Stéphane Mallarmé
Translations into English by
A. S. KLINE
Published with Illustrations by ODILON REDON
POETRY IN TRANSLATION
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© 2004-2009 A. S. Kline
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Funeral Libation (At Gautier’s Tomb)
The Tomb of Charles Baudelaire
Sonnet: ‘Quand l’ombre menaça…’
Sonnet: ‘Le vierge, le vivace…’
Sonnet: ‘Victorieusement fui le suicide…’
Sonnet: ‘Ses purs ongles très haut…’
Sonnet: ‘Pour votre chère morte, son ami…’
Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard
The French Text - Compressed, and Punctuated
The English Translation - Compressed, and Punctuated
These translations of Mallarmé’s major poetry reflect his position as a leading Symbolist poet of the nineteenth century. His use of complex syntax, and subtle turns of phrase, often makes his verse seem more abstruse than its content indicates, revealing as it does a relatively narrow though sophisticated world, predominantly literary and philosophical in nature. Part of the charm of his poetry is his ability to create a rich and detailed edifice from the simplest of ideas, objects, or occasions. Philosophically he is associated with ideas of absence and emptiness, but also of a quasi-Platonic realm of forms inherent in that emptiness, though paradoxically his verse, which often attempts to realise the ideal essence of the perceived external reality, through its images, symbols, and metaphors, appeals strongly to the senses. The impression is therefore given of a gleaming fin-de-siècle void, the gleam indeed strongly related to the world of Impressionist painting, the void partly a consequence of the earlier poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud with its analysis of the emptiness and frustrations of modern life, and partly derived from his own experience and thought.
Added here is a new translation of Mallarmé’s free-verse poem ‘Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard’ (‘A throw of the dice will never abolish chance’). An experiment in typographical layout, the author used variable spacing to indicate voids and pauses which highlight and contrast with the elements of text. The poem contains symbolist, impressionistic, and proto-surrealist themes, the various linguistic threads being emphasized by changes in font size. The poem has influenced many later experiments in the graphic design of free verse texts.
Nothing, this foam, virgin verse
Depicting the chalice alone:
Far off a band of Sirens drown
Many of them head first.
We sail, O my various
Friends, I already at the stern,
You at the lavish prow that churns
The lightning’s and the winters’ flood:
A sweet intoxication urges me
Despite pitching, tossing, fearlessly
To offer this toast while standing
Solitude, reef, and starry veil
To whatever’s worthy of knowing
The white anxiety of our sail.
‘The Siren clothed in barbs, emerged from the waves’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
National Gallery of Art | NGA Images
Princess! In jealousy of a Hebe’s fate
Rising over this cup at your lips’ kisses,
I spend my fires with the slender rank of prelate
And won’t even figure naked on Sèvres dishes.
Since I’m not your pampered poodle,
Pastille, rouge or sentimental game
And know your shuttered glance at me too well,
Blonde whose hairdressers have goldsmiths’ names!
Name me…you whose laughters strawberry-crammed
Are mingling with a flock of docile lambs
Everywhere grazing vows bleating joy the while,
Name me…so that Love winged with a fan
Paints me there, lulling the fold, flute in hand,
Princess, name me the shepherd of your smiles.
Possessed by some demon now a negress
Would taste a girl-child saddened by strange fruits
Forbidden ones too under the ragged dress,
This glutton’s ready to try a trick or two:
To her belly she twins two fortunate tits
And, so high that no hand knows how to seize her,
Thrusts the dark shock of her booted legs
Just like a tongue unskilled in pleasure.
Facing the timorous nakedness of the gazelle
That trembles, on her back like an elephant gone wild,
Waiting upside down, she keenly admires herself,
Laughing with her bared teeth at the child:
And, between her legs where the victim’s couched,
Raising the black flesh split beneath its mane,
Advances the palate of that alien mouth
Pale, rosy as a shell from the Spanish Main.
‘The Queen of Sheba’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
National Gallery of Art | NGA Images
I don’t come to conquer your flesh tonight, O beast
In whom are the sins of the race, nor to stir
In your foul tresses a mournful tempest
Beneath the fatal boredom my kisses pour:
A heavy sleep without those dreams that creep
Under curtains alien to remorse, I ask of your bed,
Sleep you can savour after your dark deceits,
You who know more of Nothingness than the dead.
For Vice, gnawing this inborn nobleness of mine
Marked me, like you, with its sterility,
But shroud-haunted, pale, destroyed, I flee
While that heart no tooth of any crime
Can wound lives in your breast of stone,
Frightened of dying while I sleep alone.
‘Perversity’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
National Gallery of Art | NGA Images
The sun, on the sand, O sleeping wrestler,
Warms a languid bath in the gold of your hair,
Melting the incense on your hostile features,
Mixing an amorous liquid with the tears.
The immutable calm of this white burning,
O my fearful kisses, makes you say, sadly,
‘Will we ever be one mummified winding,
Under the ancient sands and palms so happy?’
But your tresses are a tepid river,
Where the soul that haunts us drowns, without a shiver
And finds the Nothingness you cannot know!
I’ll taste the unguent of your eyelids’ shore,
To see if it can grant to the heart, at your blow,
The insensibility of stones and the azure.
