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Herodiade: in French and Japanese
近代フランスを代表する詩人マラルメの代表作『エロディヤード』の原詩を明治文学を代表する名訳者による翻訳と対照させて編集したテキストです。
- GenresPoetry
85 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 1898
About the author
Stéphane Mallarmé
300 books382 followersStéphane 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.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
May 8, 2025
I guess most of my European GR friends tackled this one in school - for myself, I first read it on my own, in ‘67.
With the rest of this Master’s poetry, I was suddenly blown away. And having read Ulysses on the sly, though with a crib, also in my high school years, I was ready for it.
Its darkness, its arcane symbols, and its songs of a simple and self-effacing soul climbing to untold heights of the spirit were monolithic.
It was “Too much, man.”
Stéphane Mallarme ROCKED!
As did Jimi Hendrix, who took Woodstock by storm the same year.
Mallarme, whose gargantuan fiery ordeal in his Earthly Purgatory must have been, no matter how placid and restrained his poetry seems to us now, etched so strenuously by the memory of those excruciating images of his youthful trauma.
A lot like the satellite images of Vietnam atrocities that were beamed to us boomers nightly on our TV.
Woodstock was such a welcome break from those images for us teens then! Kids like us were actually having fun at that festival instead of being blasted to bits in the jungle...
And Mallarme, writing Herodias, found his WRITING such a break from his similarly ugly trauma. And he wrote it right in the worst Winter of his Discontent.
No wonder, in the spring that followed, he again set that very symptom-liberated RELEASE to words in the immortal Afternoon of a Faun!
Fast (but temporary) relief at last.
But this review is about the trauma of Herodiade, and so we must go back a few months in his life...
Mallarme injects the same violence of imagery into Herodias as Jimi Hendrix projected onto our imaginations with his brazen electric guitar. Small wonder our parents detested it!
Vietnam raged - and this was as kind and as safe a response as we kids could muster to its pain.
So, similarly, the first part of this compressed mini-epic makes for uneasy reading.
But it’s the concluding group of quatrains, the Canticle of St John (the Baptist) that gives us a bit of a break - and uplifts us.
And THAT’s the part that I want to muse on here.
As you all know, Herod beheaded St John, after his wife Herodiade asked for his head on a platter (grisly request, isn’t it?)...
The first part of the very short epic concerns her side of the story - but HERE we hear from St John: his very unlikely song during his own execution.
Does any more brilliant symboliste verse exist in such a classical and almost Racinian style? I doubt it... but here’s vaguely how it sounds -
The sun which raises itself up
Exalts itself supernaturally,
And - then starts falling
Incandescently.
I feel as if my neck nerves
Are tingling -
All in great trembling contortions and
All in unison.
And my mind breaks free
In a solitary vigil -
Severing the old disagreements
With my body.
And that’s just my own fast and loose translation, and doesn’t do justice to the original, so pardon my errors and lack of poetic music.
You see, poor Stéphane was emerging from his own Dark Night of the Soul into the free daylight of pure thought and imagination, unencumbered by his previously exhausting, enervating and near-physical Death of spirit.
And he was now expressing the pure abstract freedom of his unencumbered soul and reborn genius, for he was finally and joyfully released from his black angst.
His symbol for this freedom was a beheading (I know, it’s gruesome)!
John the Baptist's freedom was in the sacrifice of his countercultural chastity in the face of death....
And freedom from hypocrisy is what the music of Woodstock meant to us kids.
For a few short days in 1967 we ALL lost our heads - and found Freedom.
It was a momentary burst of freedom from America’s own Dark Night of the Soul...
So sings scrawny Jimi: “Have you ever REALLY been ‘experienced?’”
“Yes!” we say emphatically:
“And we have suffered in deep inner trauma for all those wartime atrocities...
“In the very springtime of our years - and Now, we Want OUT!
“But... here, at this moment, with your fiery electric guitar, Jimi, we’re FREE OF THE PAIN again.”
***
This is a truly REMARKABLE work of Literature.
Read it and Relive that Rebirth!
With the rest of this Master’s poetry, I was suddenly blown away. And having read Ulysses on the sly, though with a crib, also in my high school years, I was ready for it.
Its darkness, its arcane symbols, and its songs of a simple and self-effacing soul climbing to untold heights of the spirit were monolithic.
It was “Too much, man.”
Stéphane Mallarme ROCKED!
