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A bilingual collection of 55 Stephane Mallarmepoems. Translated from the French by Daisy Aldan withexpositions. Mallarme (1842-1898), renowned French symbolist poet, isfamous for his unique approach to poetry, considered today to bebrilliant.

This new bilingual collection of 55 Stephane Mallarmepoems, including one of his masterpieces, "Un Coup De Des" ("A Throwof the Dice"), gives readers a fresh new perspective of Mallarme'sgenius. Translator Dr. Daisy Aldan discovered and fell in love withMallarme's work when she was told that her poetry was reminiscent ofhis. In 1956, she translated "Un Coup De Des" into English for thefirst time; the result was recognition of Dr. Aldan's unparalleleddeep understanding and feeling for Mallarme. Now, more than 40 yearslater, she has blessed us with To Purify the Words of theTribe, with expositions, which will surely lead to a deepercomprehension of the poetry of Stephane Mallarme. ... Read more

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A triumph of insight, sympathy, craft
Daisy Aldan was herself an extraordinary poet, but she was also a translator from several languages, a small-press publisher, a high school teacher (at the NYC High School of the Arts, with Harvey Fierstein and Gerard Malanga among her students), and a promoter of the poetry (and visual arts) of others, both before they were known and long after they had died.

Daisy did great service to Whitman and to Poe in her public lectures, but Mallarme was her favorite. She was a serious esotericist as well, and understood the inner meanings of his poems remarkably. Thus in translating them she did not worry at the impossible task of mirroring the surface, but went to core of his poems and brought them into English from that level. Her mother was an actress, and Daisy did not neglect the dramatic quality of Mallarme.

No translation could serve you better.

Mallarme's work can now be fully experienced in our language
Stephane Mallarme is often approached either with reverance duea god or with the disdain of ignorance. Happily, Daisy Aldan brings alifetime of study, her own opus of poetry and critical work, and a true, intimate bilingualism to a masterful translation of the major verse poems of Stephane Mallarme, TO PURIFY THE WORDS OF THE TRIBE, a book with facing French texts that contains her unsurpassed translation of "A Throw of the Dice" and illuminating expositions of each poem.

Aldan has sometimes described herself as a "former school teacher." The demystification of these often unread, misread, and misunderstood poems testify to her democratic approach as a true pedagogue and to the difficulties of Mallarme's very dense and crafted poems which are explicated with ease and generosity. The poetry of Mallarme is certainly not for a coven of priestly erudities; written during a nineteenth century of smokestacks and alienation brings the history of Western thought and symbolism into the NOW of the poet, into his life and vision.

Thanks to Daisy Aldan, Mallarme's work can now be fully experienced in our language, which is no mean feat. To carry forth his vision Mallarme had to struggle with the material sordidness of his age:

Let the dreary smokestacks ceaselessly pour smoke, and let a roving prison of soot Blot out in the horror of its dismal trains the sun dying in sulfur on the horizon

-The Sky is dead.-Towards you I hasten! Bestow, O matter, Oblivion of the cruel Ideal and of Sin Upon this martyr who comes to share the litter Where the contented herd of humans lies asleep

But he cannot succumb to the temptation to join the crowd, to escape his responsibility as a poet:

Where flee in this futile and perverse revolt? I am haunted! The Azure! The Azure! The Azure!

Aldan, to her credit, serves Mallarme by using her own poetic craft sparingly. In no way does she recreate the poems. Nor does Aldan aim to complicate matters by working out rhyme schemes that, in the end, would be extraneous and fail to do justice to the text. Mallarme is, perhaps the most concise and replete of poets and to be faithful to his content in an aesthetically satisfying way needs no rhyme or foot counting, a la francais. Aldan knows, well, when to stop.

"The Tomb of Edgar Poe" is an example of a perfectly clear translation without the distractions of second hand versification.Aldan has the capacity to keep very close to the original and the skill to move from one language to the other with the ease and rhythmic nuance that her talent as a poet makes possible:

Just as eternity transforms him at last unto Himself The Poet rouses with a naked sword, His age terrified at not having discerned That death was triumphant in that strange voice

They, like a Hydra; vile spasm on hearing the angel Once give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe Loudly proclaimed the sorcery drunk In the dishonored flow of some foul brew...

The famously difficult "Le Vierge, le Vivace et le Bel Aujourd'hui" also illustrates this capacity:

Will virginal, vibrant and beautiful today shatter with a blow of its rapturous wing this solid lost lake where beneath the frost haunts the transparent glacier of unrealized flights!