‘A woman clothed with the sun’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
National Gallery of Art | NGA Images
Eyes, lakes of my simple passion to be reborn
Other than as the actor who gestures with his hand
As with a pen, and evokes the foul soot of the lamps,
Here’s a window in the walls of cloth I’ve torn.
With legs and arms a limpid treacherous swimmer
With endless leaps, disowning the sickness
Hamlet! It’s as if I began to build in the ocean depths
A thousand tombs: to vanish still virgin there.
Mirthful gold of a cymbal beaten with fists,
The sun all at once strikes the pure nakedness
That breathed itself out of my coolness of nacre,
Rancid night of the skin, when you swept over me,
Not knowing, ungrateful one, that it was, this make-up,
My whole anointing, drowned in ice-water perfidy.
I bring you the child of an Idumean night!
Black, with pale naked bleeding wings, Light
Through the glass, burnished with gold and spice,
Through panes, still dismal, alas, and cold as ice,
Hurled itself, daybreak, against the angelic lamp.
Palm-leaves! And when it showed this relic, damp,
To that father attempting an inimical smile,
The solitude shuddered, azure, sterile.
O lullaby, with your daughter, and the innocence
Of your cold feet, greet a terrible new being:
A voice where harpsichords and viols linger,
Will you press that breast, with your withered finger,
From which Woman flows in Sibylline whiteness to
Those lips starved by the air’s virgin blue?
‘Angel with a chain in their hands’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
The Rijksmuseum
These nymphs, I would perpetuate them.
So bright
Their crimson flesh that hovers there, light
In the air drowsy with dense slumbers.
Did I love a dream?
My doubt, mass of ancient night, ends extreme
In many a subtle branch, that remaining the true
Woods themselves, proves, alas, that I too
Offered myself, alone, as triumph, the false ideal of roses.
Let’s see….
or if those women you note
Reflect your fabulous senses’ desire!
Faun, illusion escapes from the blue eye,
Cold, like a fount of tears, of the most chaste:
But the other, she, all sighs, contrasts you say
Like a breeze of day warm on your fleece?
No! Through the swoon, heavy and motionless
Stifling with heat the cool morning’s struggles
No water, but that which my flute pours, murmurs
To the grove sprinkled with melodies: and the sole breeze
Out of the twin pipes, quick to breathe
Before it scatters the sound in an arid rain,
Is unstirred by any wrinkle of the horizon,
The visible breath, artificial and serene,
Of inspiration returning to heights unseen.
O Sicilian shores of a marshy calm
My vanity plunders vying with the sun,
Silent beneath scintillating flowers, RELATE
‘That I was cutting hollow reeds here tamed
By talent: when, on the green gold of distant
Verdure offering its vine to the fountains,
An animal whiteness undulates to rest:
And as a slow prelude in which the pipes exist
This flight of swans, no, of Naiads cower
Or plunge…’
Inert, all things burn in the tawny hour
Not seeing by what art there fled away together
Too much of hymen desired by one who seeks there
The natural A: then I’ll wake to the primal fever
Erect, alone, beneath the ancient flood, light’s power,
Lily! And the one among you all for artlessness.
Other than this sweet nothing shown by their lip, the kiss
That softly gives assurance of treachery,
My breast, virgin of proof, reveals the mystery
Of the bite from some illustrious tooth planted;
Let that go! Such the arcane chose for confidant,
The great twin reed we play under the azure ceiling,
That turning towards itself the cheek’s quivering,
Dreams, in a long solo, so we might amuse
The beauties round about by false notes that confuse
Between itself and our credulous singing;
And create as far as love can, modulating,
The vanishing, from the common dream of pure flank
Or back followed by my shuttered glances,
Of a sonorous, empty and monotonous line.
Try then, instrument of flights, O malign
Syrinx by the lake where you await me, to flower again!
I, proud of my murmur, intend to speak at length
Of goddesses: and with idolatrous paintings
Remove again from shadow their waists’ bindings:
So that when I’ve sucked the grapes’ brightness
To banish a regret done away with by my pretence,
Laughing, I raise the emptied stem to the summer’s sky
And breathing into those luminous skins, then I,
Desiring drunkenness, gaze through them till evening.
O nymphs, let’s rise again with many memories.
‘My eye, piercing the reeds, speared each immortal
Neck that drowns its burning in the water
With a cry of rage towards the forest sky;
And the splendid bath of hair slipped by
In brightness and shuddering, O jewels!
I rush there: when, at my feet, entwine (bruised
By the languor tasted in their being-two’s evil)
Girls sleeping in each other’s arms’ sole peril:
I seize them without untangling them and run
To this bank of roses wasting in the sun
All perfume, hated by the frivolous shade
Where our frolic should be like a vanished day.’
I adore you, wrath of virgins, O shy
Delight of the nude sacred burden that glides
Away to flee my fiery lip, drinking
The secret terrors of the flesh like quivering
Lightning: from the feet of the heartless one
To the heart of the timid, in a moment abandoned
By innocence wet with wild tears or less sad vapours.
