Stphane Mallarm

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Stphane Mallarm (1842-1898)

French poet and leader of the Symbolist movement in poetry with Paul Verlaine. Mallarm was a provincial school teacher who came to Paris to live a bourgeois life on the rue de Rome, but published allusive, compressed poems, which suggested rather than denoted. He saw that his purified language gives "a purer meaning to the words of the tribe." (from the sonnet on Edgar Allan Poe) Mallarm never gained wide recognition for his work during his lifetime.
Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: ABCDEFGH IJKLMNOP QRSTUVWX YZ by birthday from the calendar. Credits and feedback TimeSearch for Books and Writers by Bamber Gascoigne O rveuse, pour que je plonge Au pur dlice sans chemin, Sache, par un subtil mensonge Garder mon aile dans ta main. (from 'Eventail de Mademoiselle Mallarm')

Stphane Mallarm was born in Paris into a family in which his father and grandfather had made a noteworthy career in the French civil service. He was expected to follow the family tradition but at school he did not do well except in languages. Mallarm began writing poetry at an early age under the influence of Victor Hugo. At the age of nineteen he found Charles Baudelaire's The Flowers of Evil, which had appeared in 1857. Under its influence he wrote 'Briese marine,' starting with the much quoted line "Le chair est triste, hlas! et j'ai lu tous les livres". After leaving school he visited England and while in London he married Marie Gerhard. Mallarm taught English from 1864 in Tournon, Besanon, Avignon, and Paris until his retirement in 1893. The solitary years in Tournon and Besanon were his years of apprenticeship, during which he prepared himself for his career as a man of letters. Mallarm's poems started to appear in magazines in the 1860s. His first important poem, 'L'Azur', was published when he was 24. All his life he spent a very long time on each of his poems, making them as perfect as possible. In between writing, he suffered from bouts of physical illness and metaphysical anguish. L'Aprs-Midi d'un faune (1865), best-known work, inspired Debussy's tone poem (1894) of the same name and was illustrated by the famous painter Manet. Debussy had set Mallarm's poem 'Apparation' to music in 1882, but their first meeting took place years later. From time to time Debussy attended Mallerm's Tuesday evening gatherings, which attracted such writers, artists, musicians, and intellectuals as Andr Gide, Paul Valry and Oscar Wilde, the painters Renoir, Monet, Degas, Redon, and Whistler, and the sculptor Rodin. "Certainly Mallarm prepared his conversations," recalled Gide later, "but he spoke with such art and in a tone that had so little of the doctrinal about it that it seemed as if he had just that instant invented each new proposition".

