting than others, and it is for those more enigmatic offerings that the commentary is to be most highly praised for the tact of indicating pathways through the text without foreclosing the reader's own wanderings. Finally, as of 1995 A.D., English monoglots can partake of Mallarme, the emblematic parletre. Almost makes one glad to be alive, which is all we can ask anymore. Here as nowhere else exultation and desolation coincide.

[Maddy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is really exciting especially with regards to Kristeva's idea of the poetic function of language as a means of overcoming the systems of oppression and eventually coming into contact with the abject. Otherness, absence rather than presence, underlying psychological drives are done so well here and the submarine quality of the searching throughout these poems for 'it' are exquisite. At the same time Mallarme is such a strong writer that the systems of poetry are just as prominent as the poetic function of language means of searching for these underlying currents. I would like to think that something that is just the system, just the bare bones of what we of a society are comprised of could eventually lead to dealing with the abject (though this mostly comes from my reactions to structuralist cinema) and I'm not sure how this matches with Kristeva or how it applies to Mallarme, though I know they're related.
Theory aside Mallarme is brilliant and the translations and notes were much appreciated. I want to own this and read it again when I have a better grasp on these ideas. But like all works I give five stars to, this has got me thinking.

[Quiver · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you wish we shall make love
with your lips wordlessly
never break off that rose
except to shed worse silence

no song can ever spark
the sudden gleam of a smile
if you wish we shall make love
with your lips wordlessly

softly softly between the rounds
sylph in imperial purple
a flaming kiss is sundered
on the very tips of the pinions
if you wish we shall make love

Poet of Nothingness and the Void, a great Experimenter of form, lover of wide white space, typographic variation, musicality, Mallarmé was notoriously difficult to translate, and praised by many (from Jean-Paul Sartre to Paul Valéry) for the esoteric associations that rendered his verse at times bright, at times surprising—a puzzle.

Unlike Baudelaire's Ennui, Mallaremé's Nothingness is not a negation of meaning, it is not a weight, a problem to be solved. On the contrary, vast emptiness is a potential for the existence of an inexhaustible plurality of meanings. Mallaremé was concerned more with expressing the effect of an image, than the image itself, and the effect itself could carry many interpretations.

Two poems stood out.

One is the poem 'A Fawn in the Afternoon', which inspired Claude Debussy's symphonic poem Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune. The great ballet dancer Vaslav Nijinsky choreographed the eponymous ballet in 1912 and set it to Debussy's music.

I’d love to make them linger on, those nymphs.
So far,
their frail incarnate, that it flutters in the air
drowsy with tousled slumbers.

Did I love a dream?

The other poem is 'A Dice Throw At Any Time Never Will Abolish Chance', which is printed across two pages, in an unconventional typographical layout, with capital letters, italics, and deliberately odd line justification. (A precursor to Guillaume Apollinaire's calligrammes.) These are my favourite lines, with what little of the effect that can easily be reproduced:

IT WAS
a product of the stars

THE NUMBER
MIGHT HAVE EXISTED
except as the fragmentary hallucination of some death throe
MIGHT HAVE BEGUN AND ENDED
seeping out though denied an enclosed when manifest
eventually
outspread with a certain profusion in a rare state
MIGHT HAVE BEEN RECKONED
evidence of the total sum however scant
MIGHT HAVE ENLIGHTENED

IT WOULD BE
no
worse
neither more or less
but as much indifferently as CHANCE

A fun encounter, though I suspect much was lost in my not being able to read the original.



This review is part of a series that includes:
- Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil ,
- Arthur Rimbaud’s Collected Poems ,
- Paul Verlaine’s Selected Poems ,
- and Paul Valéry’s Selected Writings .

[Hind · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The moon grew sad. Seraphim in tears, dreaming,
bows poised, amid the stillness of the steaming
blossoms, derived from moribund violas
white sobs that slid across azure corollas––
it was the blessed day of your first kiss."

- Apparition


I think I know now why I truly and passionately love French poetry.

This was such a beautiful read and I was elated that I got to explore his poetry in more than one style, theme and structure.
He is as great as everyone who told me to read his work claimed and I think that through reading his poetry I got to taste and understand how and when can one create poetry out of a coalescence of heavy words and make it smooth and titillating without seeming too ostentatious (ehm, dear me) and it also made me understand that even when you can write with a perfect meter and a rhyme, you can also use the free/blank verse in ways that are more beautiful.

I was also lucky to be able to take a look at his prose as well which I must say surprised me because of how wondrous and raw it is. It is simply out of this world, especially his piece Autumn Lament which I truly loved and felt so connected to.