‘Happy at conquering these treacherous fears
My crime’s to have parted the dishevelled tangle
Of kisses that the gods kept so well mingled:
For I’d scarcely begun to hide an ardent laugh
In one girl’s happy depths (holding back
With only a finger, so that her feathery candour
Might be tinted by the passion of her burning sister,
The little one, naïve and not even blushing)
Than from my arms, undone by vague dying,
This prey, forever ungrateful, frees itself and is gone,
Not pitying the sob with which I was still drunk.’
No matter! Others will lead me towards happiness
By the horns on my brow knotted with many a tress:
You know, my passion, how ripe and purple already
Every pomegranate bursts, murmuring with the bees:
And our blood, enamoured of what will seize it,
Flows for all the eternal swarm of desire yet.
At the hour when this wood with gold and ashes heaves
A feast’s excited among the extinguished leaves:
Etna! It’s on your slopes, visited by Venus
Setting in your lava her heels so artless,
When a sad slumber thunders where the flame burns low.
I hold the queen!
O certain punishment…
No, but the soul
Void of words, and this heavy body,
Succumb to noon’s proud silence slowly:
With no more ado, forgetting blasphemy, I
Must sleep, lying on the thirsty sand, and as I
Love, open my mouth to wine’s true constellation!
Farewell to you, both: I go to see the shadow you have become.
‘Ophelia, the blue cape on the waters’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
The Rijksmuseum
To you, gone emblem of our happiness!
Greetings, in pale libation and madness,
Don’t think to some hope of magic corridors I offer
My empty cup, where a monster of gold suffers!
Your apparition cannot satisfy me:
Since I myself entombed you in porphyry.
The rite decrees our hands must quench the torch
Against the iron mass of your tomb’s porch:
None at this simple ceremony should forget,
Those chosen to sing the absence of the poet,
That this monument encloses him entire.
Were it not that his art’s glory, full of fire
Till the dark communal moment all of ash,
Returns as proud evening’s glow lights the glass,
To the fires of the pure mortal sun!
Marvellous, total, solitary, so that one
Trembles to breathe with man’s false pride.
This haggard crowd! ‘We are’, it cries,
‘Our future ghosts, their sad opacity.’
But with walls blazoned, mourning, empty,
I’ve scorned the lucid horror of a tear,
When, deaf to the sacred verse he does not fear,
One of those passers-by, mute, blind, proud,
Transmutes himself, a guest in his vague shroud,
Into the virgin hero of posthumous waiting.
A vast void carried through the fog’s drifting,
By the angry wind of words he did not say,
Nothing, to this Man abolished yesterday:
‘What is Earth, O you, memories of horizons?’
Shrieks the dream: and, a voice whose clarity lessens,
Space, has for its toy this cry: ‘I do not know!’
The Master, with eye profound, as he goes,
Pacified the restless miracle of Eden,
Who alone woke, in his voice’s final frisson,
The mystery of a name for the Lily and the Rose.
Is there anything of this destiny left, or no?
O, all of you, forget your darkened faith.
Glorious, eternal genius has no shade.
I, moved by your desire, wish to see
for Him who vanished yesterday, in the Ideal
Work that for us the garden of this star creates,
As a solemn agitation in the air, that stays
Honouring this quiet disaster, a stir
Of words, a drunken red, calyx, clear,
That, rain and diamonds, the crystal gaze
Fixed on these flowers of which none fade,
Isolates in the hour and the light of day!
That’s all that’s left already of our true play,
Where the pure poet’s gesture, humble, vast
Must deny the dream, the enemy of his trust:
So that on the morning of his exalted stay,
When ancient death is for him as for Gautier,
The un-opening of sacred eyes, the being-still,
The solid tomb may rise, ornament this hill,
The sepulchre where lies the power to blight,
And miserly silence and the massive night.
‘I look from above at the vague forms of a human figure’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
The Rijksmuseum
Such as eternity at last transforms into Himself,
The Poet rouses with two-edged naked sword,
His century terrified at having ignored
Death triumphant in so strange a voice!
They, like a spasm of the Hydra, hearing the angel
Once grant a purer sense to the words of the tribe,
Loudly proclaimed it a magic potion, imbibed
From some tidal brew black, and dishonourable.
If our imagination can carve no bas-relief
From hostile soil and cloud, O grief,
With which to deck Poe’s dazzling sepulchre,
Let your granite at least mark a boundary forever,
Calm block fallen here from some dark disaster,
To dark flights of Blasphemy scattered through the future.
‘Glory and praise to you, Satan, in the heights of heaven’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
National Gallery of Art | NGA Images
The buried shrine shows at its sewer-mouth’s
Sepulchral slobber of mud and rubies
Some abominable statue of Anubis,
The muzzle lit like a ferocious snout
Or as when a dubious wick twists in the new gas,
Wiping out, as we know, the insults suffered
Haggardly lighting an immortal pubis,
Whose flight roosts according to the lamp
What votive leaves, dried in cities without evening
Could bless, as she can, vainly sitting
Against the marble of Baudelaire
Shudderingly absent from the veil that clothes her
She, his Shade, a protective poisonous air
Always to be breathed, although we die of her.
‘Passage of a Spirit’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
National Gallery of Art | NGA Images
Anniversary – January 1897
The black rock enraged that the north wind rolls it on
Will not halt itself, even under pious hands, still
Testing its resemblance to human ill,
As if to bless some fatal cast of bronze.
