The French poet juxtaposed the details of printing and production in a book that he imagined as a theatrical production.
Stéphane Mallarmé
Posted inPoetry
The Most Beautiful Perhaps
I wrote, a few months ago, of Stéphane Mallarmé as a difficult poet—difficult to understand, and difficult to translate, perhaps especially into English. What I should have also said then is that part of the difficulty lies in the fact that his poems in verse, as Peter Manson titled them in his estimable recent translation, that is, his Poésies, constitute only one facet of his work.
Posted inPoetry
Fold by Fold
Out of the amazing trifecta of early modernist French poets, Stéphane Mallarmé is probably the least read and least translated. That’s partly down to the genuine difficulty of his writing, but then the language of Baudelaire or Rimbaud is hardly of the most transparent either; the real difference may be that their lives have spun off an aura of myth that helps guide the reader through or past the enigmatic character of their verse.