Stephane Mallarme

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

The young Mallarmé was born in Paris, to a middle-class family that had maintained a long and distinguished tradition of public service, and both Mallarme's grandfathers and his father had had careers as civil servants. Mallarmé was expected to follow in this tradition, and to this end he was enrolled in a prestigious private school. He did not, however, do well in his classes; his only good grades were in foreign languages.

The young Mallarmé was described by his friends and family as a somber and moody child. It is clear from Mallarmé's own writings, most especially his dark, early poems, that he lived a deeply unhappy childhood, and that he suffered greatly by the early death of his mother in 1847, when he was only five, followed not long thereafter by the death of his sister in 1857. Mallarmé's juvenile poems, written after he discovered and was inspired by Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire, echo a sense of Romantic longing for an ideal world that is different from grim reality that would prove to be an enduring theme in his mature poetry, even as it would continue to evolve and become increasingly intellectual and symbolical as the poet's style matured.

Much of Mallarmé's adult life was, sadly, no less dreary for him than his early years. Considered somewhat of a failure by his family, he moved to London in 1863 in order to perfect his English. While there, he married an Englishwoman, and returned with her to France where he took up a post in the provinces as an English teacher, a career to which he was to devote thirty years of his life. Mallarmé, unfortunately, was not a very gifted teacher and he found the work itself frustrating and uncongenial. The poor pay he received only became more troubling after the birth of his children Genevieve (in 1864) and Anatole (in 1871).

All the while, Mallarmé continued to write poetry, gradually acquiring fame and recognition. A year before he had left for England, several magazines had published a handful of Mallarmé's poems, all of them obsessed with the theme of escaping reality and emerging into an ideal world, and in this vein owing a great debt to Charles Baudelaire. In the years following these early publications, however, Mallarmé would push further, with more intellectual rigor than Baudelaire had ever summoned, searching for meaning in the mesh of reality. To succeed in this rather daunting philosophical pursuit, he began composing two epic poems, Hérodiade (Herodias) and "L'Après-midi d'un faune" ("The Afternoon of a Faun") neither of which he would finish, but the latter of which would go on to become one of the most memorable of all Mallarme's poems. It is also one of the most difficult to translate because so many of the poem's words are chosen more for their music than for their meaning. The following excerpt was translated by Henry Weinfeld and Mark Ebden, and attemps to preserve the original's rhyme scheme:

These nymphs that I would perpetuate: so clear And light, their carnation, that it floats in the air Heavy with leafy slumbers. Did I love a dream? My doubt, night's ancient hoard, pursues its theme In branching labyrinths, which being still The veritable woods themselves, alas, reveal My triumph as the ideal fault of roses. Consider... whether the women of your glosses Are phantoms of your fabulous desires! Faun, the illusion flees from the cold, blue eyes Of the chaster nymph like a fountain gushing tears: But the other, all in sighs, you say, compares To a hot wind through your fleece that blows at noon? No! through the motionless and weary swoon Of stifling heat that suffocates the morning, Save from my flute, no waters murmuring In harmony flow out into the groves; And the only wind on the horizon no ripple moves, Exhaled from my twin pipes and swift to drain The melody in arid drifts of rain, Is the visible, serene and fictive air Of inspiration rising as if in prayer.

Ces nymphes, je les veux perpétuer. Si clair, Leur incarnat léger, qu'il voltige dans l'air Assoupi de sommeils touffus. Aimai-je un rêve? Mon doute, amas de nuit ancienne, s'achève En maint rameau subtil, qui, demeuré les vrais Bois même, prouve, hélas! que bien seul je m'offrais Pour triomphe la faute idéale de roses. Réfléchissons... ou si les femmes dont tu gloses Figurent un souhait de tes sens fabuleux! Faune, l'illusion s'échappe des yeux bleus Et froids, comme une source en pleurs, de la plus chaste: Mais, l'autre tout soupirs, dis-tu qu'elle contraste Comme brise du jour chaude dans ta toison? Que non! par l'immobile et lasse pâmoison Suffoquant de chaleurs le matin frais s'il lutte, Ne murmure point d'eau que ne verse ma flûte Au bosquet arrosé d'accords; et le seul vent Hors des deux tuyaux prompt à s'exhaler avant Qu'il disperse le son dans une pluie aride, C'est, à l'horizon pas remué d'une ride Le visible et serein souffle artificiel De l'inspiration, qui regagne le ciel.:

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

Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Stephane Mallarme

• 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)

External links

• Mallarme.net contains texts of most of the poems and commentary. (French)
• Works by Stéphane Mallarmé. Project Gutenberg

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