Vers et prose : morceaux choisis

by Stéphane Mallarmé, Jean-Luc Steinmetz (Notes)

"Vers et Prose" de Stéphane Mallarmé. Stéphane Mallarmé, poète français (1842-1898).

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

160 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1917

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

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thank you so much, Ms. Cawes!

Your translations of this Inimitable Giant's poetry are the Best of the Best.

Mallarme, and Dante's Comedia, were my steadies - my vade mecum's - at uni. And they would help get me the university prize for first year English.

A fellow loner, Mallarme and Dante could reach me where I LIVED (In my bipolar headspace)!

But, how SHOCKING to meet Monsieur Mallarme...

His openers always toss you for a loop:

Enfin qu'en lui-meme l'eternite se change...!

Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd'hui!

O reveuse! Pour que je plonge en pur delice sans chemin...!

Ses purs ongles dediants tres haut son Onyx...!

Zut alors! Trop Radicales.... Mais qu'est ce que ca va dire, enfin?

But I get it. Guess Stephane Mallarme was an Aspie like moi-meme. Otherwise hopelessly dumb!

Anyway! There I was - blown clear away.

But then... just five years ago, I read these lines again - in the wonderful Mary Ann Caws translation.

The hermetic poet par EXCELLENCE lives again in this version!

His voice comes thru clear as a bell.

So!

Want to learn what the greatest arcane 19th century French Symboliste really sounded like?

He'll confound you.

He'll drive you nuts.

What's he saying?

Read THIS.

It's in Plain English.

[Grace Burns · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Inert, all burns in the tawny hour"

"From the cruel one’s feet to the shy one’s heart"

"Spurning the sob that kept me drunken still"

"The moon was saddening. Seraphim in tears
Dreaming, bow in hand, in the calm of vaporous
Flowers, were drawing from dying violins
White sobs"

"I wandered then, my eyes on the worn pavement
When with the sun in your hair, and in the street
In the evening, you in laughter appeared to me"

[Matt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have such an... interesting time reading Mallarme's poetry, when I do. I started on it with the large, awkward, almost oblong edition of his works when I was but a lad and some of the poems therein hit me with the shock of recognition and others just sort of luminously fell by the wayside.

I bought a different edition, this one, and dip into it once in awhile as one does with funky, strange old books which one doesn't remember owning or reading very much anymore.

The painting on the cover is quite something. C'est le homme: looking pensive, affable, polite, heavy-lidded, somewhat withdrawn, speculating on the near distance; our author was instigator and apparently spokesman for the mardis at his apartment, a little salon where some of the nearest and dearest would come together to discuss poetry, language, and such.

I still don't quote know what to make of his oblique and exquisitely imagistic poetics but I as a reader do not demand sense from my poets, easy or otherwise, though I reserve the right to check for what you might call 'sensibility'- obscurity is rich, it's the loam from which so much sprouts.

But you have to seduce me, you gotta make me suspend my hard-headed, Anglo-American empiricism (I don't have Puritan blood for nothing) and delve into the decadent world of language for language's sake and image for image's sake and the point/counterpoint dialectic of associations played against each other...

I spent an amusing if puzzling T ride (subway, if you're not from Boston) musing over this poem in particular:

Lace passes into nothingness,
with the ultimate Gamble in doubt,
in blasphemy revealing just
eternal absence of any bed.

This concordant enmity
of a white garland and the same,
in flight against the pallid glass,
hovers and does not enshroud.

But where, limned gold, the dreamer dwells,
there sleeps a mournful mandola,
its deep lacuna source of song.

Of a kind that toward some window,
Formed by that belly or none at all,
Filial, one might have been born.

Very interesting stuff...a mandola, by the way, is a mini-mandolin.

You see what I mean? Abstract but not quite abstruse. The imagery sort of juxtaposes itself, playing off of the difference in meanings and the similarities simultaneously.

One image could stand for the meaning of another- the lace dissolving like the attempt at some kind of tangible structure or resting point, poised over the abyss of confusion and ontological ambiguity, reminding the speaker how little there is (or can be) in the face of the perpetual grievance.

