Mallarme in Prose - Softcover

Stephane Mallarme

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811214516 ISBN 13: 9780811214513

Publisher: New Directions, 2001

Synopsis

This volume contains never-before translated prose selections by the father of the Symbolist movement, one of the most influential cultural figures of 19th-century France. Mallarmé’s letters to leading French intellectuals and artists of the time appear with his pieces on language and aesthetics, as he considers the state of contemporary French literature. There are also lighter reflections on life, fashion, and the performing arts (some of Mallarmé’s fascinating essays on the ballet are included here). A number of sections are devoted to Mallarmé’s great magazine of wit and opinion, La Dernière Mode, or The Latest Fashion, every page of which he wrote himself under various pseudonyms of both genders. As the translator and editor of this volume Mary Ann Caws puts it: “It is Mallarmé as inventor whom this volume celebrates.” Mallarmé’s portraits of poets and artists (including Tennyson, Poe, and Manet) also contribute to this long-awaited volume, a collection of prose highlighting Mallarmé’s multiplicity of voices and variety of forms.

About this title

About the Authors

Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor of English, French, and Comparative Literature, and Emerita and Resident Professor at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. She has translated and written on many surrealist writers including André Breton, René Char, Paul Eluard, Salvador Dalí, and Pablo Picasso.

Award-winning translator, scholar, and essayist Richard Sieburth has translated books by Henri Michaux, Friedrich Hölderlin, Louise Labé, Gérard de Nerval, and Nostradamus.

Reviews

While St‚phane Mallarm‚ wrote as much prose as poetry, little of that side of his writing has made its way into English. Caws (who also edited St‚phane Mallarm‚: Selected Poetry and Prose) and five other translators contribute letters, articles, vignettes, paeans to Poe and Tennyson, literary criticism, appreciations of ballet and miscellaneous, unclassifiable pieces to emphasize just how much more of Mallarm‚ there is to read. Of the writer's major works, Caws has chosen excerpts from Les Mots anglais, a work that reflects less Mallarm‚'s insights into English than his fascination with the mysteries of language itself. Although there is nothing to represent Mallarm‚'s study in mythology, Les Dieux antiques (1880), there are selections from one of his money-making ventures, his fashion magazine La DerniŠre Mode (1874), such as his disquisition on the metaphysics of the top hat. There are even a few fragmentary notes from his inscrutable, incomplete work Le Livre. Apart from the necessary ecstatic impenetrability of the Symbolists, Mallarm‚ often engages in jeux d'esprit here. "Wait, for modesty's sake," he playfully begs an interlocutor, "for me to make it a little more obscure." Although there's an element of a chocolate-box assortment to this sampling, with so little of Mallarm‚'s prose in translation, Caws's collection becomes the de facto best introduction.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2001
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0811214516
• ISBN 13: 9780811214513
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 144
• Editor: Mary Ann Caws