When Aldan paraphrases stanzas of this poem in the section devoted to exposition, she eschews brilliant interpretation and "the art of criticism." Her aim is simple: to make the poems comprehensible to the reading public. And she succeeds.

The book concludes with the innovative "A Throw of the Dice." Andre Gide called this "the most untranslatable poem in any language," but Daisy Aldan's translation, published in the fifties, was highly acclaimed and brought her fame in the French community.She was called a "Mallarmiste par excellence."

"The Throw of the Dice," a poem originally written on music paper, has varying typeface and the lines of the poem read from one page to the next, across the inner spine. Each type section (caps, italics, tiny print etc.) can be read as a separate poem but when everything is read as a whole, it is the main poem. Each page is, also, an ideogram, with visual appeal...sky, sea, bird, etc. In this poem Mallarme attempted an evolution of consciousness and the freeing of Mankind, which was his mission. Daisy Aldan assures that we experience this... ... Read more

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Nineteenth-century French poet St_phane Mallarm_, regarded as a major influence on modern literature and critical theory, has long mystified readers with notoriously obscure writings and philosophy. In this highly original book, Graham Robb reveals an important "key" to Mallarm`s poetry that redefines Mallarm studies and opens the way for new interpretations of some of the most complicated poems ever written. ... Read more

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A Master Locksmith Unlocks Mallarmé's Prosody
Knowing Robb as the immensely entertaining and informative biographer of Hugo, Balzac, and Rimbaud, I was surprised to learn he'd written a book of this nature, a book on prosody -- biographers of artists never seem to have the kind of technical knowledge that Robb turns out to have in spades -- but one of the charms of this book is the bemused author's maintenance of the down to earth and unpretentious tone of his biographies: his tone makes the book fun to read.(In that sense, Unlocking Mallarmé reminds me of Owen Barfield's What Coleridge Thought.)

Robb not only has a thorough technical command of every aspect of the relevant prosody in the abstract, he has an historian's knowledge of, for example, what words were commonly rhymed in France in the 19th century and by whom, whether Hugo, Lamartine, Banville, or Baudelaire.In other words, he knows what Mallarmé knew and, like Mallarmé, from the inside.Which words will rhyme in French is happenstance, of course, but Robb's book is the result of a Eureka! moment when he realized that Mallarmé was obsessed with those French words that don't rhyme.

Making of Mallarmé a kind of "language poet" -- although Robb never uses that term -- Robb demonstrates that prosody (including rhyme)is the protagonist of Mallarmé's poetry, and how the mechanisms of that prosody give rise to the multiplying associations or meanings so famously characteristic of this particular poet.Part of Robb's argument is faintly Saussurian -- he sometimes tallies the phonemes as they accumulate -- but he's never doctrinaire, allowing the argument to take him where it leads.As Robb makes clear, the music of one aspect of Mallarmé's prosody reverberates off the music of the other aspects of Mallarmé's prosody, and Robb points to various ways in which this happens.

Highly recommended.

Unlocking Mallarme
The poetry of Stephane Mallarme, leader of the French Symbolist movement, has long been recognized for its beauty and difficulty, and a hundred years of subsequent critical studies have added much heat (and, sometimes, a little light) to itsinterpretation. Mallarme would be delighted, since his was a poetics of deliberate complexity, in which the ostensible subject often became little more than a pretext for working out his brilliant and difficult technique.

Graham Robb's contribution begins with an observation that, while most poets favored end-words with many rhymes, Mallarme favored end-words with the fewest possible rhymes - thus setting a deliberate challenge for himself - and often built his poems around the hundred or so key words in French which have no rhyme at all (a full list is provided in the book.) Furthermore, he asserts that Mallarme often determined the individual rhyme-words (not just the rhyme scheme) before beginning the poem! These observations are explained in detail in Part I of the book; Part II analyzes selected poems in terms of his theory. Surprisingly, Robb is able to draw many pertinent conclusions about the meanings of individual poems from this kind of analysis; he convinced me that this approach does add measurably to the reader's understanding.