The last two stanzas play on that idea, to me at least. The sound that needs an empty place to resonate, "hovers but does not enshroud" and offering the speaker (or any curious intelligence) a space of belonging, of presence.

Now granted the poem is a translation and such a thing is very tricky by nature. The question is, am I totally off the mark or am I affixing meaning in a vulgar way over a poem which resists this kind of categorization by the nature of its very aesthetic choices?

I'd like to add that there is a moment in the excellent, brilliantly realized and accomplished movie "Max" where John Cusak (groan) plays an art dealer in late 30's Germany who is trying to explain the unique qualities of an Abstract Expressionist painting to a prospective buyer and asks him, 'do you see how he reveals himself here'?

The gesture is kind of ridiculous in a way; another strategy for an art dealer with an eye for the bottom line to get some eyebrows lifted and some hands reaching for the wallet.

BUT- and this is a bit crucial, I'm afraid- it might be in dead earnest. After all, I'm using the painting analogy intentionally...what else would a painter have to use as a means towards self-expression but line quality, colour, space, composition, perspective, etc?

Could a well-trained eye 'see' the characteristics of a painter's personality if he knew well enough to look as it were between the lines?

I think so, I really do.

It's an open question, certainly, but there is no doubt among dedicated students of art of all kinds that there is a language occurring at a level that is definitively more than meets the eye.

So if the analogy holds, it might be fair to say that Mallarme's poem is interpret able in the way that, say, a cloud is: it's more about the shifts and translucence and the delicate ripple of pattern as it changes than about abrupt disclosure or statement.

One might be required to let the poem play itself across the mind, rather than to hammer it into submission with interrogation.

Then there's this, which is unqualifiably great, at least to me:

excerpt from CRISIS IN POETRY:

...each soul is a melody which must be picked up again, and the flute or viola of everyone exists for that.
Late in coming, it seems to me, is the true condition or the possibility not just of expressing oneself but of modulating oneself as one chooses.
Languages are imperfect in that although there are many, the supreme one is lacking: thinking is to write without accessories, or whispering, but since the immortal word is still tacit, the diversity of tongues on the earth keeps everyone from uttering the word which would be otherwise in one unique rendering, truth itself in its substance...Only, we must realize, poetry would not exist ; philosophically, verse makes up for what languages lack, completely superior as it is.

It's worth noting, on this issue, that Mallarme is respected for the simple fact that his playing with language and the mixing up of word assortments on the page anticipates a lot of the language poetry to come in the next hundred years or so. Exalting the word, liberating it from the corset of context or narrativity, has got to start here.

Poetry as not only an exalted speech but as a form of counter-speech. Alternate discourse held to being within its own bubble.

Marginalia made central, constantly veering off into the limit of comprehension on purpose, maybe as a way of challenging the reader's presuppositions and internalized means of interpretation.

The self as modulation as interpretation is necessarily modulated- what else can one know but what one brings to the table? I'm mighty partial to the idea that one can only understand what one is ready to understand, that one must have a mind of winter to comprehend summer.

Contrast is a thing of beauty.

Sea Breeze

How sad the flesh! and there's no more to read.
Escape, far off! I feel that somewhere birds
Are drunk to be amid strange spray and skies!
Nothing, not those old gardens eyes reflect
Can now restrain this heart steeped in the sea
Oh nights! nor the lone brightness of my lamp
on the blank paper which its whiteness shields
nor the young wife, her baby at her breast.
I shall depart! Steamer with swaying masts,
Raise anchor for exotic wilderness!

Tedium, desolated by cruel hope,
has faith still in great fluttering farewells!
and, it may be, the masts, inviting storms
are of the sort that wind inclines to wrecks
lost, with no mast, no mast, or verdant isle...
but listen, oh my heart, the sailors sing!

Also, I can't neglect the fact that Mallarme got just about the greatest blurb of all time:

Mallarme's poetry is like the sea. Its surface, changeless yet evanescent, catches the eye. On bright days we apprehend chiefly the quicksilver flashes of luminous intelligence. In glooom we sense the ubiquitous threat of nothingness, dissolusion and death. Always we are aware of vast depths beneath the creases and folds, of immense power masquerading as froth.
- Washington Post Book World (Johnathan Yardley???)