Here is a bit from it:

"How many long days I have spent alone with my cat! By ‘alone’ I
mean without a material creature: my cat is a mystic companion, a
spirit. So I can say that I have spent long days alone with my cat, and
alone with one of the last authors of the Latin decadence; because,
singularly and strangely, ever since the fair creature passed away I
have loved everything that can be summed up in the word ‘fall’."

- Autumn Lament


I feel that this book is another lesson I have learnt as an aspiring poet and I feel grateful that I came across such beautiful work.
It was such pleasure to delve deeper into Mallarmé world and I would love to go on another journey with him when autumn comes because I feel that pairing him with the auburn of trees, the gale and tea would count for an even more spectacular read.

[Justin Evans · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's much in Mallarme that I'm not particularly fond of: portentous art-for-art's-sakeness, tiring decadence, and the combination of those two, naturally.

On the other hand, this excellent little volume gives you the French, with not entirely awful English translations, at a reasonable price, and the French gives even poor French readers like myself the means to find the gold in Mallarme. Being able to see the full range of his poetry, in French, meant that I could finally place him where he deserves to be, among the great nineteenth century poets in English, to wit, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and G. M. Hopkins. And maybe Browning.

The problem with 19th century poetry, for me, is its extraordinary inability to take seriously either humor, or other people (excluding those people you were or would like to be schtupping), and the dreariness of its forms, all harnessed towards some very boring end. Enough with the elegies, people. I'd thought Mallarme was one of them, albeit a very talented one. Instead, it turns out, Mallarme is a nonsense poet with a rather inflated sense of the importance of poetry. Consider the first stanza of "Prose" (pour des Esseintes):

Hyperbole! de ma memoire
Triophalement ne sais-tu
Te lever, aujourd'hui grimoire
Dans un livre de fer vetu:

On the one hand, it combines both of my pet peeves; on the other, it's only slightly more meaningful than outgrabing mome raths, and just as much fun to read.

This gleeful nonsensicality is everywhere, but mostly in the occasional or obviously minor poems. In "Billet," Mallarme manages to rhyme rebattu and tutu.

Of course Un Coup de des is a masterpiece and forward thinking and all that. But give me the glee.

[Caspar "moved to storygraph" Bryant]

Okay I finally worked through this here's Mallarmé & it turns out this is a COLLECTED which I somehow didn't notice beforehand but it's fine I've read it all now. French french French He's a bit of a genius it's pedestrian to say ugh translation bad BUT I think here I allow the less goodness because it manages to underscore what SM is doing here w/r/t what Foucault describes as his discovery of 'the word in its impotent power', its 'fragile density'. He shines.

[Anima · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Azure

“The everlasting Azure’s tranquil irony

Depresses, like the flowers indolently fair,

The powerless poet who damns his superiority

Across a sterile wilderness of aching Despair.

In flight, with eyes shut fast, I feel it scrutinize

With all the vehemence of some destructive remorse,

My empty soul. Where can I flee? What haggard night

Fling over, tatters, fling on his distressing scorn?

Oh fogs, arise! Pour your momentous ashes down

In long-drawn rags of dust across the skies unreeling

To darkly drench the livid swarm of autumn days,

And fabricate of them a great and silent ceiling!“

Another Fan' Of Mademoiselle Mallarmé’s

"O dreamer, that I may dive
In pure pathless joy, understand,
How by subtle deceits connive
To keep my wing in your hand.

A coolness of twilight takes
Its way to you at each beat
Whose imprisoned flutter makes
The horizon gently retreat.

Vertigo! How space quivers
Like an enormous kiss
That, wild to be born for no one, can neither
Burst out or be soothed like this.

Do you feel the fierce paradise
Like stifled laughter that slips
To the unanimous crease’s depths
From the corner of your lips?

The scepter of shores of rose
Stagnant on golden nights,
Is this white closed flight that shows
Against your bracelet’s fiery light."

SUMMER SADNESS
‘The sun, on the sand, O sleeping wrestler,
Warms a languid bath in the gold of your hair,
Melting the incense on your hostile features,
Mixing an amorous liquid with the tears.

The immutable calm of this white burning,
O my fearful kisses, makes you say, sadly,
‘Will we ever be one mummified winding,
Under the ancient sands and palms so happy ?...”

[Tait · Rating 5 out of 5]

While more often poetic then a prose writer, the Symbolist Mallarmé, along with Baudelaire in "Paris Spleen" and Rimbaud in "Seasons of Hell," attempted to destroy the boundary between poetry and prose, creating narratives outside of traditional syntactic forms that could be read for both the story and images at once. These works also capture the picture of the distraught French writer so eloquently distilled later in Sartre's "Nausea." On the other hand, Mallarmé's most famous poem, "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," is a sprawling meta-poem about writing where words strewn everywhere on the page can be read in whatever order the reader chooses

[Wryly · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seated in the sensual this book of poems will take your perceptions for a flight. The translation is very sound conscious. The langauge bubbles.

