Stéphane Mallarmé – författare

”Den orfiska förklaringen av Jorden”, skrev Stéphane Mallarmé, ”är poetens enda uppgift och det högsta litterära spelet”. Det Stora Verk som han arbetade på under större delen av sitt liv lyckades han aldrig färdigställa, men vid sidan om detta skrev han dikter som revolutionerade den moderna litteraturen. Mallarmés poesi är kompromisslös i sin komplexitet, full av svävande symboler och mångtydig syntax som ställer höga krav på sin läsare. Men genom dunklet skimrar också en glasklar sinnlighet, där ordens klangfärger och betydelser speglar varandra i ett ständigt undanglidande spel. Denna tvåspråkiga utgåva innehåller för första gången på svenska Mallarmés enda diktsamling Poésies (Dikter) i sin helhet, följt av den brett upplagda, grafiskt komponerade dikten Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard (Ett tärningskast kan aldrig upphäva slumpen). Här finns också utförliga kommentarer som erbjuder svenska läsare en ingång till de svårtillgängliga dikterna, samt ett efterord som presenterar Mallarmés liv och verk, liksom de särskilda utmaningar hans poesi ställer sin översättare inför.

'sense too definite cancels yourindistinct literature'Stéphane Mallarmé was the most radically innovative of nineteenth-century poets. His writings, with their richly sensuous texture and air of slyly intangible mystery, perplexed or outraged many early readers; yet no writer has more profoundly influenced the course of modern poetry - in English as well as in French. In both form and content, his poems created new ways of conveying existential doubt, fragmentation, and discontinuity. This is the fullest collection of Mallarmé's poetry ever published in English, and the only edition in any language that presents his Poésies in the last arrangement known to have been approved by the author. Apart from verse, it includes all the prose poems and the unique, unclassifiable Un Coup de dés... (A Dice Throw...). The lucid, wide-ranging introduction and invaluable notes help an understanding of this astonishing poet's work. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

The leading poet of French symbolism, Stephane Mallarme has exercised an enormous influence both on French and on English and American avant-garde writers. In this volume C. F. MacIntyre has translated forty-three of his poems, including the "Ouverture" and "Scene" from Herodiade, which was to have been a drama in verse, and the well-known L'Apres-midi d'un faune, for which Debussy composed his orchestral prelude. The French text faces the English translations, which are both true to the original and poetic. Indeed, as MacIntyre suggests, Debussy is probably "one of the best guides into the mysterious realm of Mallarme." The poet was more concerned with the music of words, their sounds and vague associations, than with their conventional meanings; one of the elements in his credo was that suggestion and evocation are of greater significance than statement. His syntax is fractious, his meaning frequently enigmatic; but the reader will find MacIntyre's notes helpful in savoring the translations and the original French verses.

Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) is one of the giants of nineteenth-century French poetry. Leader of the Symbolist movement, he exerted a powerful influence on modern literature and thought, which can be traced in the works of Paul Valery, W.B. Yeats, and Jacques Derrida. From his early twenties until the time of his death, Mallarme produced poems of astonishing originality and beauty, many of which have become classics. In the "Collected Poems", Henry Weinfield brings the oeuvre of this European master to life for an English-speaking audience, essentially for the first time. All the poems that the author chose to retain are here, superbly rendered by Weinfield in a translation that comes remarkably close to Mallarme's own voice. Weinfield conveys not simply the meaning but the spirit and music of the French originals, which appear en face. Whether writing in verse or prose, or inventing an altogether new genre - as he did in the amazing 'Coup de Des' - Mallarme was a poet of both supreme artistry and great difficulty. To illuminate Mallarme's poetry for twentieth-century readers, Weinfield provides an extensive commentary that is itself an important work of criticism.He sets each poem in the context of the work as a whole and defines the poems' major symbols. Also included are an introduction and a bibliography. Publication of this collection is a major literary event in the English-speaking world: here at last is the work of a major figure, masterfully translated.

"This is a book just the way I don't like them," the father of French Symbolism, Stéphane Mallarmé, informs the reader in his preface to Divagations: "scattered and with no architecture." On the heels of this caveat, Mallarmé's diverting, discursive, and gorgeously disordered 1897 masterpiece tumbles forth--and proves itself to be just the sort of book his readers like most. The salmagundi of prose poems, prose-poetic musings, criticism, and reflections that is Divagations has long been considered a treasure trove by students of aesthetics and modern poetry. If Mallarmé captured the tone and very feel of fin-de-siècle Paris, he went on to captivate the minds of the greatest writers of the twentieth century--from Valéry and Eliot to Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida. This was the only book of prose he published in his lifetime and, in a new translation by Barbara Johnson, is now available for the first time in English as Mallarmé arranged it. The result is an entrancing work through which a notoriously difficult-to-translate voice shines in all of its languor and musicality. Whether contemplating the poetry of Tennyson, the possibilities of language, a masturbating priest, or the transporting power of dance, Mallarmé remains a fascinating companion--charming, opinionated, and pedantic by turns. As an expression of the Symbolist movement and as a contribution to literary studies, Divagations is vitally important. But it is also, in Johnson's masterful translation, endlessly mesmerizing.

