Mallarmé! Mallarmé! Everywhere We Turn!

If it seems you're unable to turn a poetry-corner these days without running into Stéphane Mallarmé, you're not alone. In recent years we've seen the publication of numerous new translations and re-imaginings of M. Mallarmé, from innovative approaches to printing his final poem, "Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard," to translating said poem into Arabic for the first time to imagining his work as contemporary-sounding poems. Rumors abound. At the New Yorker, Alex Ross tries to tackle the renewed and ongoing interest in the enigmatic works of Mallarmé. Ross begins the piece by looking at Peter Manson's translation of the sonnet "“Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui," and then goes on to write:

Mallarmé’s place in the English-speaking world is somewhat tenuous. As Blake Bronson-Bartlett and Robert Fernandez point out in their new collection of translations, “Azure” (Wesleyan), he lacks the wide fame of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, who, with their drug-taking and other bohemian exploits, “set the bar for trailblazing misbehavior in philosophy and the arts from the early to the late twentieth century.” Mallarmé is bland by comparison. He taught English in Paris and elsewhere in France; he married a German woman, Marie Gerhard, and had two children; he presided over a Tuesday gathering of fellow-poets; he published relatively little.

Yet his influence has been immense. Paul Claudel and Paul Valéry moved in his shadow; so, to varying degrees, did Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and, especially, Wallace Stevens, who staged similar collisions of grand abstraction and mundane reality. Mallarmé also affected the visual artists of his time, having helped to define Impressionism in an 1876 essay; Manet, Whistler, Gauguin, and Renoir made portraits of him, Degas photographed him. In music, the advent of modernism is often pegged to Debussy’s 1894 composition “Prelude to ‘The Afternoon of a Faun,’ ” a meditation on Mallarmé’s most famous poem. John Cage and Pierre Boulez, masters of the musical avant-garde, studied Mallarmé’s explorations of chance and discontinuity. Perhaps the most prolonged resonance was in French philosophy and theory. From Sartre and Lacan to Blanchot and Derrida and on to Badiou, Julia Kristeva, and Jacques Rancière, French thinkers have defined themselves through interpretations of Mallarmé. If you can crack these poems, it seems, you can crack the riddles of existence.

This prophet of the high modern never saw himself as a revolutionary. With the exception of one grand experiment—the free-form poem “Un Coup de Dés,” or “A Throw of the Dice,” proofs of which he was correcting at the time of his death—Mallarmé persisted with his sonnets and alexandrines. It is, however, precisely this tension between traditional form and radical content that keeps reactivating the shock of his writing. Sartre, in a skeptical yet passionate analysis, identified Mallarmé’s method as “the terrorism of politesse”—civilization stylishly blowing itself to pieces. The poet himself said that he knew of no other bomb than a book.

It's a long and rich article that includes a survey of recent Mallarmé publications in English translation. Go the New Yorker to read on!