[J.M. Hushour · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm not sure if it was the translation or the scouring jadedness that fills the decade or so between readings, but Mallarme just isn't as good as I remember him being. I love me some Symbolist literature, and Steve is the pinnacle and figurehead of the movement in poetry, at least. Too bad I found his poems largely banal and of little weight to mark them off from much of its contemporary ilk. There are a few exceptions, the "Tombeaus" and a few others, but mostly just not that great. Certainly not movement-forming.

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 4 out of 5]

It is wonderful that this volume contains the original French text on the facing pages, as Mallarmé is notoriously difficult to translate, given the place that he accords language.
My French is not very good, so I am thankful for the translations, though some feel as though they fall wide of the mark.
The volume is well worth it for Un Coup de dés alone, however.

[Peter Crofts · Rating 4 out of 5]

Probably the best place to go if you can't read French. The layout of the book, something like that of a coffee table book, is a great idea. This leaves a lot of blank space on the page in which the text is situated. That in itself carries a high degree of symbolism for this particular poet. Besides the quality of the translations, which try and preserve meter and rhyme, this volume also offers an abundance of commentary. Mallarme is one of the most elusive poets there is, after years of reading him some of it is still completely impenetrable. He's often described as a beautiful poet, which frankly, suggests to me the comment is from someone who is simply being pretentious. Look at the prose poems of his early career, anyone who would describe such sentiments as beautiful must be a sadist. Mallarme is a dense, allusive and dark poet. His preoccupation with language as a thing in itself was way ahead of its time. It's self contained hermetic verse where the poet attempts to produce some sort of sacred meaning that does not reflect any thing "out there" in the "real world". This is language as a spell. Heavy stuff. There is nothing beautiful to the implications of Mallarme's work, it suggests the sublime is a pointless and artificial pursuit which one will follow because the world of matter is devoid of any human meaning. Out of this darkness he creates a luminescence of language solely to feed the spirit. But it does not speak to anything divine, other than the human need to think in such terms. A bit too cold a gaze to be described by easy aesthetic terms, these are the products of a struggle to carry on. He was as much a philosopher as a poet and it is for this reason he is worth reading.

[Sajid · Rating 5 out of 5]

“The poets of those days, feeling their lifeless eyes reillumined, will make their way back toward their lamps, their brains fleetingly rapt with a hint of glory, haunted by Rhythm and oblivious that they exist in an age that has outlived beauty.”

Mallarme,a poet sometimes blabbering dirty,sometimes childishly romantic, sometimes horribly melancholic, sometimes prodigiously pathbreaker of poetic language. I think he did literally everything anyone can do in creative expression of words. Words,symbols,images were reinvente through Mallarme's magical twist of hands. Even the empty spaces became his poetic expression(or silence). He loved to make love to silence. Such a vulgar thing to say about silence.


“Dreamer, that I may plunge in sweet and pathless pleasure, understand how, by ingenious deceit, to keep my wing within your hand.
A coolness of the evening air
is reaching you at every beat; its captive stroke with delicate care drives the horizon to retreat.
Dizziness! space is quivering, see! like one immense kiss which, insane
at being born for nobody, can neither spurt up nor abstain.
Feel how the untamed Eden slips like a buried smile of caprice down from the corner of your lips deep into the unanimous crease.
The sceptre of shores tinged with rose stagnant on golden waning days is this, a white flight which you close and set against a bracelet’s blaze.”

[Lysergius · Rating 4 out of 5]

Quite some of the strangest poetry I have ever read. I especially liked his incorporation of his friends addresses in rhymes on the envelopes...

[Egor xS · Rating 5 out of 5]

This diction could have no contenders: it is he who fondles the spinning lustre of dissemination. One trembles before a page

[Natalia Angarita · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mi poeta favorito sin pensarlo dos veces.

[Loki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fucking beautiful.

[Mattea Gernentz · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Yes, for myself alone I bloom, in isolation! / You gardens blossoming amethyst, you know this, / endlessly buried in some dazzling deep abyss, / unknown golds that preserve your old illumination" (Herodias, 35).

The things I do for Berthe Morisot... So, my dissertation keeps haunting me, and I wanted to immerse myself more in the writing of Mallarmé, a French poet who was a dear friend and penpal of Morisot.

This collection was definitely worth a read overall, but I favor his more experimental work, like "A Dice Throw At Any Time Never Will Abolish Chance." I brought this book to work with me, and my boss flipped through and said, "Hmmm... he really liked lips, didn't he?" She's not wrong. 😭

Okay, but when Mallarmé started a poem with "I have not come to tame your body"... CHILLS.