Recommended for folks with a good command of French (in addition to the poems, there are numerous untranslated French-language quotes in the book.) In addition, the prospective reader shouldpreviously have read Mallarme's poems -- this book is not an introduction. Finally, some interest and patience is helpful to follow the details of Robb's prosodic analysis. The reward at the end of the journey is that the reader will enjoy Robb's graceful prose (this is a technical book but not at all a dryly technical one), and will come away not only with Robb's particular interpretations, but also with a technique of "reading" Mallarme that many readers will find helpful in their own exploration of these great but elusive poems. ... Read more

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In this book Adam Piette establishes fascinating new links between sound effects and the representation of memory in literary texts.He sets out a workable taxonomy of sound-repetitions in prose and formulates, through a theory of alerting-devices, the ways in which the reader's attention is drawn to the acoustic surface of the text. Piette scrutinizes Mallarme's prose-poetry, Proust's musical syntax, Joyce's memory-rhymes (from the Portrait of the Artist through Ulysses to Finnegans Wake), and Beckett's prose and drama, demonstrating that sound effects act as intricate reminders of memory-traces in the text. Despite how widely the four writers diverge in their representations of memory, Piette shows that the use of this memory-rhyme technique is common to them all. ... Read more

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the poetically ananlytical voice of nothingness
This book exceeds the linguistical capacity of appraisal.The intro- well constructed, cleanly written- has tranfixed an elusive Sartre that resides under the appearence of Sartre. The translation is utterly perfected to echo the nuances of Sartre's analytical style. Through Sartre's analysis, one becomes aware of the meaning of the poet.From the floating pen of Mallarme, to the analytical precision of Sartre, to the beautifly rendered translation of Sturm, including an introduction that surpasses the fragile, uninformative, existence of intro's, and stands alone as a well-composed critical essay, the english reader has been granted a gift. Without reading this, you're Sartrean perspective wobbles hopelessly on one leg. Highly recommended. ... Read more

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Unfolding Mallarme provides a coherent account of Mallarme's poetic developments from his earliest verse to his final masterpiece, "Un coup de Des." A series of close readings demonstrate the intricate linguistic and formal play to be found in many of his major poems; and, in a detailed analysis of "Un coup de Des," Pearson explores the "profound calculation" upon which Mallarme's final, seemingly chaotic masterpiece is based. ... Read more

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Upon his death in 1898, the French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme (b. 1842) left behind a body of published work which though modest in quantity was to have a seminal influence on subsequent poetry and aesthetic theory. He also enjoyed an unparalleled reputation for extending help and encouragement to those who sought him out. Rosemary Lloyd has produced a fascinating literary biography of the poet and his period, offering a subtle exploration of the mind and letters of one of the giants of modern European poetry.

Every Tuesday, from the late 1870s on, Mallarme hosted gatherings that became famous as the "Mardis" and that were attended by a cross section of significant writers, artists, thinkers, and musicians in fin-de-siecle France, England, and Belgium. Through these gatherings and especially through a voluminous correspondence--eventually collected in eleven volumes--Mallarme developed and recorded his friendships with Paul Valery, Andre Gide, Berthe Morisot, and many others. Attractively written and scrupulously documented, Mallarme: The Poet and His Circle is unique in offering a biographical account of the poet’s literary practice and aesthetics which centers on that correspondence. ... Read more

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savoring jewellery
The brilliant light of this masterful work has been shed into the most reluctant corner, I'm astonished at the revealing glance at fabulous flowers. How refreshing to read something like this, I savor every page! Bravo Rosemary, I would follow you anywhere! ... Read more

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1 b/w illustrationThe leading poet of French symbolism, Stéphane Mallarmé has exercised an enormous influence both on French and on English and American avant-garde writers. In this volume C. F. MacIntyre has translated forty-three of his poems, including the "Ouverture" and "Scène" from Hérodiade, which was to have been a drama in verse, and the well-known L'Après-midi d'un faune, for which Debussy composed his orchestral prelude. The French text faces the English translations, which are both true to the original and poetic.Indeed, as MacIntyre suggests, Debussy is probably "one of the best guides into the mysterious realm of Mallarmé." The poet was more concerned with the music of words, their sounds and vague associations, than with their conventional meanings; one of the elements in his credo was that suggestion and evocation are of greater significance than statement. His syntax is fractious, his meaning frequently enigmatic; but the reader will find MacIntyre's notes helpful in savoring the translations and the original French verses. ... Read more

