Stephane Mallarme
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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 and Work
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:
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By 1868 Mallarmé had formulated his endlessly confusing theory of poetry; as he would state it, the purpose of the poet was to somehow create something out of the nothingness that is the world—to bring into being, in Mallarmé's own phrase, "l'absente de tous bouquets", the ideal flower absent from the bouquet. From 1868 on, Mallarmé devoted all of his energies to bringing this absent ideal into being, intending to produce an epic work which he called his Grand Oeuvre ("Great Work") or Le Livre ("The Book") which he never finished. Whatever Mallarmé may have planned for this great work is largely open to conjecture; barely any fragments of the planned work exist, and the few notes that have survived from Mallarmé's notebooks reveal very little of what it may have looked like had it been completed.
It has been conjectured that the reason Mallarmé never finished the Grand Oeuvre is because, late in life, he ultimately turned away from the intense and philosophical views which had long held to all his life. Certainly, in the 1890s, at a relatively advanced age for a poet, Mallarmé finally gained the recongition he deserved. Glowing reviews by his friend Paul Verlaine and the praise lavished on him by Joris-Karl Huysmans in his novel À rebours resulted in Mallarmé becoming a literary celebrity in Paris; painters, poets, writers and patrons flocked to his home, where he would hold weekly salons and discuss his ideas on art. Many of the greatest artistic minds in Europe would attend these salons, among them Marcel Proust, W.B. Yeats, Paul Verlaine, and Ranier Marie Rilke. The poems Mallarmé wrote during this period of final success expressed a view of reality that was increasingly content with the world as it is; a series of sonnets written to his mistress, and most especially the poem Un Coup de dés ("A Throw of the Dice"), written the year before he died and considered one of his finest, express this feeling of contentment, and of Mallarmé's conclusion that, despite the daunting nature of reality, he had succeeded in creating something of value nonetheless.
Works
- 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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