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If you think of Mallarme as
the solitary elitist who is responsible for the death of the author,
and even the demise of common-sense criticism in our literature
departments, think again. Or if you think of Mallarme as an
unparalleled wordsmith and punster, creator of equisite but empty sound
pictures, think again. The papers translated here for the first time by
Patrick McGuinness show us a young Mallarme grappling with fatherhood
and poethood, with unutterable loss and poesis. These notes,
probably written in the winter of 1879-80, in the months following the
dath of his second child and only son Anatole, aged eight, were not
published until 1961 (as Pour un tombeau d'Anatole, edited by
Jean-Pierre Richard), and were never referred to by the poet himself.
What they reveal is a unique version of the conflict between the
abstract and the concrete that had long preoccupied Mallarme (e.g.
'Igitur', c. 1869), and that would reach new heights in his greatest
works: the late sonnets, 'Prose (pour des Esseintes)', and 'Un Coup de
des'. For Anatole's Tomb is more than a translation;
McGuinness's succinct introduction, along with his essay published as
'afterword', together constitute an important work of contextualization
and sensitive reading.
In this interpretive work,
McGuinness resists the biographical route: in any case Jean-Pierre
Richard had already guided the reader to the key moments in the
Mallarme family correspondence in his edition. On the thematic level,
Richard also showed in painstaking detail how Anatole announces
themes that are developed elsewhere in Mallarme's oeuvre. Rather than
restate the coherence of this oeuvre through parallel quotation,
McGuinness draws on the work of Mallarme's close friend Villiers de
l'Isle-Adam to allow him into the crux of the matter. Death -
particularly that of a son as opposed to the departure of a poet or
artist - proves an extreme test-case for Mallarme's investigation of
the relationship between the world of abstract ideas and that of
everyday reality. This crucial relationship is acted out as a conflict
between 'mother' and 'father', where the mother is 'in league' with
mother earth: 'mother wants to have him to herself, she is earth'.
Incidentally, the succinctness of the play 'terre/mere' is one of the few casualties of the translation process here (the other notable one being the homophony of 'mer/mere',
about which McGuinness is upfront.) While the father-poet's choice of
abstraction might seem to offer consolation, it is the world of things
- the furniture in the flat, Anatole's 'little clothes', reminders of
the sailor suit in which he was buried - that brings home the pain of
his loss.
It is the gap between this
flight into 'consolatory abstraction' and the materiality of the dying
boy, followed by the funeral rites, that McGuinness identifies as the
very space of poetry. Anatole's precarious state, and the opposing
reactions it has evoked in his parents, has brought all this to the
surface: for Mallarme, McGuinness expains: 'sickness is the ally of
poetry, because, at once deadly and death-defying, it provides the
writing-space'. In the late work, Mallarme famously articulates
metaphysical doubt or his version of the 'space inbetween', by
manipulating ambiguity, or through what has been called by Malcolm
Bowie his 'art of being difficult'. If understanding late Malllarme is
all about understanding his 'difficulty' as the result of a minutely
controlled semantic overflow, then For Anatole's Tomb can offer
us insights into the experimentation that went before. Rather than the
Bach fugue that the student of late Mallarme might expect, these notes
suggest a lone Romantic melody.
The Mallarme known to the
Anglophone world has long been in need of some updating. We are
fortunate that Mallarme has found in this translator such a sensitive
reader and critic. We need more such translations, and indeed the signs
are good. There have been some impressive recent attempts to bring
French poetry to an Anglophone readership. Rosemary Lloyd's
enthusiastic and enigmatic Baudelaire's World (2002) contains
detailed discussion of the challenges and joys of translating some of
the founding works of modernity. Clive Scott has devoted his latest
book to the same master: Translating Baudelaire (2000). And a selection of Mallarme's prose was translated into English for the first time in Mallarme in Prose, ed. Mary Ann Cawes(2001). As a new 'way into Mallarme', For Anatole's Tomb
offers some distinct advantages: our understanding of the famously
contrapuntal nature of Mallarme's late poetic textures is enhanced by
focusing on the conflicts in his thought that are observable here in
slow motion thanks to this text's brokenness, and remembering all the
time that this is, as McGuinness puts it: 'the poetry of the
undecidable, not poetry for the indecisive.'
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