Collected Poems and Other Verse Read Online

Again, English verse is more heavily accented than French, and therefore requires more diversity in scansion and rhyme-schemes, and more generous use of run-on lines, if it is not to sound inflexible. Furthermore, English seems to be somewhat less tolerant of rime riche than French (though there is no obvious linguistic reason why this should be so; perhaps it is merely a matter of arbitrary convention). In preliminary experiments, we also discovered that readers found our translations easier to follow if most of the lines started with lower-case letters, so that the beginnings of sentences could be identified more readily. This policy (which is traditional in editions of Latin verse) was used within Mallarmé’s own lifetime by at least one of his English-language disciples.

The translations and annotations attempt to incorporate, for the first time in a volume of this type, the results of the last six decades of Mallarmé research. Virtually all previous English versions—even the most recent ones—were based on the 1945 Pléiade edition or its precursors, which were issued before the bulk of Mallarmé’s manuscripts had been published or even thoroughly examined. Therefore (to take two examples among many) the translators used an unintelligible text of lines 26–7 of the Hérodiade Overture (the 1945 edition unwittingly printed the third-person form of line 26 but the first-person form of line 27) and gave erroneous interpretations of the first four lines of the Wagner ‘Hommage’ (Mallarmé’s own explanation was not available to the 1945 editors).

Dr Francine Giguère and Oxford University Press’s anonymous pre-publication readers provided valuable assistance with the translations in this volume. We feel deeply privileged that our work has been supervised by Judith Luna of Oxford University Press and introduced by Dr Elizabeth McCombie. Un coup de dés … was typeset by Claire Dickinson, student at the Department of Typography & Graphic Communication, The University of Reading; she has managed to reproduce the layout of Mallarmé’s corrected proofs more closely (especially on the poem’s fourth page) than even the new Pléiade edition was able to do. We would also like to thank the copy-editor, Jeff New, the proofreader, Judith Colleran, and the book’s designer, Bob Elliott, for their meticulous attention to detail. To Dr and Mrs H. J. Blackmore and Drs Warner and Erica Quarles de Quarles we are indebted in many ways that no acknowledgement could adequately summarize.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY

Editions

Œuvres complètes, vol. I, Poésies, ed. Carl Paul Barbier and Charles Gordon Millan (Paris, 1983). The projected second and third volumes were never published.

Œuvres, ed. Yves-Alain Favre (Paris, 1985).

Poésies, ed. Pierre Citron (Paris, 1987).

Poésies, ed. Lloyd James Austin (Paris, 1989).

Œuvres complètes, ed. Bertrand Marchal, 2 vols. (Paris, 1998–2003).

Biographical Studies

Dujardin, Édouard, Mallarmé par un des siens (Paris, 1936).

Gill, Austin, The Early Mallarmé, 2 vols. (Oxford, 1979–86).

Millan, Gordon, Mallarmé: A Throw of the Dice (London, 1994).

Mondor, Henri, Vie de Mallarmé (Paris, 1941).

Steinmetz, Jean-Luc, Mallarmé: L’Absolu au jour le jour (Paris, 1998).

Critical Studies

Abastado, Claude, Expérience et théorie de la creation poétique chez Mallarmé (Paris, 1970).

Bernard, Suzanne, Mallarmé et la musique (Paris, 1959).

Bersani, Leo, The Death of Stéphane Mallarmé (Cambridge, 1982).

Blanchot, Maurice, L’Espace littéraire (Paris, 1955).

Bowie, Malcolm, Mallarmé and the Art of Being Difficult (Cambridge, 1978).

Chadwick, Charles, Mallarmé, sa pensée dans sa poésie (Paris, 1962).

Cohn, Robert Greer, Mallarmé’s Masterwork: New Findings (The Hague, 1966).

—— Mallarmé’s Prose Poems: A Critical Study (Cambridge, 1987).

—— Toward the Poems of Mallarmé (Berkeley, Calif., 1965).

Davies, Gardner, Mallarmé et le drame solaire (Paris, 1959).

—— Mallarmé et la rêve d’ ‘Hérodiade’ (Paris, 1978).

Dayan, Peter, Mallarmé’s ‘Divine Transposition’: Real and Apparent Sources of Literary Value (Oxford, 1986).

Derrida, Jacques, La Dissémination (Paris: Seuil, 1972).

Florence, Penny, Mallarmé, Manet and Redon: Visual and Aural Signs and the Generation of Meaning (Cambridge, 1986).

Fowlie, Wallace, Mallarmé (Chicago, 1953).

Franklin, Ursula, An Anatomy of Poesis: The Prose Poems of Stéphane Mallarmé (Chapel Hill, NC, 1976).

Kravis, Judy, The Prose of Mallarmé: The Evolution of a Literary Language (Cambridge, 1976).

Kristeva, Julia, La Révolution du langage poétique: l’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris, 1974).

Lloyd, Rosemary, Mallarmé: Poésies (London, 1984).

—— Mallarmé: The Poet and His Circle (Ithaca, NY, 1999).

McCombie, Elizabeth, Mallarmé and Debussy: Unheard Music, Unseen Text (Oxford, 2003).

Marchal, Bernard, La Religion de Mallarmé (Paris, 1988).

Paxton, Norman, The Development of Mallarmé’s Prose Style (Geneva, 1968).

Pearson, Roger, Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art (Oxford, 1996).

—— Mallarmé and Circumstance: The Translation of Silence (Oxford, 2004).

St Aubyn, F. C., Stéphane Mallarmé, 2nd edn. (New York, 1989).

Sartre, Jean-Paul, Mallarmé: La Lucidité et sa face d’ombre (Paris, 1986).

Williams, Thomas A., Mallarmé and the Language of Mysticism (Athens, Ga., 1978).

Further Reading in Oxford World’s Classics

Baudelaire, Charles, The Flowers of Evil, ed. and trans. James McGowan (Oxford, 1993).

Huysmans, Joris-Karl, Against Nature, trans. Margaret Mauldon (Oxford, 1998).

Rimbaud, Arthur, Collected Poems, ed. and trans. Martin Sorrell (Oxford, 2001).

Verlaine, Paul, Selected Poems, ed. and trans. Martin Sorrell (Oxford, 1999).

A CHRONOLOGY OF STÉPHANE MALLARMÉ