Here nearly always if the ring-dove coos
This immaterial grief with many a fold of cloud
Crushes the ripe star of tomorrows, whose crowd
Will be silvered by its scintillations. Who
Following the solitary leap
External once of our vagabond – seeks
Verlaine? He’s hidden in the grass, Verlaine
Only to catch, naïvely, not drying with his breath
And without his lip drinking there, at peace again,
A shallow stream that’s slandered, and named Death.
‘Pilgrim of the sublunary world’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
National Gallery of Art | NGA Images
Hyperbole! From my memory
Triumphantly can’t you
Rise today, like sorcery
From an iron-bound book or two:
Since, through science, I inscribe
The hymn of hearts so spiritual
In my patient work, inside
Atlas, herbal, ritual.
We walked set our face
(We were two, I maintain)
Toward the many charms of place,
Compared them, Sister, to yours again.
The reign of authority’s troubled
If, without reason, we say
Of this south that our double
Thoughtlessness has in play
That its site, bed of a hundred irises,
(They know if it truly existed),
Bears no name the golden breath
Of the trumpet of summer cited.
Yes, on an isle the air charges
With sight and not with visions
Every flower showed itself larger
Without entering our discussions.
Such flowers, immense, that every one
Usually had as adornment
A clear contour, a lacuna done
To separate it from the garden.
Glories of long-held desire, Ideas
Were all exalted in me, to see
The Iris family appear
Rising to this new duty,
But the sister sensible and fond
Carried her look no further
Than a smile, and as if to understand
I continue my ancient labour.
Oh! Let the contentious spirit know
At this hour when we are silent
The stalks of multiple lilies grow
Far too tall for our reason
And not as the riverbank weeps
When its tedious game tells lies
Claiming abundance should reach
Into my first surprise
On hearing the whole sky and the map
Behind my steps, without end, bear witness
By the ebbing wave itself that
This country never existed.
The child so taught by the paths,
Resigns her ecstasy
Says the word: Anastasius!
Born for scrolls of eternity,
Before a tomb can laugh
Beneath any sky, her ancestor,
At bearing that name: Pulcheria!
Hidden by the too-high lily-flower.
‘Nasturtiums’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
Yale University Art Gallery
Of Mademoiselle Mallarmé’s
With nothing of language but
A beating in the sky
From so precious a place yet
Future verse will rise.
A low wing the messenger
This fan if it is the one
The same by which behind you there
Some mirror has shone
Limpidly (where will fall
pursued grain by grain
a little invisible dust, all
that can give me pain)
So may it always bless
Your hands free of idleness.
Of Mademoiselle Mallarmé’s
O dreamer, that I may dive
In pure pathless joy, understand,
How by subtle deceits connive
To keep my wing in your hand.
A coolness of twilight takes
Its way to you at each beat
Whose imprisoned flutter makes
The horizon gently retreat.
Vertigo! How space quivers
Like an enormous kiss
That, wild to be born for no one, can neither
Burst out or be soothed like this.
Do you feel the fierce paradise
Like stifled laughter that slips
To the unanimous crease’s depths
From the corner of your lips?
The sceptre of shores of rose
Stagnant on golden nights,
Is this white closed flight that shows
Against your bracelet’s fiery light.
‘Pandora’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
The Met
All at once, as if in play,
Mademoiselle, she who moots
A wish to hear how it sounds today
The wood of my several flutes
It seems to me that this foray
Tried out here in a country place
Was better when I put them away
To look more closely at your face
Yes this vain whistling I suppress
In so far as I can create
Given my fingers pure distress
It lacks the means to imitate
Your very natural and clear
Childlike laughter that charms the air.
Note: Written to Mademoiselle Roumanille whom Mallarmé knew as a child.
‘Child's head with flowers’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
The Rijksmuseum
Not meaningless flurries like
Those that frequent the street
Subject to black hats in flight;
But a dancer shown complete
A whirlwind of muslin or
A furious scattering of spray
Raised by her knee, she for
Whom we live, to blow away
All, beyond her, mundane
Witty, drunken, motionless,
With her tutu, and refrain
From other mark of distress,
Unless a light-hearted draught of air
From her dress fans Whistler there.
Any solitude
Without a swan or quai
Mirrors its disuse
In the gaze I abdicate
Far from that pride’s excess
Too high to enfold
In which many a sky paints itself
With the twilight’s gold
But languorously flows beside
Like white linen laid aside
Such fleeting birds as dive
Exultantly at my side
Into the wave made you
Your exultation nude.
Unconquerably there must
As my hope hurls itself free
Burst on high and be lost
In silence and in fury
A voice alien to the wood
Or followed by no echo,
The bird one never could
Hear again in this life below.
The wild musician,
The one that in doubt expires
As to whether from his breast or mine
Has spurted the sob more dire
Torn apart may it complete
Find rest on some path beneath!
When the shadow with fatal law menaced me
A certain old dream, sick desire of my spine,
Beneath funereal ceilings afflicted by dying
Folded its indubitable wing there within me.
Luxury, O ebony hall, where to tempt a king
Famous garlands are writhing in death,
You are only pride, shadows’ lying breath
For the eyes of a recluse dazed by believing.