[camilo · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘The only reality is Beauty and Its only perfect expression is Poetry. All the rest is a lie-except for those who live by the body, by love, or by the mental love that friendship is. Since you are lucky enough to have a love outside of Poetry, then love: doubtless in you, Being and Idea will find that paradise which wretched mortals, ignorant and lazy as they are, can only hope to find in death. Then when you think of the nothingness to come, this twin happiness you have found will comfort you, and you will think it all quite natural. As for me, Poetry takes the place of love because it is enamored of itself, and because this self-lust has a delightful dying fall in my soul. But I confess that the Knowledge I have acquired (or rediscovered in the depths of the man I was would seem insufficient to me-that my entrance into the last Abyss would be a truly crushing blow-if I were not able to finish my work; I mean she Work, the "Great Work,' as our ancestors the alchemists used to call it.’

[Alex Obrigewitsch · Rating 5 out of 5]

A beautiful soul held in and held forth by the tomb of the word. A true genius, the vehicle for the unending saying that is the word's expression. Mallarme is an exemplary figure of Man as the creature ecriture.

[Andra Dom · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mă asteptam la altceva. Totusi, cred ca s-a pierdut mult in traducere si ca versiunea originala e mai buna. Too bad I'm not that good at french.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

“…Therefore we must pay no attention to the book industry with its materialistic considerations. The making of a book, with respect to its flowering totality, begins with the first sentence. From time immemorial the poet has knowingly placed his verse in the sonnet which he writes upon our minds or upon pure space. We, in turn, will misunderstand the true meaning of this book and the miracle inherent in its structure, if we do not knowingly imagine that a given motif has been properly placed at a certain height on the page, according to its own or to the book's distribution of light.

Let us have no more of those successive, incessant, back and forth motions of our eyes, traveling from one line to the next and beginning all over again. Otherwise we will miss that ecstasy in which we become immortal for a brief hour, free of all reality, and raise our obsessions to the level of creation. If we do not actively create in this way (as we would music on the keyboard, turning the pages of a score), we would do better to shut our eyes and dream. I am not asking for any servile obedience. For, on the contrary, each of us has within him that lightning-like initiative which can link the scattered notes together.”

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mallarme’s poetry, I believe, unfortunately does not translate its true excellence into English. Focused on aesthetics, Mallarme included in his poetic formulations wonderful symbolism, which does translate, as well as aesthetic form that focused on spacing, and the image of the poem as a whole. Unfortunately, it is difficult to translate both. This volume does make an admirable attempt, however, and it is worth the investment in time to read the text. A great example, I think, of Mallarme’s work can be found in the last verse from “The Azure” is incredibly descriptive, overwhelming, haunting, and hyperbolic:
It travels ancient through the fog, and penetrates
Like an unerring blade your native agony;
Where flee in my revolt so useless and depraved?
For I am haunted! The Sky! The Sky! The Sky! The Sky!

Ranging widely over much subject matter, I found the prose contained in this volume just as interesting as the poetry. A quote from “Crisis In Poetry” is a fantastic representation of Mallarme’s thinking. “Each soul is a melody which must be picked up again, and the flute or the viola of everyone exists for that.” (75) Overall, Mallarme was an influential artist for his aesthetic quality and symbolic representations, and as such, deserves to be studied.

[Luke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is what I assume Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson would sound like if they published every single thought that ever came to them. Plus of course letters and other correspondences and whatnot that people should also be required to read. Text messages too, should they become available. The temporal order of writer’s neuronal firings is asking a lot but go ahead and throw it on the fire if we got it.

This reads like Rimbaud’s diary. Not exclusively the everything they published of his. And then left us to wonder just how additionally tortured and fickle young genius is.

When war becomes the norm you get these disproportionate populations. And men who are hardened into these impossible personas. This couldn’t have been a fun society to be a woman in at times. The decline of empire’s and the Nietzschean drama of early mourning.