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Buy it for the bonkers annotation.
'The reader seems to have some disaster of far vaster import than he can fathom.That is the mysterious effect of Mallarme's poetry.One gets a strange emotional effect past analysis'.So declares translator C.F. MacIntyre of a typically impenetrable Mallarme sonnet.Unfortunately, it's an effect the non-French reader will never experience.In translation, somebody like Robert Frost once said, what is lost is the poetry, and no other writer exemplifies this truism more clearly than Mallarme.Most translations will at least yield some sort of broad narrative or imagistic or intellectual sense.Mallarme's self-contained, bookish, exquisitely artificial poetry (Borges was a fan) exists on a plane beyond sense.It is an intensely intricate agglomeration of sounds, forms, distorted grammar, codes and riddles whose 'meaning' is not literal.Mallarme is usually compared to a costumier, jeweller or musician, such is this artisan's devotion to the poem as crafted object.The only real way to translate Mallarme is not to find literal English equivalents for his words as printed, but to find new word-constructions with sounds and resonances that transmute the originals' spirit, rather than sense.But if the translator had that kind of gift, s/he wouldn't be wasting it on Mallarme translations.Despite MacIntyre's best efforts, then, literal Mallarme in English sounds like the worst kind of sub-decadent pot-pourri, like the imitations of French Symbolism Oscar Wilde churned out in his youth.[...]This does not mean the volume is useless.French students struggling with the originals can use the translations as a kind of grammatical glossary, and will find MacIntyre's synopses and explanatory notes, with background and critical infomration, helpful, if dated.The casual reader, however, will find much to enjoy.After a few poems (including the famous 'Herodiade' and 'L'apres-mide d'un faune'), I gave up struggling with Mallarme, and gave into the pleasures of MacIntyre's annotations.A real-life Charles Kinbote, he doesn't even seem to like Mallarme very much: one poem 'is built up of so much nothing, like a fragile pastry of whipped cream.It is artful in the worst sense of the word... He should have had a stern editor! (As I have)'; 'Line 4 is particularly good, [a critic] insists, because it suppresses the classic caesura!I don't think many readers would suffer if the whole sonnet had been suppressed'.He refers to Mallarme's art as a 'dead end', execrates 'his miserably bungled up French', and cheerfully admits that he doesn't really understand the poems!So what qualified him to translate them?!A delectable egotism blows through the pages, from its overheated, homoerotic dedication, and the unwarranted, though very welcome, detours into autobiography and war memories, to the Olympian sneers at previous commentators.Published in sexually unliberated 1957, MacIntyre is forced to euphemise Mallarme's detailed and relentless erotics, which leads to some splendid tongue-twisting; the frequent suspicion that MacIntyre himself misses the point of a poem like 'What silk...' ('the mouth will not be sure/in its bite of finding savor,/unless he, your princely lover,/breathe out, diamond-like, in your/considerable tuft the cry/of Glories stifled as they die'), which he says is about a woman brushing her hair at the mirror (!), is quashed by his mocking one persistently misreading critic: 'Really now.I wish I still had Herr Wais's niaive innocence.I really do'.Barmy, endearing and delightful. ... Read more

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This volume is produced from digital images created through the University of Michigan University Library's large-scale digitization efforts. The Library seeks to preserve the intellectual content of items in a manner that facilitates and promotes a variety of uses. The digital reformatting process results in an electronic version of the original text that can be both accessed online and used to create new print copies. The Library also understands and values the usefulness of print and makes reprints available to the public whenever possible. This book and hundreds of thousands of others can be found in the HathiTrust, an archive of the digitized collections of many great research libraries. For access to the University of Michigan Library's digital collections, please see http://www.lib.umich.edu and for information about the HathiTrust, please visit http://www.hathitrust.org ... Read more

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Poetry. Bilingual Edition. Translated from the French by David Scott. A fully bilingual edition of Mallarme's SONNETS, with introduction and notes designed for the undergraduate. An ideal way to find one's way into Mallarme's engagement with this particular form, which played a central part in his work in the last 15 years of his life. ... Read more

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This Elibron Classics book is a facsimile reprint of a 1880 edition by J. Rothschild, Paris. ... Read more

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One of a series of French texts which are works of the past and not readily accessible to scholars. Each has historic or literary value and is accompanied by an introduction, bibliogaphy and notes, all in French. This volume presents "Villiers de l'Isle-Adam" by Mallarme. Each volume in the series is available individually, and a special subscription rate is available in advance of publication for each group of four forthcoming titles. Details are available on request from the University of Exeter Press. ... Read more

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170 pp ... Read more