Books by Stephane Mallarme
A Tomb for Anatole
by Paul Auster, Stephane Mallarme
An immensely moving poetic work addressing inconsolable sorrow: a father's pain over the death of his child. Bilingual. "One of the most moving accounts of a man trying to come to grips with modern death that is to say, death without God, death without hope of salvation and it reveals the secret meaning of Mallarme's whole aesthetic: the elevation of art to the stature of religion." Paul Auster, from the Introduction The great French Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898), who changed the course of modern French literature (and influenced writers from James Joyce to T.S. Eliot to Wallace Stevens), suffered many tragedies. His mother died when he was just five years old, but in 1879 the cruelest blow of all struck when his beloved son Anatole died at the age of eight. A Tomb for Anatole presents the 202 fragments of Mallarme's projected long poem in four parts. By far the poet's most personal work, he could never bring himself to complete it. To speak publicly of his immense sorrow, Mallarme concluded, "for me, it's not possible." Unpublished in France until 1961, these works are very far from the oblique, cool "pure poetry" Mallarme is famous for, poetry that sought to capturepainstakingly"l'absente de tous bouquets" (the ideal flower absent from all bouquets). Paul Auster, who first published A Tomb for Anatole with the North Point Press in 1983 (a volume long out of print), notes in his excellent introduction that facing "the ultimate horror of every parent," these fragments "have a startling unmediated quality." As Mallarme writes, it is "a vision / endlessly purified / by my tears."
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A Roll of the Dice
Previously only available in hardcover, and after a long period of being unavailable, one of Wave's most popular titles, A Roll of the Dice by Stéphane Mallarmé, is now available in paperback.
Through brilliant collaboration, Robert Bononno and book designer Jeff Clark translated one of Mallarmé’s most well-known and visually complex poems into contemporary English language and design. This bilingual softcover edition not only includes Mallarmé's original preface, but also matches the typography of the last round of proofs that Mallarmé was correcting at the time of his death. Clark's presentation is both visually stunning and typographically radical, mirroring the dark mystery of Mallarmé’s poem. With a keen understanding of poetics, Bononno’s translation offers myriad interpretations, while capturing the visionary spirit of the original. Together, Clark and Bononno have created a singular version of A Roll of the Dice that is markedly unique in its attention to the ways layout, design, typeface, and language all contribute to the meaning making of this masterpiece.
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A Roll of the Dice
A translation by Robert Bononno and designer Jeff Clark of one of Stéphane Mallarmé’s most well-known and visually complex poems into contemporary English language and design. The book is composed in an elaborate set of type and photography to both honor the original and be an object of delight. Includes the original preface by Mallarmé. Bilingual edition.
Stéphane Mallarmé (184298) was born in Paris and is widely regarded as one of the most important figures of nineteenth-century French poetry.
Jeff Clark's book designs have been praised in the New Yorker, Better Living Through Design, Cool Hunting, Granta, and other venues. He is a graduate of the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop.
Robert Bononno has received two NEA grants for translations of French authors and was a finalist for the French-American Foundation Translation Prize for his translation of René Crevel.
