Difference between revisions of "Stephane Mallarme" - New World Encyclopedia

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As a Symbolist, Mallarmé's poetry is, as one would expect, highly symbolical; like [[Charles Baudelaire|Baudelaire]], Mallarmé uses particular images—a star, the sky, a virgin—and refers to them again and again through the course of a poem, using the image to symbolize some aspect of the human psyche. In this vein, Mallarmé is simply following the long tradition of poetic allegory; what sets him apart from generations of symbolic poets and sets him apart as a Symbolist is the sheer density of images and allegories that Mallarmé uses in his poetry. His poetry is notoriously difficult to translate; it is often considered just as difficult to read. Each of Mallarmé's poems is layered with allusions, word-play, and metaphors, and often the sounds of the words are just as important as their literal meanings. Due to all these attributes Mallarmé is often considered a parituclarly appealing poet for musicians—and more than a little music, including a famous piece by [[Claude Debussy|Debussy]], has been inspired by his works—but he is also considered, even more than a century after his death, to be one of the most difficult poets in the French language.
 
As a Symbolist, Mallarmé's poetry is, as one would expect, highly symbolical; like [[Charles Baudelaire|Baudelaire]], Mallarmé uses particular images—a star, the sky, a virgin—and refers to them again and again through the course of a poem, using the image to symbolize some aspect of the human psyche. In this vein, Mallarmé is simply following the long tradition of poetic allegory; what sets him apart from generations of symbolic poets and sets him apart as a Symbolist is the sheer density of images and allegories that Mallarmé uses in his poetry. His poetry is notoriously difficult to translate; it is often considered just as difficult to read. Each of Mallarmé's poems is layered with allusions, word-play, and metaphors, and often the sounds of the words are just as important as their literal meanings. Due to all these attributes Mallarmé is often considered a parituclarly appealing poet for musicians—and more than a little music, including a famous piece by [[Claude Debussy|Debussy]], has been inspired by his works—but he is also considered, even more than a century after his death, to be one of the most difficult poets in the French language.
  
Part of this difficulty is due to Mallarmé's complicated theories of poetry. Although he never wrote a formal work on poetics, from his correspondence, prose, and poetry 
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Part of this difficulty is due to Mallarmé's complicated theories of poetry. Mallarmé believed that, beneath the surface of appearances, reality consisted of nothing but darkness and emptiness; poetry and art, however, could kindle the darkness and bring out, however faintly, the glimmer of an ideal form. This confusing and rather contradictory theory of art was not without its detractors; the painter [[Edgar Degas]] famously stormed out of a lecture where Mallarmé was trying to explain his ideas, shouting "I do not understand! I do not understand!" Nevertheless, it is with this pessimistic yet paradoxical view of the world that Mallarmé developed his poetry; although he never lived to complete his masterpiece, his ideas about poetry and the radical changes to poetic style which he introduced would alter the face of 19th- and 20th-century literature forever.
  
 
==Life==
 
==Life==

Revision as of 02:13, 2 July 2006

Édouard Manet, Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé .

Stéphane Mallarmé (March 18, 1842 – September 9, 1898), whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet who, along with Verlaine, was one of the founders of the Symbolist movement in French poetry, which would become one of the most important poetic movements not only for French literature in the 19th-century, but for English and American poets who would adopt the conventions of Symbolism into the emergent 20th-century forms of Modernism.

As a Symbolist, Mallarmé's poetry is, as one would expect, highly symbolical; like Baudelaire, Mallarmé uses particular images—a star, the sky, a virgin—and refers to them again and again through the course of a poem, using the image to symbolize some aspect of the human psyche. In this vein, Mallarmé is simply following the long tradition of poetic allegory; what sets him apart from generations of symbolic poets and sets him apart as a Symbolist is the sheer density of images and allegories that Mallarmé uses in his poetry. His poetry is notoriously difficult to translate; it is often considered just as difficult to read. Each of Mallarmé's poems is layered with allusions, word-play, and metaphors, and often the sounds of the words are just as important as their literal meanings. Due to all these attributes Mallarmé is often considered a parituclarly appealing poet for musicians—and more than a little music, including a famous piece by Debussy, has been inspired by his works—but he is also considered, even more than a century after his death, to be one of the most difficult poets in the French language.

Part of this difficulty is due to Mallarmé's complicated theories of poetry. Mallarmé believed that, beneath the surface of appearances, reality consisted of nothing but darkness and emptiness; poetry and art, however, could kindle the darkness and bring out, however faintly, the glimmer of an ideal form. This confusing and rather contradictory theory of art was not without its detractors; the painter Edgar Degas famously stormed out of a lecture where Mallarmé was trying to explain his ideas, shouting "I do not understand! I do not understand!" Nevertheless, it is with this pessimistic yet paradoxical view of the world that Mallarmé developed his poetry; although he never lived to complete his masterpiece, his ideas about poetry and the radical changes to poetic style which he introduced would alter the face of 19th- and 20th-century literature forever.

Life

His earlier work owes a great deal to the style established by Charles Baudelaire. His fin-de-siècle style, on the other hand, anticipates many of the fusions between poetry and the other arts that were to blossom in the Dadaist, Surrealist, and Futurist schools, where the tension between the words themselves and the way they were displayed on the page was explored. But whereas most of this latter work was concerned principally with form, Mallarmé's work was more generally concerned with the interplay of style and content. This is particularly evident in the highly innovative Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard ('A roll of the dice will never abolish chance') of 1897, his last major poem. Template:French literature (small) Some consider Mallarmé one of the French poets most difficult to translate into English. This is often said to be due to the inherently vague nature of much of his work, but this explanation is really a simplification. On a closer reading of his work in the original French, it is clear that the importance of sound relationships between the words in the poetry equals, or even surpasses, the importance of the standard meanings of the words themselves. This generates new meanings in the spoken text which are not evident on reading the work on the page. It is this aspect of the work that is impossible to render in translation (especially when attempting a more literal fidelity to the words as well), since it arises from ambiguities inextricably bound in the phonology of the spoken French language. It can also be suggested that it is this 'pure sound' aspect of his poetry that has led to its inspiring musical compositions (see below), and to its direct comparison with music.

A good example of this play of sound appears in Roger Pearson's book 'Unfolding Mallarmé', in his analysis of the Sonnet en '-yx'. The poem opens with the phrase 'ses purs ongles' ('her pure nails'), whose first syllables when spoken aloud sound very similar to the words 'c'est pur son' ('it's pure sound'). This use of homophony, along with the relationships and layers of meanings it results in, is simply impossible to capture accurately through translation.

For many years, the Tuesday night sessions in his apartment on the rue de Rome were considered the heart of Paris intellectual life, with W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, Stefan George, Paul Verlaine, and many more in attendance, as Mallarmé held court as judge, jester, and king.

Mallarmé's poetry has been the inspiration for several musical pieces, notably Claude Debussy's Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune (1894), a free interpretation of Mallarmé's poem L'après-midi d'un faune (1876), which creates powerful impressions by the use of striking but isolated phrases. Debussy also set Mallarmé's poetry to music in Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé (1913). Other composers to use his poetry in song include Maurice Ravel (Trois poèmes de Stéphane Mallarmé, 1913), Darius Milhaud (Chansons bas de Stéphane Mallarmé, 1917), and Pierre Boulez (Pli selon pli, 1957-62).

Works

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Stephane Mallarme
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:
  • L'après-midi d'un faune, 1876
  • Les Mots anglais, 1878
  • Les Dieux antiques, 1879
  • Divagations, 1897
  • Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard, 1897
  • Poésies, 1899 (posthumous)

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