Yes, I know that Earth in the depths of this night,
Casts a strange mystery with vast brilliant light
Beneath hideous centuries that darken it the less.
Space, like itself, whether denied or expanded
Revolves in this boredom, vile flames as witness
That a festive star’s genius has been enkindled.
‘The Drowned’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
The Rijksmuseum
The virginal, living and lovely day
Will it fracture for us with a wild wing-blow
This solid lost lake whose frost’s haunted below
By the glacier, transparent with flights not made?
A swan from time past remembers it’s he
Magnificent yet struggling hopelessly
Through not having sung a liveable country
From the radiant boredom of winter’s sterility.
His neck will shake off this whitest agony
Space inflicts on a bird that denies it wholly,
But not earth’s horror that entraps his feathers.
Phantom assigned to this place by his brilliance,
The Swan in his exile is rendered motionless,
Swathed uselessly by his cold dream of defiance.
Victoriously the grand suicide fled
Foaming blood, brand of glory, gold, tempest!
O laughter if only to royally invest
My absent tomb purple, down there, is spread.
What! Not even a fragment of all that brightness
Remains, it is midnight, in the shade that fetes us,
Except, from the head, there’s a treasure, presumptuous,
That pours without light its spoiled languidness,
Yours, always such a delight! Yours, yes,
Retaining alone of the vanished sky, this
Trace of childish triumph as you spread each tress,
Gleaming as you show it against the pillows,
Like the helmet of war of a child-empress
From which, to denote you, would pour down roses.
‘Profile of Light’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
The Rijksmuseum
Her pure nails on high dedicating their onyx,
Anguish, at midnight, supports, a lamp-holder,
Many a twilight dream burnt by the Phoenix
That won’t be gathered in some ashes’ amphora
On a table, in the empty room: here is no ptyx,
Abolished bauble of sonorous uselessness,
(Since the Master’s gone to draw tears from the Styx
With that sole object, vanity of Nothingness).
But near the casement wide to the north,
A gold is dying, in accord with the décor
Perhaps, those unicorns dashing fire at a nixie,
She who, naked and dead in the mirror, yet
In the oblivion enclosed by the frame, is fixed
As soon by scintillations as the septet.
Note: The septet may indicate the constellation of Ursa Major in the north.
For your dear departed wife, his friend 2 November 1877
– ‘Over the lost woods when dark winter lowers
You moan, O solitary captive of the threshold,
That this double tomb which our pride should hold’s
Cluttered, alas, only with absent weight of flowers.
Unheard Midnight counts out his empty number,
Wakefulness urges you never to close an eye,
Before in the ancient armchair’s embrace my
Shade is illuminated by the dying embers.
Who wishes to receive visitations often,
Mustn’t load with too many flowers the stone
My finger raises with a dead power’s boredom.
A soul trembling to sit by a hearth so bright,
To exist again, it’s enough if I borrow from
Your lips the breath of my name you murmur all night.’
‘If on a close dark night...’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
The Rijksmuseum
To the sole task of voyaging
Beyond an India dark and splendid
– Goes time’s messenger, this greeting,
Cape that your stern has doubled
As on some low yard plunging
Along with the vessel riding
Skimmed in constant frolicking
A bird bringing fresh tidings
That without the helm flickering
Shrieked in pure monotones
An utterly useless bearing
Night, despair, and precious stones
Reflected by its singing so
To the smile of pale Vasco.
All summarised, the soul,
When slowly we breathe it out
In several rings of smoke
By other rings wiped out
Bears witness to some cigar
Burning skilfully while
The ash is separated far
From its bright kiss of fire
Should the choir of romantic art
Fly so towards your lips
Exclude from it if you start
The real because it’s cheap
Meaning too precise is sure
To void your dreamy literature.
What silk of time’s sweet balm
Where the Chimera tires himself
Is worth the coils and natural cloud
You tend before the mirror’s calm?
The blanks of meditating flags
Stand high along our avenue:
But I’ve your naked tresses too
To bury there my contented eyes.
No! The mouth cannot be sure
Of tasting anything in its bite
Unless your princely lover cares
In that mighty brush of hair
To breathe out, like a diamond,
The cry of Glory stifled there.
‘The chimera with green eyes’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
The Rijksmuseum
To introduce myself to your story
It’s as the frightened hero
If he touched with naked toe
A blade of territory
Prejudicial to glaciers I
Know of no sin’s naivety
Whose loud laugh of victory
You won’t have then denied
Say if I’m not filled with joyousness
Thunder and rubies to the hubs no less
To see in the air this fire is piercing
With royal kingdoms far scattering,
The wheel, crimson, as if in dying,
Of my chariot’s single evening.
‘Parsifal’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
The Rijksmuseum
Crushed by the overwhelming cloud
Depth of basalt and lavas
By even the enslaved echoes
Of a trumpet without power
What sepulchral shipwreck (you
Know it, slobbering there, foam)
Among hulks the supreme one
Flattened the naked mast too
Or that which, furious mistake
Of some noble ill-fate
All the vain abyss spread wide
In the so-white hair’s trailing
Would have drowned miser-like
The childish flank of some Siren.
My books closed again on Paphos’ name,
It delights me to choose with solitary genius
A ruin, by foam-flecks in thousands blessed
Beneath hyacinth, far off, in days of fame.