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Stphane Mallarm

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The Afternoon of the Faun presents the wandering thoughts of a faun on a drowsy summer afternoon. "Forgetful let me lie where summer's drouth / Sifts fine the sand and then with gaping mouth / Dream planetstruck by the grape's round wine-red star. / Nymphs, I shall see the shade that now you are." (translated by Aldous Huxley) Mallarm began to write the poems while working in Tournon, a town he found ugly and unpleasant. For Claude Debussy he wrote in December 1894 after coming from the concert: "... what a marvel! your illustration of the Afternoon of a Faun not in the slightest disaccord with my text, except that it goes further, truly, in nostalgia and light, so delicate, disquieting, and rich." Between the years 1867 and 1873 Mallarm did not finish any of his large poetical works, Hrodiade (1869) included. Among Mallarm's later publications are Toast funbre, which was written in memory of the author Thophile Gautier, and the experimental poem, one of his masterpieces, 'Un Coup De Ds' (1914, A Throw of the Dice), which was published posthumously. From the 1880s Mallarm was the center of a group of French writers in Paris, which had such members Gide, Paul Valry, and Proust. Mallarm's ideas on poetry and art were considered difficult and obscure. When Mallarm started to write poetry in the 1850s', French poets were still rather obedient to certain conventions concerning rhyme, metre, theme, etc. Victor's Hugo's notion that 'pure poetry' is essentially 'useless' was widely accepted. Proust wrote once: "How unfortunate that so gifted a man should become insane every time he takes up the pen", and Mallarm's friend, the painter Edgar Degas, came out from his lecture, and crying "I do not understand, I do not understand." Challenging his readers, Mallarm sought out from a dictionary the long-forgotten meanings of common words and used these. Naturally this provoked a hostility, that followed Mallarm through his career. To Proust's attack he answered in The Mystery in Literature: "Every piece of writing, on the outside of its treasure, must-out of respect for those from whom, after all, it borrows the language, for a different purposepresent with the words a meaning, even if an unimportant one: there is an advantage to turning away the idler, who is charmed that nothing here concerns him at first sight." According to Mallarm's theories, nothing lies beyond reality, but within this nothingness lie the essence of perfect forms. It is the task of the poet to reveal and crystallize these essences. Mallarm's poetry employs condensed figures and unorthodox syntax. He believed that the point of a poem was the beauty of the language. "You don't make a poem with ideas, but with words." Thus a poem should be read as an object independent of the world in which it existed. But sometimes he became bored of the antique gardens of words, where he wanted to live: "The flesh grows weary. And books, I've read them all. / Off, then, to where I
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glimpse through spray and squall / Strange birds delighting in their unknown skies!" (from 'Seabreeze') Each poem is built around a central symbol, idea, or metaphor and consists of subordinate images that illustrate and help to develop the idea. However, he preferred to hint between the l ines at meanings rather than state them clearly. "Nommer un object, c'est supprimer les trois-quarts de la jouissance du pome qui est fait peu peu: le suggrer." The reader must return over and over again to the lines, concentrate on the music of the words rather than the referential meaning. Once he stated: "I become obscure, of course! if one makes a mistake and thinks one is opening a newspaper." For the rest of his life Mallarm devoted himself to putting his literary theories into practice and writing his Grand Oeuvre (Great Work). Mallarm died in Paris, on September 9, 1898 without completing this work. Mallarm's vers libre had a huge influence on twentieth century French poetry, and in the creation of the modernist tradition in German and American poetry.
For further reading: Symbolisme from Poe to Mallarme by Joseph Chiarie (1970); The Aesthetics of Stephane Mallarme in Relation to His Public by Paula Gilbert Lewis (1976); Stephane Mallarme TwentiethCentury Criticism 1901-1971 by Hampton D. Morris (1977); Mallarme and the Symbolist Drama by Haskell Block (1977); The Death of Stphane Mallarm by Leo Bersani (1982); Eros Under Glass: Psychoanalysis and Mallarme's Herodiate by Mary Ellen Wolf (1987); Mallarme's Divine Transposition by Peter Dayan (1987); Stephane Mallarme by F.C. St. Aubyn (1989); Mallarme's Divagations by Robert Greer Cohn (1991); The Poetics of the Occasion by Marian Zwerling Sugano (1992); The Fiction of the Poet: From Mallarm to the PostSymbolist Mode by Anna Balakian (1992); Performance in the Texts of Mallarme by Mary Lewis Shaw (1993); A Throw of the Dice: The Life of Stehane Mallarm by Gordon Millan (1994); The Name of the Poet by Michael Temple (1995); Boulez and Mallarm: A Study in Poetic Influence by Mary Breatnach (1996); Unlocking Mallarm by Graham Robb (1996); Remembering the Sound of Words: Mallarm, Proust, Joyce, Beckett by Adam Piette (1996); Unfolding Mallarme by Roger Pearson (1997); Mallarm in the Twentieth Century, ed. by Robert Greer Cohn (1998); Toward the Poems of Mallarme by Robert Greer Cohn (2000); Mallarm And The Poetics Of Everyday Life. A Study of the Concept of the Ordinary in his Verse and Prose by Hlne Stafford (2000); The Poet in Society: Art, Consumerism, and Politics in Mallarme by Damian Catani (2002) - See also: Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe, whose works Mallarm translated.

