Can the English language live up to Mallarmé?

 

“It is perhaps because Mallarmé is so important to modernism and twentieth-century and contemporary Continental Philosophy that English-language versions of the poet’s work end up inert and academic. The following questions therefore preoccupied us for some time before our labors began: Why can’t the English language live up to the demands of Mallarmé’s art? Can we make these poems live, in English, without betraying them? Can we practice the art of translation as the art of writing poetry? Or the art of reading? Azure is the record of our exploration of these questions through collaborative translation, intensive reading, and our commitment to the process of writing. Mallarmé poses formidable challenges to his translators, his readers, and to poets. We found ourselves meeting these challenges with a challenge of our own. Our primary aim was to create translations that worked as contemporary poems and that linked translation to the reading and writing of poetry. We hope to revive an interest in Mallarmé the poet that rivals the interest in Mallarmé the thinker of poetry. “
— from the Translators’ Note

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) wrote extensively on themes of reality and his desire to turn from it. He married form and content in revolutionary ways that departed from the more tightly controlled French tradition. When translators Bronson-Bartlett and Fernandez observed the absence of Mallarmé from young poets’ reading lists, they sought to rebirth Mallarmé for a new generation. Included in this volume are more than forty of Mallarmé’s poems from the 1899 Deman edition—the editon believed to be most consistent with Mallarmé’s true intentions; “A Cast of Dice”;  and excerpts from an unfinished Livre (book)—translated to English here for the first time.

Stéphane Mallarmé was a poet and critic who influenced Symbolism, Decadence, and other late nineteenth-century aesthetic movements, Mallarmé’s weekly salons were part of the heart of Parisian intellectual life and drew writers such as Yeats, Rilke, and Valéry. Blake Bronson-Bartlett earned his BA in English and French from Hunter College and his PhD in English from the University of Iowa. He is a professor in English at the University of Iowa, and has published essays, interpretations, and translations in a variety of journals. Robert Fernandez earned an MFA in poetry from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. He is an assistant professor of poetry and writing at the University of Nebraska and has published several poetry books, including Scarecrow (2016) and Pink Reef (2013.)

 

“These vivid and utterly convincing translations reopen the poems to controversy, nuance, and innovation. They refresh the poet’s reputation as a sovereign enigma.”
—Donald Revell, author of Tantivy

“The best translation is a hundred translations, and Mallarmé, as one of the inaugural monsters of Modernism, needs at least that many even to begin to reveal his complexities. This new one is exceptionally welcome, as it is a poets’ Mallarmé, built of what earlier translators have left out. Bronson-Bartlett and Fernandez give particular freedom to Mallarmé’s radical music as well as to his essential strangeness. The inclusion of a sizable section of Mallarmé’s work-in-eternal-progress, the ‘Livre,’ never before translated into English, makes a substantial contribution to Mallarmé studies, as does their excellent introduction. Not only a must for Mallarmé enthusiasts, but also simply a grippingly great read!”
—Cole Swensen

 

“Salut”

Then nothing, bright spray, hymnal holiday,
To show us but this skin;
Dead ahead, impacted sirens
Roll perversely: a log of bodies

We set our course, O rangy
Friends, I already at aft,
You at the glinting fore which breaks
The sea’s membrane of flashes and shivers

A honeyed drunkenness sends me
Fearless into foundering
Forward with poise to toast

Solitude, reef, star
These which gathered, drew resonant
And plumped the naked canvas of our craft

 

December
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