Let the cold flow with its silence of scythes,
I’ll not ululate here in a ‘no’ that’s empty
If this frolic so white near the ground denies
To each site the honour of false scenery.
My hunger regaled by no fruits here I see
Finds equal taste in their learned deficiency:
Let one burst with human fragrance and flesh!
While my love pokes the fire, foot on cold iron
I brood for a long time perhaps with distress
On the other’s seared breast of an ancient Amazon.
My soul, towards your brow where O calm sister,
An autumn dreams, blotched by reddish smudges,
And towards the errant sky of your angelic eye
Climbs: as in a melancholy garden the true sigh
Of a white jet of water towards the Azure!
– To the Azure that October stirred, pale, pure,
That in the vast pools mirrors infinite languor,
And over dead water, where the leaves wander
The wind, in russet throes, dig their cold furrow,
Allows a long ray of yellow light to flow.
‘Beatrice’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
National Gallery of Art | NGA Images
Each Dawn however numb
To raise a fist obscure
Against trumpets of azure
Sounded by her, the dumb,
Has the shepherd with his gourd
Joined to a rod struck harshly
Along the path to be
Till the vast stream’s outpoured
Already thus solitary
You live O Puvis
De Chavannes
never alone
Lead our age to quench its thirst
From the shroud-less nymph, the one
Whom your glory will rehearse
She slept: her finger trembled, amethyst-less
And naked, under her nightdress:
After a deep sigh, ceased, cambric raised to her waist.
And her belly seemed of snow on which might rest,
If a ray of light re-gilded the forest,
A bright goldfinch’s mossy nest.
‘Closed Eyes’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
National Gallery of Art | NGA Images
Of Méry Laurent
Frigid roses to last
Identically will interrupt
With a calyx, white, abrupt,
Your breath become frost
But freed by my fluttering
By shock profound, the sheaf
Of frigidity melts to relief
Of laughter’s rapturous flowering.
In carving out the sky
Like a fine fan you ply
Outdoing that phial’s glass
Without loss or violation
Unable to hold fast
Méry’s sweet emanation.
O so dear from far and near and white all
So deliciously you, Méry, that I dream
Of what impossibly flows, of some rare balm
Over some flower-vase of darkened crystal.
Do you know it, yes! For me, for years, here,
Forever, your dazzling smile prolongs
The one rose with its perfect summer gone
Into times past, yet then on into the future.
My heart that sometimes at night tries to confer,
Or name you most tender with whatever last word
Rejoices in that which whispers none but sister –
Were it not, such short tresses so great a treasure,
That you teach me a sweetness, quite other,
Soft through the kiss murmured only in your hair.
Note: Dated 1895. This being one of the series of poems written for Méry Laurent, a friend also of Manet and others.
‘Silence’
Odilon Redon (French, 1840 – 1916)
Minneapolis Institute of Art
(Méry, sans trop d’aurore…)
Méry,
Without dawn too grossly now inflaming
The rose, that splendid, natural and weary
Sheds even her heavy veil of perfumes to hear
Beneath the flesh the diamond weeping,
Yes, without those dewy crises! And gently,
Unbroken when the sky fills with storm,
Jealous to add who knows what spaces
To simple day the day so true in feeling,
Does it not seem, Méry, that each year,
Where spontaneous grace relights your brow,
Suffices, in so many aspects and for me,
Like a lone fan with which a room’s surprised,
To refresh with as little pain as is needed here
All our inborn and unvarying friendship.
Since Maria left me to go to another star - which one, Orion, Altair - or you green Venus? - I have always loved solitude. How many long days I have passed alone with my cat. By alone I mean without a material being, and my cat is a mystic companion, a spirit. I can say then that I have passed long days alone with my cat and alone with one of the last authors of the Roman decadence; for since the white creature is no more I have loved, uniquely and strangely, everything summed up in the word: fall. So, in the year, my favourite season is the last slow part of summer that just precedes autumn, and, in the day, the hour when I walk is when the sun hesitates before vanishing, with rays of yellow bronze over the grey walls, and rays of red copper over the tiles. Literature, also, from which my spirit asks voluptuousness, that will be the agonised poetry of Rome’s last moments, so long as it does not breathe a breath of the reinvigorated stance of the Barbarians or stammer in childish Latin like Christian prose. I was reading then one of those dear poems (whose flakes of rouge have more charm for me than young flesh), and dipping a hand into the pure animal fur, when a street organ sounded languishingly and sadly under my window. It was playing in the great alley of poplars whose leaves, even in spring, seem mournful to me since Maria passed by them, on her last journey, lying among candles. The instrument of sadnesses, yes, certainly: the piano flashes, the violin gives off light from its torn fibres, but the street organ in memory’s half-light made me dream despairingly. Now it murmured a delightfully common song that filled the faubourgs with joy, an old, banal tune: why did its words pierce my soul and make me cry, like any romantic ballad? I savoured it slowly and did not throw a coin through the window for fear of troubling my spirit and discovering that not only the instrument was playing.
The flesh is sad, alas! – and I’ve read all the books.
Let’s go! Far off. Let’s go! I sense
That the birds, intoxicated, fly
Deep into unknown spume and sky!