Selected Poetry and Prose of Stéphane Mallarmé presents what can be considered the essential work of the renowned “father of the Symbolists.” Mallarmé’s major elegies, sonnets, and other verse, including excerpts from the dialogue “Hériodiade,” are all assembled here with the French and English texts en face. Also included (not bilingually) are the visual poem “Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance” and the drama “Igitur,” as well as letters, essays, and reviews. Although his primary concern was with poetry, the aesthetics of Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) has touched all the arts. During the last twenty years of his life, his Paris apartment was a major literary gathering place. Every Tuesday evening, standing beneath the portrait of himself by his friend Edouard Manet, the poet addressed reverent gatherings which included at various times Paul Valery and André Gide, among many others. The American painter James Whistler was influenced by these “Mardis,” and one of the best-known poems in the present collection, “The Afternoon of a Faun,” inspired Claude Debussy’s famous musical composition. In translation, the subtle and varied shades of Mallarmé’s oeuvre may best be rendered by diverse hands. Editor Mary Ann Caws, the author of books on René Char, Robert Desnos, and various aspects of modern French writing, has brought together the work of fourteen translators, spanning a century, from the Symbolists and the Bloomsbury group (George Moore and Roger Fry) to Cid Corman, Brian Coffey, and other contemporary poets and writers.

A deluxe, large-format publication of French poet Stéphane Mallarmé’s most influential workAmong the most influential works of the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98), Un Coup de dés jamais n'abolira le Hasard feels to this day revolutionary and resoundingly contemporary, both for the suggestive power of its unconventional free verse and for its striking visual impact. For the poet, the white spaces, or scattered "silences," are as integral to the reading as the words on the page, and the very design—the typographical layers and the arrangement of lines and words upon the page and across spreads—carries meaning and content.At the time of his death in 1898, Mallarmé was close to realizing his vision of a deluxe, large-format publication of the poem that would meet his precise specifications with regard to dimensions, typography and page design, and would include commissioned lithographs by his friend Odilon Redon, an artist he admired for the tonal richness and symbolic power of his images.This two-volume edition brings all of these elements together for the first time in an English-language edition. Separate French and English volumes allow for individual readings of the original poem and this fresh new translation (A Blow of Dice Never Will Abolish Chance), each produced at full scale, meticulously typeset and accompanied by Redon's evocative illustrations.

Mallarmé’s magnum opus rendered as an open-ended Tarot-esque card gameUpon his death, Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–98) left hundreds of notes on an unrealized great work he called The Book. Housed in a clear Plexiglas box, this card-deck conception of his project draws from that material, and from other writings alluding to its possible forms, including a letter in which he describes “a book that is architectural…. The orphic explanation of the Earth, which is the sole duty of the poet, and the literary game par excellence.”The title of this game derives from another letter in which Mallarmé writes, “perhaps the title of my volume of lyric poetry will be The Glory of the Lie, or The Glorious Lie.” Each deck contains 48 cards: three with artwork on each side, and 45 with words or phrases on each side. The size of the cards, their gold edging and the physical housing of the decks in the box reflect descriptions and clues in Mallarmé’s notes.The manner of playing the game is left open, but quotes and diagrams by Mallarmé in the accompanying 20-page booklet point to the idea of pulling cards from each of the four decks and laying them out for one reading, then flipping the cards over for a second reading. The image cards function like the Arcana of Tarot, providing a visual language equal to the word cards. The readings might be used to create poetry or, like Tarot, to divine or illuminate.

The French poet Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) was modernism's great champion of the book as both a conceptual and material entity: probably his most famous pronouncement is 'everything in the world exists in order to end up as a book.' The Book was Mallarme's total artwork, a book to encompass all books. Frequently quoted, sometimes excerpted, but never before translated in its entirety, The Book is a visual poem about its own construction, the scaffolding of a cosmic architecture intended to reveal 'all existing relations between everything.'

A fully bilingual edition of Mallarme's Sonnets, with introduction and notes. An ideal way to find one's way into Mallarme's engagement with this particular form, which played a central part in his work in the last 15 years of his life. Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898) is among the greatest of the French poets, one whose relatively small ouvre has had a disproportionate impact on subsequent developments in theory, in the philosophy of language, and French poetry in the twentieth century. Essentially an occasional poet, Mallarme's most original and successful writing was done in the 30 years between the later 1860s, when he underwent a spiritual crisis, and 1898 when he died at the age of 56. His writings can be divided into three main areas: the longer poems of his earlier period (1860s to 1870s, including L'Herodiade and L'Apres-midi d'un faune), his various theoretical reflections on poetry, theatre and music of the 1870s, 80s and 90s (in particular those gathered under the heading Divagations) and his sonnets of the 1880s and 90s which, along with his experimental poem Un coup de Des of 1897, constitute his most original and successful poetic works. The thirty-nine sonnets presented here, with the originals and translations in parallel text, are in many ways his most typical and representative works in that they reflect a radical point of both continuity and discontinuity within a long tradition of European poetic expression and at the same time embody a uniquely modern synthesis of language's multiple potentialities.

Previously only available in hardcover, and after a long period of being unavailable, one of Wave's most popular titles, A Roll of the Dice by Stéphane Mallarmé, is now available in paperback.Through brilliant collaboration, Robert Bononno and book designer Jeff Clark translated one of Mallarmé’s most well-known and visually complex poems into contemporary English language and design. This bilingual softcover edition not only includes Mallarmé's original preface, but also matches the typography of the last round of proofs that Mallarmé was correcting at the time of his death. Clark's presentation is both visually stunning and typographically radical, mirroring the dark mystery of Mallarmé’s poem. With a keen understanding of poetics, Bononno’s translation offers myriad interpretations, while capturing the visionary spirit of the original. Together, Clark and Bononno have created a singular version of A Roll of the Dice that is markedly unique in its attention to the ways layout, design, typeface, and language all contribute to the meaning making of this masterpiece.