[John Kameas · Rating 5 out of 5]

My understanding of whatever the fuck Mallarme was talking about decreased exponentially as the book went on. So, the greatest praise I can give this book --- on the merit of what my mere mortal mind could muster from those first few sections --- is that despite never sympathising with why some people get so damn worked up about reading books in their source-language, is that after completing this book, I suddenly really want to learn French.

[Samantha]

appreciated some of the more legible early work more at least in terms of having a grasp on what is written, but the later abstractions, building up to 'a thrown dice will never annul chance' are incredibly compelling. the confusion of the prose is more challenging than the poetry, perhaps because i allow more abstract/lyrical nature for poems than i would expect from prose. want to read more from the Tomb of Anatole.

[Noah · Rating 1 out of 5]

The concrete stuff's good, at least.

[Minā · Rating 4 out of 5]

"[...] A swan of long ago remembers now that he,
Magnificent but lost to hope, is doomed [...]"

[Sis Seanz ℘ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poetry that's like a beautiful puzzle kinda mysterious, sometimes confusing, but when it clicks, it hits you deep.

[Andràș-Florin Răducanu · Rating 3 out of 5]

Cred că traducerea trage în jos, e prea trunchiată pentru o poezie atât de fluidă.

[nonegloga]

– Il cielo è morto. – A te, materia, accorro! Dammi
L’oblio dell’Ideale crudele e del Peccato;
Questo martire viene a divider lo strame
Dove il gregge degli uomini felice è coricato.

Io voglio, poiché infine il mio cervello, vuoto
Come il vaso d’unguento gettato lungo un muro,
Più non sa agghindare il pensiero stentato,
Lugubre sbadigliare verso un trapasso oscuro...

Invano! Ecco trionfa l’Azzurro nella gloria
Delle campane.

[Peter Talbot · Rating 4 out of 5]

An easy bonbon for those who read effervescently. An impossible slog for any rigorous thinker. I guess I am in between: a dilettante emoter with the occasional desire for cogent thought. A delight if you can suspend your belief that a poet creates the eternal in 26 letter alphabets with nothing to engage their sight but furniture, heavy drapes and Baudelaire worship.

Recommend all to read. But once.

[Michael · Rating 4 out of 5]

einige hervorragende und ausgesprochen schöne gedichte finden sich darin, wie beispielsweise die "arbeiterlieder" oder auch die grabmals-dichtung; auch das ein oder andere gedicht in prosa ist schön zu lesen.

[Piego di Libri · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ci rimangono schegge di luce, bagliori nelle tenebre in un generale brancolamento nel buio. Ci rimane un balbettìo incomprensibile del grande discorso che Mallarmé aveva in mente...
http://www.piegodilibri.it/libri-disp...

[Monica]

I've no idea if this is the best choice but English and French translations are printed enface. I'm interested especially due to Joseph Cornell's appreciation of his work.

[Holly Raymond · Rating 5 out of 5]

That ghoulish pupil of Nostradamus. I had some fun reading this on a futon, for no reason. It's not like my bed wasn't available.

[Tony Iantosca · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's about how she became a McDonald's

[rebecca · Rating 2 out of 5]

Who knew that French syntax was so flexible? I certainly didn’t, so most of the time reading Mallarmé felt like deciphering an unfamiliar language.

[Audrey · Rating 3 out of 5]

➥ ❪ 𝟮𝟭/𝟬𝟲/𝟮𝟮 ─ 𝟯★ ❫
 ▸ read on eboox
  ▸ ebook

[Tym ✿⁠ · Rating 4 out of 5]

J'ai lu ça en VO, donc en français, mais j'ai pas trouvé la version française sur Goodreads 🤷🏽‍♂️

[Giovanna · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Oh dreamer, that I may plunge
Pathless to pure delight,
Learn by a subtle lie
To keep my wing in your hand…”

[Ahmad · Rating 5 out of 5]

Best book ever read about poetry and prose

[Mills College Library]

841.8 M252Ac 1982