Nothing – not even old gardens mirrored by eyes –
Can restrain this heart that drenches itself in the sea,
O nights, or the abandoned light of my lamp,
On the void of paper, that whiteness defends,
No, not even the young woman feeding her child.
I shall go! Steamer, straining at your ropes
Lift your anchor towards an exotic rawness!
A Boredom, made desolate by cruel hope
Still believes in the last goodbye of handkerchiefs!
And perhaps the masts, inviting lightning,
Are those the gale bends over shipwrecks,
Lost, without masts, without masts, no fertile islands...
But, oh my heart, listen to the sailors’ chant!
(A throw of the dice will never abolish chance)
‘The game is done!’
Gustave Doré (1832 - 1910), The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Coleridge
Wikimedia Commons
The French text displayed here is as close as I could achieve to that printed in the edition of July 1914, which produced a definitive version superseding the original publication of 1897. The English ‘translation’ is offered as an equivalent text to, or interpretation of, the original. The compressed and punctuated translation is offered as an aid to grasping the poem as a whole, in a swift reading.
‘I would prefer that this Note was not read, or, skimmed, was forgotten; it tells the knowledgeable reader little that is beyond his or her penetration: but may confuse the uninitiated, prior to their looking at the first words of the Poem, since the ensuing words, laid out as they are, lead on to the last, with no novelty except the spacing of the text. The ‘blanks’ indeed take on importance, at first glance; the versification demands them, as a surrounding silence, to the extent that a fragment, lyrical or of a few beats, occupies, in its midst, a third of the space of paper: I do not transgress the measure, only disperse it. The paper intervenes each time as an image, of itself, ends or begins once more, accepting a succession of others, and, since, as ever, it does nothing, of regular sonorous lines or verse – rather prismatic subdivisions of the Idea, the instant they appear, and as long as they last, in some precise intellectual performance, that is in variable positions, nearer to or further from the implicit guiding thread, because of the verisimilitude the text imposes. The literary value, if I am allowed to say so, of this print-less distance which mentally separates groups of words or words themselves, is to periodically accelerate or slow the movement, the scansion, the sequence even, given one’s simultaneous sight of the page: the latter taken as unity, as elsewhere the Verse is or perfect line. Imagination flowers and vanishes, swiftly, following the flow of the writing, round the fragmentary stations of a capitalised phrase introduced by and extended from the title. Everything takes place, in sections, by supposition; narrative is avoided. In addition this use of the bare thought with its retreats, prolongations, and flights, by reason of its very design, for anyone wishing to read it aloud, results in a score. The variation in printed characters between the dominant motif, a secondary one and those adjacent, marks its importance for oral utterance and the scale, mid-way, at top or bottom of the page will show how the intonation rises or falls. (Only certain very bold instructions of mine, encroachments etc. forming the counterpoint to this prosody, a work which lacks precedent, have been left in a primitive state: not because I agree with being timid in my attempts; but because it is not for me, save by a special pagination or volume of my own, in a Periodical so courageous, gracious and accommodating as it shows itself to be to real freedom, to act too contrary to custom. I will have shown, in the Poem below, more than a sketch, a ‘state’ which yet does not entirely break with tradition; will have furthered its presentation in many ways too, without offending anyone; sufficing to open a few eyes (This applies to the 1897 printing specifically: translator’s note). Today, without presuming anything about what will emerge from this in future, nothing, or almost a new art, let us readily accept that the tentative participates, with the unforeseen, in the pursuit, specific and dear to our time, of free verse and the prose poem. Their meeting takes place under an influence, alien I know, that of Music heard in concert; one finds there several techniques that seem to me to belong to Literature, I reclaim them. The genre, which is becoming one, like the symphony, little by little, alongside personal poetry, leaves intact the older verse; for which I maintain my worship, and to which I attribute the empire of passion and dreams, though this may be the preferred means (as follows) of dealing with subjects of pure and complex imagination or intellect: which there is no remaining justification for excluding from Poetry – the unique source.’
