1957 • University of California Press (translated by C.F. MacIntyre)
192 pages / 0520008014 (paperback)
There are quite a few similes that can be used to describe Stéphane Mallarmé's verse: a sheet of gauze, a cloud, a pane of frosted glass. All of the comparisons point to distortion, one of the prevailing trends in fin de siècle art that connected romanticism to 20th century modernism.
Useful background reading is the essay 'Concepts of Decadence in Nineteenth-Century French Literature' by James M. Smith, which appeared in a 1953 issue of Studies in Philology. Smith, a literature professor at Emory University, supports the belief that late-19th century French writers such as Mallarmé, Huysmans, and Valéry confused true inventiveness with erudition and overt analysis. And in reading Mallarmé, this is too often what comes to mind. The Parisian, who died on the cusp of major artistic and social change in 1898, left behind a modest collection of work that has all of the jadedness, overloaded imagery, and desperation that is standard for his time.
C.F. (Carlyle Ferren) MacIntyre's little volume of Mallarmé translations was a standard-bearer in its day. It was originally published in 1957, after MacIntyre had agonized for 18 years over conveying the poet's work in a language often incompatible with French expression and cadence. The Selected Poems offers 43 works that draw from Mallarmé's more traditional writings. Included are his famous 'L'Après-midi d'un Faune,' the pastoral that influenced Claude Debussy's Prélude; the triptych 'Hérodiade'; and tributes to artists such as Baudelaire and Poe.MacIntyre does what he can to transpose the ideas, rhythms, and rhymes that are frequently lost in English. While he manages to carry over some of the meter and rhyming elements cleanly, he struggles in other areas such as line groupings and Mallarmé's complex vocabulary. Mallarmé worked in a free-form language that places musicality over grammatical accuracy, which makes a one-for-one translation neigh impossible. It is to some credit that MacIntyre did not go the route of other translators in loosening the structure or resorting to prose, though his mission was in many ways futile.
MacIntyre elucidates much in 50 pages of notes, though there are plenty of times along the way when he gives into pretention and looks to show off his vast knowledge. A professor at UCLA and Berkeley, MacIntyre knew his subject thoroughly and is quite willing to remind us. Instead of keeping to watered-down explanations, he freely refers to locations, writings, and people that are not commonly known in the English-speaking world and quotes French and German texts without offering translations into English (could you imagine having to look all of this up before the Internet existed?). He also doesn't bother to translate the poem titles or inscriptions which, needless to say, would help a bit.
In the meantime, Mallarmé's poetry itself offers difficulties. Reading this volume felt like a trying exercise, with one poem soon becoming indistinguishable from the others. He was one of the many to come down with that -itis that struck art at the turn of the century, when Europe was lurching from the last scraps of Romanticism into the Postromantic and Modernist worlds. Symbolism, a champion of indirect reference and 'fogginess' to examine life, has the feel of a struggle to overcome its forebearers' achievements and create anew.
The predominant feeling I got from these poems was of being suffocated by ideas and images - simply too much furniture in the room. Mallarmé's best poems of the volume are, not surprisingly, those with a clearer sense of organization and story arch. These include the well-known 'Faun' and 'Hérodiade,' a triptych profiling Salomé's mother that Mallarmé intended as a larger work but never completed. Such poems feel more deliberate in their settings and trains of thought compared to the vague blobs of 'Sainte' and 'A la nue,' which are crammed with allusion but have very little end product. There is also plenty of repetition in the lesser works that brings out Mallarmé's fetishes like women's hair, tombs, fire-torches, and the sonnet form.
Mallarmé was not alone in this poetic swamp that gave off bright colors and sweet fragrances - the 'synesthesia' that psychiatrists talk about. His work became a standard of the symbolist and decadence movements and influenced a long line of writers, composers, painters, and sculptors who bridged the 19th century into the 20th. His experiments with how poetry appears on the printed page (hypertext) were also important to later trends in graphic arts. Mallarmé's poetry needs to be revisited on these grounds alone.
MacIntyre's volume from the University of California Press is fairly easy to obtain, as it's been circulating for nearly 60 years. If you are looking for a less 'bookish' translation, you may want to consider UC's newer volume by Henry Michael Weinfield, published in 2011. The Weinfield compilation is more 'layman friendly,' with a helpful introductory essay and notes that offer more basic background and translations of titles and inscriptions. It also includes late period poems by Mallarmé that built on the concept of hypertext, which MacIntyre chose not to touch.