[Anita Raychawdhuri · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love Mallarme. I know that reading in translation may cause me to lose some aspects of it (though it was useful to cross reference the French text). I was inspired to read this in part due to my partner and in part by Maggie Nelson’s Bluets and her discussion of Mallarme’s use of “l’azur” rather than “ciel” to talk about the sky. Anyway, one day I hope I can read this fully in French. His poetry feels like looking at a painting. amazing amazing amazing.

[Marcos Augusto · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stéphane Mallarmé was an originator (with Paul Verlaine) and a leader of the Symbolist movement in poetry.

Mallarmé early poems, which he began contributing to magazines in 1862, were influenced by Charles Baudelaire, whose recently published collection Les Fleurs du mal (“The Flowers of Evil”) was largely concerned with the theme of escape from reality, a theme by which Mallarmé was already becoming obsessed. But Baudelaire’s escapism had been of an essentially emotional and sensual kind—a vague dream of tropical islands and peaceful landscapes where all would be “luxe, calme et volupté” (“luxury, calm, and voluptuousness”). Mallarmé was of a much more intellectual bent, and his determination to analyze the nature of the ideal world and its relationship with reality is reflected in the two dramatic poems he began to write in 1864 and 1865, respectively, Hérodiade (“Herodias”) and L’Après-midi d’un faune (“The Afternoon of a Faun”), the latter being the work that inspired Claude Debussy to compose his celebrated Prélude a quarter of a century later.

By 1868 Mallarmé had come to the conclusion that, although nothing lies beyond reality, within this nothingness lie the essences of perfect forms. The poet’s task is to perceive and crystallize these essences. In so doing, the poet becomes more than a mere descriptive versifier, transposing into poetic form an already existent reality; he becomes a veritable God, creating something from nothing, conjuring up for the reader, as Mallarmé himself put it, “l’absente de tous bouquets”—the ideal flower that is absent from all real bouquets. But to crystallize essences in this way, to create the notion of floweriness, rather than to describe an actual flower, demands an extremely subtle and complex use of all the resources of language, and Mallarmé devoted himself during the rest of his life to putting his theories into practice in what he called his Grand Oeuvre (“Great Work”), or Le Livre (“The Book”). He never came near to completing this work, however, and the few preparatory notes that have survived give little or no idea of what the end result might have been.

[Sean A. · Rating 3 out of 5]

re-reading it after all these years...
this is a really hard book to rate. it was rather hit or miss. even as a life-long student of poetry, a lot of these were wordy and oblique to me. (i guess that's what i get for not brushing up on the classics more often...) yet often right when i would be totally lost in the words between the margins, they would hint at sardonic glory. also good thing there's the explanations in the back although its a bit weird how these are longer than the poems themselves.

the themes seemed to range between pomp and attaining beauty to folly and everyday ironies, if i understood at all. ha!

also, the last poem, "A Roll of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance" is so sublime. it's freaking great. totally modern, and i am thinking, 'well, now here at the end of the book is something that speaks my language'. but more than that, it is so rough and beautiful. the layout is great, the words are rough and beautiful and choice, it's reputation claimed by the translator as one of the singular modern european poems is well deserved for once. i thought about getting that phrase tattooed on my legs once...lolz, well i'm glad i didn't, but still an amazing phrase and title from an amazing poem!

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Four stars, not for the poems themselves, but rather for the translation, which sacrifices a host of virtues at the altar of rhyme. Mallarmé is one of the two or three greatest French poets and, as such, is among the greatest poets in any language — but if any writer were ever truly untranslatable, it is him. Which is where Weinfield’s commentary (taking up half the volume) proves useful. It’s lucid, transparent, and references both Mallarmé’s journals/correspondence as well as plenty of scholarly sources. Weinfield’s translations of the Poems in Prose are free from slavish devotion to rhyme and are the hidden gems here, imo.

[cristiana]

i saw (literally, you see his work, which i think strikes up an interesting relationship between the viewer - who is also the reader - and the text) a whittled down version of un coup de des in that mccafferty anthology. i also am beginning to write in such a way where i want to actually set up words on a grid system, and perhaps mallarme often wondered - 'what are the limits of a poem? or are there limits? where is the conceptual boundary between visual art, concrete poetry, and poetry?'

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

not crazy about the translations here, but I probably wouldn't like *any* translation of Mallarme. Struggling through him with two years of desultory french and a French English dictionary is, frankly, worth it.

[Myhte · Rating 5 out of 5]

einem schönen Rausch darf ich danken,
daß ich aufrecht, selbst sein Schwanken
nicht scheuend, zum Gruße steh:

Riff, Einsamkeit, Stern, was immer
wofür uns im weißen Schimmer
um unser Segel die Sorge geh.