Stéphane Mallarmé
Fragments – Anatole’s Tomb
‘Die Toteninsel / The Isle of the Dead’
Arnold Böcklin (1827–1901), Wikimedia Commons
Translated by A. S. Kline © Copyright 2009 All Rights Reserved
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Introduction
Mallarmé’s second child, Anatole, born July 1871, became seriously ill when he was seven years old. He suffered from rheumatic fever complicated by an enlarged heart, and died in October 1879, aged eight. Mallarmé left a series of fragments for a four-part poetic memorial, a ‘tomb’. He was emotionally and artistically unable to forge a finished work from them. This translation or rather adaptation contains many of the two hundred or so fragments, in some cases fragments of the fragments, excluding things I found too partial or obscure to resonate. I have not followed original spacing exactly, except where it genuinely appears to add impact to the verse. Despite being fragments the pieces communicate some part of the loss suffered, and the thoughts engendered, by the child’s death, and therefore any child’s death, any such tragedy. Mallarmé’s spiritual position is taken to be atheistic, and therefore religious assumptions should not be made in interpreting these fragments. The content is however universal enough, I think, for a reader of any spiritual persuasion to respond in their own manner, within their own belief system.
The Fragments
1.
Child emerged from
us both – showing us
our ideal, the way
– for us! A father
mother surviving him
in sad existence
like two extremes –
ill fused in him
that are parted
–hence his death –
cancelling this small
child’s ‘self’
2.
Ill in
spring time
Dead in autumn
– the sun
3.
Son
re-absorbed
not gone
it is he
– or his brother
I
myself said it
to him
two brothers
4.
– image of I
other than I
taken in
death!
5.
what takes refuge
in me your future
becomes a
purity for life,
which I shall
not touch –
6.
To pray to the dead
(not for them)
– need
for the child here
– his absence
because of the true dead
only a child!
7.
Hands join
towards him not
to be touched –
but who is –
– whom a space
distances –
8.
To resurrect
– to construct
with his
lucidity – this
work – too
vast for me
and thus
depriving me
of life, sacrificing
it if it is
not for the work
– to be him grown,
deprived – and
do it without
fear of toying
with his death –
if I sacrificed
life for him –
if I accepted
this death
as my own
9.
Exemplar
we have known
through you this ‘more
than ourselves’
which often escapes
us – and will be
in us – in our
actions, now
child, sowing
the ideal
10.
Father mother
vowing never
another child
– grave that he dug
life ends there
11.
Useless
remedies
abandoned
if nature
wished it not
I would
take myself
for one dead
balms mere
consolations for us
– doubt
then not, their reality!
12.
Child our
immortality
made in fact
of lost human
hopes – son –
entrusted to woman
by a man
no longer young
despairing of finding
the mystery
taking a wife
13.
Ill
since the day when death
installed itself – marked by
malady –
no longer himself already, but
the one we would wish
to see again later
beyond death –
summing up death and
corruption – appearing
so, with his sickness
and pallor
14.
Ill – to be naked
as the child –
appearing to us
– we profit from those
hours, when death
stricken
he lives
still, and
is still ours
title: poetry of
the malady
15.
With the gift of words
I could have made you
yourselfchild of the work
kingmade of you
instead
–no, sadof the son
in us
– made you– of
task
no–
yet he
remember theproves
that he
bad days –was such –
played
mouth closedthat role!
native
speech–
forgotten
it is I who have
aided you since
16.
– Have brought back in
you the child –
youth or sickness
of history learned
forgottenfrom which
nothing
I would not have
suffered – to be
in my turn
studying only that
–death
17.
Then – you would only
have been me
– since I am
here – lonely, sad –
– no, I remember
a childhood –
– yours
twin voices
but without you
I’d not have – known
18.
So it is I,
hands accursed –
who bequeathed you!
– silence
(he forgives)
19.
Oh! Leave...us
at this word
– that merges
us both
– unites us
finally –
since who has
spoken it
yours
20.
– All this transformation
once barbarous and
material
external –
now
moral
and within
21.
No brother sister
ever the absent one
shall not be less than
those present –
22.
to feel it burst
in the night
the immense void
produced by what
would be his life
– because he cannot
know –
he is dead
lightning?
23.
Moment when one must
break with the
living memory,
to inter it
– place it in the coffin,
hide it – with
the brutality of
placing it there,
raw contact
to see it no longer
except as idealised –
later, no longer him
living, there – but
the germ of his being
taken back into itself –
the germ allowing
thought for him
– sight of him
vision (ideality
of state) and
speech for him
for in us, pure
him, a refining
– become our
honour, the source
of our finer
feelings –
true re-entry
into the ideal
24.
Death’s treacherous
blow – of
which he
evil
knew nothing
– in my turn
to toy with it, the
one thing childhood
knows nothing of
25.
hour of the
empty room
–
until it is
opened
perhaps everything
follows thus
(morally)
26.
You can, with your
weak hands, drag me
into your grave – you
have the right –
– I myself
who follow you, I, I
let myself fall –
– yet if you
wish, together,
let us both make...
an alliance
a magnificent bond,
– and the life
remaining in me
I will employ
for..............
27.
You watch me
I cannot tell you
the truth yet
I dare not, too little one,
What has happened to you
–
One day I will tell it
to you
– for as a man
I’d not wish you
not to know
your fate
–
or man
dead child
28.
No – not
one of the great
deaths –
– as long as we
ourselves live, he
lives – in us
it is only after we’re
dead he will be so
– and the bell that tolls
for the Dead will toll for
him
29.