As did Jimi Hendrix, who took Woodstock by storm the same year.
Mallarme, whose gargantuan fiery ordeal in his Earthly Purgatory must have been, no matter how placid and restrained his poetry seems to us now, etched so strenuously by the memory of those excruciating images of his youthful trauma.
A lot like the satellite images of Vietnam atrocities that were beamed to us boomers nightly on our TV.
Woodstock was such a welcome break from those images for us teens then! Kids like us were actually having fun at that festival instead of being blasted to bits in the jungle...
And Mallarme, writing Herodias, found his WRITING such a break from his similarly ugly trauma. And he wrote it right in the worst Winter of his Discontent.
No wonder, in the spring that followed, he again set that very symptom-liberated RELEASE to words in the immortal Afternoon of a Faun!
Fast (but temporary) relief at last.
But this review is about the trauma of Herodiade, and so we must go back a few months in his life...
Mallarme injects the same violence of imagery into Herodias as Jimi Hendrix projected onto our imaginations with his brazen electric guitar. Small wonder our parents detested it!
Vietnam raged - and this was as kind and as safe a response as we kids could muster to its pain.
So, similarly, the first part of this compressed mini-epic makes for uneasy reading.
But it’s the concluding group of quatrains, the Canticle of St John (the Baptist) that gives us a bit of a break - and uplifts us.
And THAT’s the part that I want to muse on here.
As you all know, Herod beheaded St John, after his wife Herodiade asked for his head on a platter (grisly request, isn’t it?)...
The first part of the very short epic concerns her side of the story - but HERE we hear from St John: his very unlikely song during his own execution.
Does any more brilliant symboliste verse exist in such a classical and almost Racinian style? I doubt it... but here’s vaguely how it sounds -
The sun which raises itself up
Exalts itself supernaturally,
And - then starts falling
Incandescently.
I feel as if my neck nerves
Are tingling -
All in great trembling contortions and
All in unison.
And my mind breaks free
In a solitary vigil -
Severing the old disagreements
With my body.
And that’s just my own fast and loose translation, and doesn’t do justice to the original, so pardon my errors and lack of poetic music.
You see, poor Stéphane was emerging from his own Dark Night of the Soul into the free daylight of pure thought and imagination, unencumbered by his previously exhausting, enervating and near-physical Death of spirit.
And he was now expressing the pure abstract freedom of his unencumbered soul and reborn genius, for he was finally and joyfully released from his black angst.
His symbol for this freedom was a beheading (I know, it’s gruesome)!
John the Baptist's freedom was in the sacrifice of his countercultural chastity in the face of death....
And freedom from hypocrisy is what the music of Woodstock meant to us kids.
For a few short days in 1967 we ALL lost our heads - and found Freedom.
It was a momentary burst of freedom from America’s own Dark Night of the Soul...
So sings scrawny Jimi: “Have you ever REALLY been ‘experienced?’”
“Yes!” we say emphatically:
“And we have suffered in deep inner trauma for all those wartime atrocities...
“In the very springtime of our years - and Now, we Want OUT!
“But... here, at this moment, with your fiery electric guitar, Jimi, we’re FREE OF THE PAIN again.”
***
This is a truly REMARKABLE work of Literature.
Read it and Relive that Rebirth!
June 16, 2015
«Va a suceder: el carmesí más triste
penetrará la cera del cuerpo que se esconde.»
No el carmesí crepuscular; será el del alba
en el último día que pondrá fin a todo»
(23).
___
«Densos frutos ante esbeltas columnas
y, en su día, los jardines nevados
ponen en mis pupilas suavidades de ámbar
y pálidos rojos invernales,
pero yo no amo otro fruto
que el alto y opulento de mí misma,
el increíble, el que, de pronto, habrá granado
sin otro germen que mis presentimientos
suscitados, quizá, por el desastre.
(61)
penetrará la cera del cuerpo que se esconde.»
No el carmesí crepuscular; será el del alba
en el último día que pondrá fin a todo»
(23).
___
«Densos frutos ante esbeltas columnas
y, en su día, los jardines nevados
ponen en mis pupilas suavidades de ámbar
y pálidos rojos invernales,
pero yo no amo otro fruto
que el alto y opulento de mí misma,
el increíble, el que, de pronto, habrá granado
sin otro germen que mis presentimientos
suscitados, quizá, por el desastre.
(61)
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews