The New Yorker. A Critic at Large. "Encrypted" Translators confront the supreme enigma of Stephane Mallarme's poetry
This is a lovely article giving new perspectives on Mallarme's relationship to Modernism as well as on translation from french, a very nuanced language, to English, the language noted for multiple valences. Alex Ross is a clever writer, starting out by likening the Modernists to explorers, in this instance, "Amundsen"! Immediately, he has my attention. The illustration is by Hugo Guinness. Another italicized sub heading is: "After only a few lines of Mallarme, you are engulfed in fine mist, and terror sets in. "
The Scottish poet Peter Manson publishes a collection of translations in 2012(Miami University Press) . The one cited enploys a swan caught in the ice. " The subsequent sentences are impacted and fractured, the ;jamming together of disconnected images presaging Dadiasim. "
Mallarme also affected the visual artists of his time, having helped to define Impressionism in an 1876 essay; Manet, Whistler, Gauguin, and Renoir made portraits of him, Degas photographed him.
In Music, the advent of modernism is often pegged to Debussy's 1894 composition "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun," a meditation on Mallarme's most famous poem.
John cage and Pierre Boulez, master of the musical avante garde, studied Mallarme's explorations of chance and discontinuity.
The poet hit upon his principal ;method, which is to combine words in unexpected ways and thus to create a "new work" in their place. "
Paul Verlaine featured him in his anthology of "poetes maudits" and he was catapulted out of the dustbin...as he had spent all his years teaching and living in relative anonymity. Mallarme, through Baudelaire's introduction, was an admirer of Edgar Allen Poe.
( I thought of my beautiful edition of Paul Verlaine, which is somewhere in storage, or no where, any longer. It was once a book I treasured with its antique pages and beautiful marbled cover )
When Mallarme did retire from teaching, as he left writing for the "side", he died five years later, so did not enjoy "the freedom" to write exclusively. One of the great tragedies of his life was the loss of his 8 year old son to Rheumatic fever, which is elegized in "For Anatole's Tomb".
Mallarme liked to sail and wrote often of boats and celestial navigation. He would gaze at the sun and sunsets, at stars and constellations.
"Destruction was my Beatrice", Mallarme wrote. He also called a book a "bomb".
Mallarme became the house god of Roland Barthes and the post-structuralists, who proclaimed the "death of the author".
Derrida's 1972 book "dissemination" makes almost perfect sense if you come to it after an immersion in Mallarme. The theorist's musings on "undecidability" on the "excess of syntax over meaning" are precise paraphrases of Mallarme's technique.
Rancier in "Mallarme: The Politics of the Siren" that Mallarme's was a "solitary protest against worn-out language and false populist gestures, Mallarme himself said, "I alone create a product that society does not want."
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I read "Shouts and Murmurs" Fleeing, Hypothetically, by Calvin Trillin, (p 32) which is a very humorous short essay about ostensibly seeking citizenship in Canada, based on spending his summers every year in Nova Scotia....he employs quotes from his former writings which do not persuade the interviewer. He worries about remarks he has made in the past, such as Canada changing its Thanksgiving day to match America's. When Trillin utters, "I'm seeking asylum from a country in danger of being taken over by a egomanical windbag", the interviewer walks out the door.
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BOOKS. Charles McGrath writes a book review. "Desk Set" is such a clever title, with a subtitle, "How Blanche Knopf helped make Knopf". Although I have great respect for the Knopf label, as it has published 25 Nobel laureates, 60 Pulitzer Prize winners, and more than 30 winners of the National Book award, it definitely has a niche in literary publishing. A merger of Random House and Penguin Books has bought hundreds of publishing imprints, in the formation of a mega company of which Knopf is one that has held onto its literary identity of caring about literary excellence, without neglecting the bottom. line. The crux of this review is somewhat scepticism that Blanche deserves more credit than her husband. The last sentence probably sums it up: "That they were so unalike was bad for the marriage, (She lived in a stylish midtown apartment and he lived on an estate in Purchase) ultimately, but very good for business, where they couldn't have suited each other better."
The Scottish poet Peter Manson publishes a collection of translations in 2012(Miami University Press) . The one cited enploys a swan caught in the ice. " The subsequent sentences are impacted and fractured, the ;jamming together of disconnected images presaging Dadiasim. "
Mallarme also affected the visual artists of his time, having helped to define Impressionism in an 1876 essay; Manet, Whistler, Gauguin, and Renoir made portraits of him, Degas photographed him.
In Music, the advent of modernism is often pegged to Debussy's 1894 composition "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun," a meditation on Mallarme's most famous poem.
John cage and Pierre Boulez, master of the musical avante garde, studied Mallarme's explorations of chance and discontinuity.
The poet hit upon his principal ;method, which is to combine words in unexpected ways and thus to create a "new work" in their place. "
Paul Verlaine featured him in his anthology of "poetes maudits" and he was catapulted out of the dustbin...as he had spent all his years teaching and living in relative anonymity. Mallarme, through Baudelaire's introduction, was an admirer of Edgar Allen Poe.
( I thought of my beautiful edition of Paul Verlaine, which is somewhere in storage, or no where, any longer. It was once a book I treasured with its antique pages and beautiful marbled cover )
When Mallarme did retire from teaching, as he left writing for the "side", he died five years later, so did not enjoy "the freedom" to write exclusively. One of the great tragedies of his life was the loss of his 8 year old son to Rheumatic fever, which is elegized in "For Anatole's Tomb".
Mallarme liked to sail and wrote often of boats and celestial navigation. He would gaze at the sun and sunsets, at stars and constellations.
"Destruction was my Beatrice", Mallarme wrote. He also called a book a "bomb".
Mallarme became the house god of Roland Barthes and the post-structuralists, who proclaimed the "death of the author".
Derrida's 1972 book "dissemination" makes almost perfect sense if you come to it after an immersion in Mallarme. The theorist's musings on "undecidability" on the "excess of syntax over meaning" are precise paraphrases of Mallarme's technique.
Rancier in "Mallarme: The Politics of the Siren" that Mallarme's was a "solitary protest against worn-out language and false populist gestures, Mallarme himself said, "I alone create a product that society does not want."
-----------------------------------------------------------
I read "Shouts and Murmurs" Fleeing, Hypothetically, by Calvin Trillin, (p 32) which is a very humorous short essay about ostensibly seeking citizenship in Canada, based on spending his summers every year in Nova Scotia....he employs quotes from his former writings which do not persuade the interviewer. He worries about remarks he has made in the past, such as Canada changing its Thanksgiving day to match America's. When Trillin utters, "I'm seeking asylum from a country in danger of being taken over by a egomanical windbag", the interviewer walks out the door.
-----------------
BOOKS. Charles McGrath writes a book review. "Desk Set" is such a clever title, with a subtitle, "How Blanche Knopf helped make Knopf". Although I have great respect for the Knopf label, as it has published 25 Nobel laureates, 60 Pulitzer Prize winners, and more than 30 winners of the National Book award, it definitely has a niche in literary publishing. A merger of Random House and Penguin Books has bought hundreds of publishing imprints, in the formation of a mega company of which Knopf is one that has held onto its literary identity of caring about literary excellence, without neglecting the bottom. line. The crux of this review is somewhat scepticism that Blanche deserves more credit than her husband. The last sentence probably sums it up: "That they were so unalike was bad for the marriage, (She lived in a stylish midtown apartment and he lived on an estate in Purchase) ultimately, but very good for business, where they couldn't have suited each other better."
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