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Poesies Mallarme (Poesie/Gallimard) (French Edition)
by Stephane Mallarme, Oleh Zujewskyj
"Comprendre Mallarmé a toujours paru difficile. Mais c'est que dès qu'il s'agit de lui, qui fut un des fondateurs de notre modernité, il ne faut pas hésiter à se référer pourtant à ce qui peut en paraître si éloigné : les grandes structures de la pensée archaïque. Celle-ci, en effet, cette longue et omniprésente tradition qu'a commencé de démanteler en Europe à la fin de la Renaissance le nouvel esprit scientifique, ancrait le besoin de connaître dans l'existence comme elle va, autrement dit dans le temps, avec pour horizon et énigme les moyens limités de la condition humaine, et le hasard des événements, et la fatalité de la mort. C'est par analogie avec ses situations de l'exister quotidien que les aspects que nous dirions les plus matériels du monde étaient abordés : choses que l'on percevait de ce fait comme des êtres, enchaînements qui semblaient dictés par un dessein, un vouloir. Et c'est donc de par l'intérieur de l'événement ou de l'objet qu'on avait l'impression d'accéder à leur raison d'être, à leur sens ; et sans avoir perdu pour autant contact avec leur apparence la plus immédiatement sensorielle, alors encore non simplifiée par les instruments de mesure. Par exemple, la passiflore était comprise, dans l'univers médiéval. On avait reconnu dans ses organes floraux une représentation abrégée - une image en miroir - des instruments de la Passion, chiffres eux-mêmes du salut, de la Providence. Et ce savoir préservait donc toute la présence sensible de cette fleur, il en voyait la couleur, il en respirait le parfum. [...] Les couleurs, les odeurs, les sons restaient vifs dans l'idée de la passiflore ou du ciel étoilé, aussi riches ceux-ci apparaissaient-ils de significations symboliques ; et pour peu qu'on approfondît cette lecture de signes, on pouvait donc déboucher sur une expérience d'unité sans quitter le plan des réalités sensibles : l'expérience même que Mallarmé dans ses premiers textes appellera une extase. Mallarmé qui a ressent durement, dès ses débuts de poète, que la connaissance ne s'élabore plus, de notre temps, que de l'extérieur, qu'elle réifie tout ce qu'elle touche, que les parfums, les couleurs, les sons ne soient donc pour nous que des émergences privées de tout sens profond, désordonnées." Yves Bonnefoy.
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Oeuvres Completes (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade) (French Edition) (Bibliotheque de la Pleiade)
Rare book
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A Blow of Dice Never Will Abolish Chance: A Poem
A deluxe, large-format publication of French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s most influential work
Among the most influential works of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le Hasard feels to this day revolutionary and resoundingly contemporary, both for the suggestive power of its unconventional free verse and for its striking visual impact. For the poet, the white spaces, or scattered "silences," are as integral to the reading as the words on the page, and the very design―the typographical layers and the arrangement of lines and words upon the page and across spreads―carries meaning and content.
At the time of his death in 1898, Mallarmé was close to realizing his vision of a deluxe, large-format publication of the poem that would meet his precise specifications with regard to dimensions, typography and page design, and would include commissioned lithographs by his friend Odilon Redon, an artist he admired for the tonal richness and symbolic power of his images.
This two-volume edition brings all of these elements together for the first time in an English-language edition. Separate French and English volumes allow for individual readings of the original poem and this fresh new translation (A Blow of Dice Never Will Abolish Chance), each produced at full scale, meticulously typeset and accompanied by Redon's evocative illustrations.
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The Book
Frequently quoted but never before translated in its entirety, The Book is a visual poem about its own construction
The French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) was modernism's great champion of the book as both a conceptual and material entity: perhaps his most famous pronouncement is "everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book." A colossal influence on literature from Huysmans to Ashbery, art from Manet to Broodthaers, music from Debussy to Boulez and philosophy from Blanchot to Rancière, Mallarmé spent more than 30 years on a project he called Le Livre. This legendary, unfinished project is now translated into English for the first time.
The Book was Mallarmé's total artwork, a book to encompass all books. His collected drafts and notes toward it, published only posthumously in French in 1957, are alternately mystical, lyrical and gloriously banal; for example, many concern the dimensions, page count and cost of printing this ideal book. Resembling sheet music, the lines are laid out like a musical score, with abundant expanses of blank space between them. Frequently quoted, sometimes excerpted, but never before translated in its entirety, The Book is a visual poem about its own construction, the scaffolding of a cosmic architecture intended to reveal "all existing relations between everything."
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Azure: Poems and Selections from the "Livre" (Wesleyan Poetry Series)
A vibrant new translation of a modernist poet
During his lifetime, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842 – 1898) was recognized as one of the greatest living French poets. He wrote extensively on themes of reality and his desire to turn away from it, marrying form and content in revolutionary ways that departed drastically from the more tightly controlled French tradition. Despite his status as one of the first modernists, much of Mallarmé's radicalism has been lost in translation. Finally, in this new collection by Blake Bronson-Bartlett and Robert Fernandez, the magic and mastery of form and diction, so striking in Mallarmé's French verse, comes to life in English. Drawing from Poésies (1899), Un coup de dés (A Cast of Dice), and the "Livre" (the "Book"―the overarching conceptual work left unfinished at the death of the poet), this collection captures Mallarmé's true linguistic brilliance, bringing the poems into our current history while retaining the music, playfulness, and power of the originals.
