A Look into Peter Manson's English in Mallarmé

Q: What happens when translation meets erasure? A: Peter Manson's English in Mallarmé. Manson's no stranger to Stéphane Mallarmé, having translated the French Symbolist master's Poésies (Poems in Verse) back in 2012. But he's definitely making Mallarmé stranger with his new project. Rebecca Varley-Winter at Glasgow Review of Books writes:

[...] Due to this persistent resistance of singular readings, Paul Valéry described Mallarmé’s mind-bending poems as prismatic crystals:

Ils n’ont point la transparence du verre, sans doute; mais rompant en quelque sorte les habitudes de l’esprit sur leurs facettes et dans leur dense structure, ce qu’on nomme leur obscurité n’est, en vérité, que leur réfringence. (They have not the transparency of glass, no doubt; but breaking in some way the habits of mind on their facets and in their dense structure, what is called their obscurity is only, in truth, their refraction).

Reading Mallarmé in his native tongue, Valéry felt like a translator, incorporated into the processes of writing, retracing ‘les chemins et les travaux de la pensée de leur auteur’ (the ways and workings of the author’s thought), a ‘monde préparatoire’ (preparatory world). A reader without French fluency, working through poems slowly with a dictionary, is already attuned to this preparatory world; reading between languages, meanings become less firmly anchored to words, which take on sensuous power through the preliterate, childlike engagement with them as verbal textures. Should Mallarmé’s translators attempt a smooth transition into a new tongue, or remain faithful to the foreignness of this first encounter?

Peter Manson’s English in Mallarmé bends Mallarmé’s Poésies out of shape, into this realm of playful foreignisation. Having laboriously translated the Poésies for The Poems In Verse (2012), now he scrapes a sequence of shipwrecked English verses out of Mallarmé’s French. Rather than feeling “English”, these poems read as a new half-language, frustrated and stuttering. Manson keeps almost all of the punctuation and elements of Mallarmé’s French that can read as (semi)English words in black. The rest of the lines are made to disappear into the page: the words still there, but written in white ink. Here are the first two stanzas of Mallarmé’s ‘Salut’ in its original French (from The Poems In Verse), transformed to warped English...

You'll have to head to the Glasgow Review of Books to see how Manson works his magic!