– And let us speak
of what
we both know
we two
mystery
30.
Oh! Make us
suffer
you who
thought so
little of it – all
that equates to
your life, painful in
shattered
us
while you
glide, free
31.
And you, his sister
you who one day
– (that gulf open
since his death
that follows us
to our own –
when we
your mother and I
have vanished there)
must, one day,
unite us all
three in your thoughts,
your memory...
–as in
a single tomb
you who, in
turn, will come
upon this tomb, not
made for you –
32.
Sunset
and wind
now vanished, a
wind of nothing
that breathes
(the emptiness
?modern, there)
33.
Tears, flood
of lucidity, the dead
seen again,
beyond
34.
Death – whispers low
– I am no one –
do not even know myself
(for the dead do not
know they’re
dead – nor that they’re
dying
– children
at least
– or
heroes – sudden
deaths
for my beauty’s
made otherwise
of last
moments –
lucidity, beauty
face – of
what would be
I, without I
for as soon as
(one is,
I am –
dead) I cease
to be –
made then of
premonitions, of
intuitions, ultimate
frissons – I
am not –
yet in the ideal
state
and for those
others, tears,
mourning, all that –
and it’s my
shade, ignorance
of myself, that
dresses in mourning
35.
Illness to which
one clings
wanting it
to endure, to possess
him longer
36.
Death – ridiculous enemy
– who cannot impose on the child
the notion that you exist!
37.
No more life for
me
and I sense myself
lying there in the grave
beside you.
38.
Death
only consolation
exists, thoughts – balm
but what is done
is done – we cannot
return to the absolute
contained in death –
– and yet
to show that if,
life once abstracted,
the happiness of being
together, all that – such
consolation in its turn
has its root – its base –
absolute – in what
(if we wish
for example a
dead being to live in
us, thought –
is his being, his
thought in effect)
ever he has of the best
that transpires, through our
love and the care
we take
of being –
(being, being
simply moral and
about thought)
there is in that a
magnificent beyond
that rediscovers its
truth – so much
purer and lovelier than
the absolute rupture
of death – become
little by little as illusory
as absolute ( so we’re
allowed to seem
to forget the pain)
– as this illusion
of survival in
us, becomes absolutely
illusory – (there is
unreality in both
cases) has been terrible
and true
39.
Earth – you lack
a single plant
– to what purpose –
– I who
honour you –
flowers,
vain beauty
40.
His eyes
watch me, double
and sufficient
– already taken by
absence and the void
all to unite there?
41.
Man and
absence –
the spiritual
twin with which
he blends when he
dreams, reflects
– absence, alone
after death, once
the pious
interment of the
body, creates
mysteriously – that
agreed fiction
42.
Slow to be sacrifice
earth alters him
all this time
pain eternal
and dumb
43.
What! death
in its vastness – terrible
death
to strike down so
small a being
I say to deathcoward
ah! it is in us
not beyond
44.
He has dug our
grave
in dying
the burial plot
45.
Oh! If the eyes of the dead
had greater power
than those, most beautiful
of the living
if they could draw you in
46.
After-effect
immortality
thanks to
our love
– he prolongs us
beyond
in exchange
we give back
life to him
in deepening
our thought
47.
Earth – gap gaping and
never to be filled
– but by sky
– indifferent earth
grave
not flowers
wreaths, our
joys and our life
48.
No, you are not one of the dead
– you will not be among
the dead, always in us
49.
it becomes a
joy (a bitter
enough thing) for us –
and unjust to him
who rests below, and is
in reality deprived
of all that with which
we associate him.
50.
I –
perhaps –
the ambiguity
that might be!
pain and sweet
joys
of the ghostly
sufferer
51.
Vision
endlessly purified
by my tears
52.
Ah! Adored heart
O my image
beyond of too vast
destinies –
only a child
like you –
I dream
still
all alone –
in the future
53.
Ah! Truly you know
that if I consent
to live – to seem
to forget you –
it is to
nourish my pain
– and so this apparent
forgetfulness
can pour out more
fully in tears, at
some moment
in the midst of this
life, when you
appear to me
54.
Time – it takes
for a body to decompose
in earth – (confounded
little by little
with neutral earth
in vast horizons)
it is then he
let’s go of the pure
spirit one
was – which was
bound to him,
organised – which
can take refuge
pure in us,
to reign
in us,
the survivors
absolute purity
on which
time pivots and
re-forms
55.
I sense it in myself
wanting – if not
the life lost,
at least the
equivalent –
the death
– where one is stripped
of body
– in those who remain
56.
– Oh! I
sense you
so strongly – and that you
always feel
well with us,
the parents – but
free, child
eternal, and at once
everywhere –
57.
To close the eyes
I – do not want to
close the eyes –
that will watch
me always
58.
Let us speak of him
again, let us extinguish
– in reality, silence
59.
True mourning in
rooms
– not the cemetery –
to find only
absence –
– in presence
of things
60.
And he
the father –
who constructs
a tomb
– won’t his spirit
go seeking the traces of
destruction – and transmute
into pure spirit?
so deeply that
purity emerges from
the corruption!
61.
No – I will not
relinquish
nothingness
a father – I
sense the nothingness
invading me
62.
May my thought
make for him a
more beautiful
purer life.
63.
Wreaths
One feels obliged
to throw into this earth
that opens before
the child – the loveliest
wreaths of flowers –
the loveliest flowery
products, of that
earth – sacrificed
– in order to veil
or pay his toll
for him
64.
It is only, there,
the explosion of the
shattering caused
by the cry of I –
that little by little
re-forms itself –
all ended