It does not offer itself as a single object of contemplation with a fixable reading position. The imagery of sea, shipwreck, and gambling is enacted in the violence and risk of reading as the poem swirls and surges over a background of simultaneous blankness and multiplicity. Like Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, which ends so that the next word could be the first word of the book, the ending of ‘A Dice Throw’ appears to promise conclusion but in fact points back into what seems infinite possibility. The work is a journey, but not one that moves from a beginning towards an end.

NOTE ON THE TEXT AND TRANSLATION

The main body of this book contains all the works finally collected by Mallarmé himself under the heading ‘poems’: the verse Poésies prepared for publication in 1894, the prose ‘Poèmes’ issued in 1897 as part of his volume Divagations (Diversions), and the unclassifiable ‘Poème’ Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard (A Dice Throw At Any Time Never Will Abolish Chance), set up in proof for separate publication in 1898. (The Poésies and Un coup de dés x… did not actually pass through the press until after his death—in 1899 and 1914 respectively.)

Divagations includes all of Mallarmé’s prose poems, but the 1894 collection of Poésies does not contain all his verse. The two appendices to the present edition supply the other significant verse works.

Appendix 1 contains all the verse that has been added posthumously to the body of Mallarmé’s Poésies (apart from juvenilia—we have arbitrarily defined that category as ending in 1861, the year before he began publishing poems—and fragments). Most of these pieces were interpolated among the Poésies by the poet’s daughter Geneviève, either in the 1899 Deman edition or in the 1913 Gallimard edition; others were inserted by Henri Mondor and Georges Jean-Aubry in the 1945 Pléiade edition. It is occasionally suggested that Geneviève may have had verbal authorization from her father for the general principle of inserting extra poems among his Poésies, or even for some or all of the specific additions made in 1899 and 1913. This is possible, but there is no evidence to support it. (Nor is there any evidence that Mallarmé authorized the posthumous removal of ‘Conflit’ from his prose poems and placement of ‘La Gloire’ at the end of the series. Prior to the composition of ‘Conflit’, he ended editions of his prose poems sometimes with ‘Le Nénuphar blanc’, sometimes with ‘L’Ecclésiastique’, but never with ‘La Gloire’.) Moreover, there is widespread agreement that some at least of Geneviève’s interpolations significantly disturb the 1894 architecture. Therefore, the present edition preserves—apparently for the first time in any language—the 1894 arrangement, the last known to have been approved by the poet himself, and relegates all posthumous additions to an appendix.

In his final instructions to his wife and daughter (written the day before his death), Mallarmé also authorized the publication of a selection of what he called vers de circonstances (‘occasional verses’). Appendix 2 contains all the verse of this kind that he himself had ever released for publication (in some cases only after repeated entreaties from his friends). He never made any attempt to include such vers de circonstances among his poésies (even though many of the latter are also, in a sense, ‘occasional’ pieces), and all subsequent editors have respected this policy.

Original spelling and punctuation have been preserved. Spellings such as évènement were perfectly normal in nineteenth-century French and were not, as non-French readers sometimes imagine, devised by Mallarmé himself for special esoteric purposes. In the prose poems and the Faune, the French texts also reproduce the original variations in space between stanzas or paragraphs (though the English translations do not always match these). Titles or subtitles in round brackets (thus) are Mallarmé’s own; those in square brackets [thus] are editorial. Each item is printed in its final state; earlier drafts, where they differ significantly, are cited and translated in the Explanatory Notes.

French originals and English translations are presented on facing pages, with one inevitable exception. Un coup de dés … can make its proper impression only if it is allowed to occupy both sides of each page; in this case, therefore, the French text is printed on pp. 139–59, and the English translation on pp. 161–81.

Further information about the composition and publication of Mallarmé’s various volumes, and comments on individual poems, can be found in the Explanatory Notes.

Mallarmé is commonly regarded as the most untranslatable of all French poets, and different translators have advocated very different strategies for dealing with his work. (The more incurable the disease, the greater the diversity of treatments offered for it.) Henry Weinfeld (1994) declares ‘with absolute certainty’ that it is ‘essential to work in rhyme and meter … If we take rhyme away from Mallarmé, we take away the poetry of his poetry.’ Daisy Aldan (1999) agrees that the translations ‘must themselves be poetry’ but maintains that they ‘must avoid that fallacy which attempts to recreate the rhyme schemes’. Charles Chadwick (1996), by contrast, advocates prose, arguing that ‘any attempt at a verse translation merely adds to the difficulties’. We ourselves have learnt from all three of these translators, and from many others. Perhaps the search for a best method of translating Mallarmé is as illusory as the search for a best method of depicting a cube in two dimensions. Different representations will illustrate different aspects of the original; no one representation will encompass it fully.

Mallarmé himself permitted a diversity of translatorial strategies. Like many writers of his generation, he was wary of free verse; but he, and other translators working with his approval, rendered poems into rhythmical prose, prose divided into separate lines, and rhymed verse. The present volume is similarly eclectic in approach, and contains translations of all those kinds. We have paid close attention to the English poems that he singled out for special praise, or in which he discerned a kinship with his own work—and we have studied them with particular care when, as is often the case, they do not conform to conventional ideas of what is Mallarméan. In a volume that aims to present the French texts in a form as close to the author’s wishes as the Oxford World’s Classics format will permit, it seems logical to adopt a similar approach to translations. Nevertheless, we fully recognize that renderings that departed further from Mallarmé’s own literary preferences would be equally legitimate.

Many techniques available to French poets cannot be accurately imitated in English. We have sometimes been forced to use more punctuation than Mallarmé himself does. In French, details of gender and word-ending are often enough to show the syntactic relationships between words; but English is a less highly inflected language, and cannot always indicate syntax without some help from punctuation.