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Collected Poems and Other Verse (Oxford World's Classics)
by Stephane Mallarme, A. M. Blackmore, E.H. Blackmore
Stéphane Mallarmé was the most radically innovative of nineteenth-century poets, and a key figure in Modernism. His writings, with their richly sensuous texture and air of slyly intangible mystery, perplexed or outraged many early readers; yet no writer has more profoundly influenced the course of modern poetry - in English as well as in French. This is the fullest collection of Mallarmé's poetry ever published in English, and the only edition in any language that presents his Poésies in the last arrangement known to have been approved by the author. Prose poems, uncollected verse, and the unique, unclassifiable Un Coup de dés... (A Dice Throw...) are also present, including over 20 items that have never previously been translated. Original spelling, punctuation, and lineation have been preserved throughout.
The lucid, wide-ranging introduction provides a clear survey of Mallarmé's work and deals fully with the difficulties that may face readers approaching it for the first time. Collected Poems offers both Mallarme lovers and first-time readers a full understanding of this astonishing poet's work.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
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Divagations
The salmagundi of prose poems, musings, criticism, and reflections that is Divagations is a treasure trove for students of aesthetics and modern poetry. The only book of prose Mallarmé published in his lifetime, it is now available for the first time in English just as he arranged it, in all of its languor and musicality.
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Selected Poems
The 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.
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Collected Poems of Mallarme
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) is one of the giants of nineteenth-century French poetry. Leader of the Symbolist movement, he exerted a powerful influence on modern literature and thought, which can be traced in the works of Paul Valéry, W.B. Yeats, and Jacques Derrida. From his early twenties until the time of his death, Mallarmé produced poems of astonishing originality and beauty, many of which have become classics.
In the Collected Poems, Henry Weinfield brings the oeuvre of this European master to life for an English-speaking audience, essentially for the first time. All the poems that the author chose to retain are here, superbly rendered by Weinfield in a translation that comes remarkably close to Mallarmé's own voice. Weinfield conveys not simply the meaning but the spirit and music of the French originals, which appear en face.
Whether writing in verse or prose, or inventing an altogether new genre―as he did in the amazing "Coup de Dés"―Mallarmé was a poet of both supreme artistry and great difficulty. To illuminate Mallarmé's poetry for twentieth-century readers, Weinfield provides an extensive commentary that is itself an important work of criticism. He sets each poem in the context of the work as a whole and defines the poems' major symbols. Also included are an introduction and a bibliography.
Publication of this collection is a major literary event in the English-speaking world: here at last is the work of a major figure, masterfully translated.
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The Poems in Verse
Poetry. Translated from the French by Peter Manson. THE POEMS IN VERSE is Peter Manson's translation of The Po�sies of St�phane Mallarm�. Long overshadowed by Mallarm�'s theoretical writings and by his legendary visual poem "Un coup de D�s jamais n'abolira le Hasard," the Po�sies are lyrics of a uniquely prescient and generative modernity. Grounded in a scrupulous sounding of the complex ambiguities of the original poems, Manson's English translations draw on the resources of the most innovative poetries of our own time--these may be the first translations really to trust the English language to bear the full weight of Mallarm�an complexity. With THE POEMS IN VERSE, Mallarm�'s voice is at last brought back, with all its incisive strangeness, into the conversation it started a hundred and fifty years ago, called contemporary poetry.
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For Anatole's Tomb
Among the most ambitious works that Stéphane Mallarmé attempted, these poems—reflections on the death of his eight-year-old son—remain a moving reading experience and reveal a side to the poet largely unknown. This en-face translation, based on a recent text established in the Pléiade Mallarmé, is preceded by a substantial introduction.
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