Selected works: Hrodiade, 1864-1887 - Herodiade (translated by Joseph T. Shipley, 1921) / Herodias (translated by Clark Mills, 1940) / Herodias: Canticle of John the Baptist (translated by E.H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore, in Collected Poems and Other Verse, 2006) Le Corbeau / E.A. Poe, 1875 (translator)
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Stphane Mallarm

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L'Aprs-Midi d'un faune, 1876 - The Afternoon of the Faun (translated by Roger Fry, in The Poems of Mallarm, 1936) / A Faun in the Afternoon (translated by E.H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore, in Collected Poems and Other Verse, 2006) - Faunin iltapiv: valitut runot (suom. Einari Aaltonen, 2006)
- This poem inspired Claude Debussy to compose in 1894 his Prlude l'aprsmidi d'un faune , the score was published in the following year; choreographed and danced by Nijinsky for Diaghilev's Russian Ballet in 1912

Prosa, 1880 L'toile des fes / Mrs. W.-C. Elphinstone Hope, 1881 (translator) Posies, 1887 - Posies / Poetical Works (translated by E.H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore, in Collected Poems and Other Verse, 2006) Album de vers et de prose, 1887 Pomes / E.A. Poe, 1888 (translator) Le Ten o'clock / M. Whistler, 1888 (translator) Pages, 1891 La musique et les lettres, 1891 Vers et prose, 1893 Divagations, 1897 - Divagations (translated by Barbara Johnson, 2007) Un coup de ds jamais n'abolira le hasard, 1897 - Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance (translated by Brian Coffey, 1965) / A Cast of Dice Never Can Annul Chance (translated by Neil Crawford, 1985) / A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance, in To Purify the Words of the Tribe (translated by Paul Herron, 1999) / A Dice Thrown At Any Time Never Will Abolish Chance(translated and edited by E.H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore, in Collected Poems and Other Verse, 2006) - Nopanheitto (suom. Helena Sinervo, 2006) Posies, 1899 - Posies / Poetical Works, in Collected Poems and Other Verse (translated and edited by E.H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore, 2006) Madrigaux, 1920 (with Raoul Dufy) Vers de circonstance, 1920 - Vers de circonstances/Occasional Verses, in Collected Poems and Other Verse (translated and edited by E.H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore, 2006) Contes indiens, 1927 Posies de Stphane Mallarm, 1928 The Poems of Mallarm, 1936 (translated by Roger Fry) Oeuvres compltes, 1945 (ed. Henri Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry) Propos sur la posie, 1953 Lettres, 1959
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Les "Gossips", 1962 (ed. by H. Mondor and G. Jean-Aubry) Pour un tombeau d'Anatole, 1962 - A Tomb For Anatole (translated by Paul Auster, 1983) / Notes for Anatoles Tomb (translated by Patrick McGuinness, 2002) / For Anatoles Tomb (translated by Patrick McGuinness, 2003) Correspondance, 1959-1985 (11 vols.) Selected letters of Stphane Mallarm, 1988 (edited and translated by Rosemary Lloyd) Stephane Mallarm: Selected Poems, 1989 (translated by C. F. Macintyre) uvres compltes, 1989 (edited by Henri Mondor and G. JeanAubry) Lettres Mry Laurent / Stphane Mallarm, 1996 (edited by Bertrand Marchal) Collected Poems by Stephane Mallarm, 1996 (reissued edition, translated by Henry Weinfield) Mallarm, 1998 (edited by Bertrand Marchal) Oeuvres compltes, I, 1998 (edited by Bertrand Marchal) Correspondance: complments et supplments, 1998 (edited by Nicola Luckhurst) To Purify the Words of the Tribe: The Major Verse Poems of Stephane Mallarm, 1999 (translated by Daisy Aldan) Mallarme in Prose, 2001 (edited by Mary Ann Caws, translated by Jill Anderson) Oeuvres compltes, II, 2003 (edited by Bertrand Marchal) Collected Poems and Other Verse, 2006 (traslated and edited by E.H. Blackmore and A. M. Blackmore) Correspondance / Flix Fenon, Stphane Mallarm, 2007 (edited by Maurice Imbert) Mallarm-Morisot: correspondance 1876-1895, 2009 (edited by Olivier Daulte and Manuel Dupertuis) De la lettre au livre, 2010 (edited by Pierre-Henry Frangne) The Poems in verse, 2012 (translation and notes by Peter Manson)

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Stphane Mallarm

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