UN COUP DE DÉS JAMAIS, QUAND BIEN MÊME LANCÉ DANS DES CIRCONSTANCES ÉTERNELLES DU FOND D'UN NAUFRAGE, Soit que l'Abîme blanchi, étale, furieux sous une inclinaison planche désespérément d'aile, la sienne, par avance retombée d'un mal à dresser le vol et couvrant les jaillissements, coupant au ras les bonds très à l'intérieur résume l'ombre enfouie dans la profondeur, par cette voile alternative jusqu'adapter à l'envergure sa béante profondeur entant que la coque d'un bâtiment penché de l'un ou l'autre bord
LE MAÎTRE, hors d'anciens calculs, où la manoeuvre avec l'âge oubliée surgi jadis, il empoignait la barre inférant de cette conflagration à ses pieds de l’horizon unanime, que se prépare s'agite et mêle au poing qui l'étreindrait, comme on menace un destin et les vents, l'unique Nombre, qui ne peut pas être un autre Esprit, pour le jeter dans la tempête en reployer la division et passer fier; hésite, cadavre par le bras écarté du secret qu'il détient plutôt que de jouer, en maniaque: chenu la partie au nom des flots, un envahit le chef, coule en barbe, soumise naufrage, cela direct de l'homme sans nef, n'importe où vaine
ancestralement à n'ouvrir pas la main crispée par delà l'inutile tête, legs en la disparition, à quelqu'un ambigu, l'ultérieur démon immémorial, ayant de contrées nulles induit le vieillard vers cette conjonction suprême avec la probabilité, celui son ombre puérile caressée et polie et rendue et lavée assouplie par la vague, et soustraite aux durs os perdus entre les ais né d'un ébat, la mer par l'aïeul tentant ou l'aïeul contre la mer, une chance oiseuse, Fiançailles dont le voile d'illusion rejailli leur hantise, ainsi que le fantôme d'un geste chancellera, s'affalera, folie N'ABOLIRA
COMME SI Une insinuation simple au silence, enroulée avec ironie, ou le mystère précipité, hurlé, dans quelque proche tourbillon d'hilarité et d'horreur, voltige autour du gouffre sans le joncher ni fuir et en berce le vierge indice COMME SI
plume solitaire éperdue, sauf que la rencontre ou l'effleure une toque de minuit et immobilise au velours chiffonné par un esclaffement sonore, cette blancheur rigide, dérisoire en opposition au ciel, trop pour ne pas marquer exigüment quiconque prince amer de l'écueil, s'en coiffe comme de l'héroïque, irrésistible mais contenu par sa petite raison, virile en foudre
soucieux expiatoire et pubère muet rire que SI La lucide et seigneuriale aigrette de vertige au front invisible scintille, puis ombrage, une stature mignonne ténébreuse, debout en sa torsion de sirène, le temps de souffleter, par d'impatientes squames ultimes, bifurquées, un roc faux manoir tout de suite évaporé en brumes qui imposa une borne à l'infini
C'ÉTAIT LE NOMBRE, issu stellaire, EXISTÂT-IL autrement qu'hallucination éparse, d'agonie; COMMENÇÂT-IL ET CESSÂT-IL, sourdant que nié, et clos, quand apparu enfin, par quelque profusion répandue en rareté; SE CHIFFRÂT-IL évidence de la somme, pour peu qu’une; ILLUMINÂT-IL, CE SERAIT, pire non davantage ni moins indifféremment mais autant, LE HASARD Choit la plume, rythmique suspens du sinistre, s'ensevelir aux écumes originelles naguères, d'où sursauta son délire jusqu'à une cime flétrie par la neutralité identique du gouffre
RIEN de la mémorable crise où se fût l'événement accompli, en vue de tout résultat nul humain, N'AURA EU LIEU, une élévation ordinaire verse l'absence QUE LE LIEU inférieur clapotis quelconque, comme pour disperser l'acte vide abruptement, qui sinon par son mensonge eût fondé la perdition, dans ces parages du vague, en quoi toute réalité se dissout
EXCEPTÉ à l'altitude PEUT-ÊTRE, aussi loin qu'un endroit fusionne avec au-delà, hors l'intérêt quant à lui signalé, en général, selon telle obliquité, par telle déclivité de feux, vers ce doit être le Septentrion aussi Nord UNE CONSTELLATION froide d'oubli et de désuétude, pas tant qu'elle n'énumère, sur quelque surface vacante et supérieure, le heurt successif, sidéralement, d'un compte total en formation, veillant, doutant, roulant, brillant et méditant avant de s'arrêter à quelque point dernier qui le sacre Toute pensée émet un Coup de Dés.
A THROW OF THE DICE NEVER, EVEN WHEN TRULY CAST IN THE ETERNAL CIRCUMSTANCE OF A SHIPWRECK’S DEPTH, Can be only the Abyss raging, whitened, stalled beneath the desperately sloping incline of its own wing, through an advance falling back from ill to take flight, and veiling the gushers, restraining the surges, gathered far within the shadow buried deep by that alternative sail, almost matching its yawning depth to the wingspan, like a hull of a vessel rocked from side to side
THE MASTER, beyond former calculations, where the lost manoeuvre with the age rose implying that formerly he grasped the helm of this conflagration of the concerted horizon at his feet, that readies itself; moves; and merges with the blow that grips it, as one threatens fate and the winds, the unique Number, which cannot be another Spirit, to hurl it into the storm, relinquish the cleaving there, and pass proudly; hesitates, a corpse pushed back by the arm from the secret, rather than taking sides, a hoary madman, on behalf of the waves: one overwhelms the head, flows through the submissive beard, straight shipwreck that, of the man without a vessel, empty no matter where
ancestrally never to open the fist clenched beyond the helpless head, a legacy, in vanishing, to someone ambiguous, the immemorial ulterior demon having, from non-existent regions, led the old man towards this ultimate meeting with probability, this his childlike shade caressed and smoothed and rendered supple by the wave, and shielded from hard bone lost between the planks born of a frolic, the sea through the old man or the old man against the sea, making a vain attempt, an Engagement whose dread the veil of illusion rejected, as the phantom of a gesture will tremble, collapse, madness, WILL NEVER ABOLISH
AS IF A simple insinuation into silence, entwined with irony, or the mystery hurled, howled, in some close swirl of mirth and terror, whirls round the abyss without scattering or dispersing and cradles the virgin index there AS IF
a solitary plume overwhelmed, untouched, that a cap of midnight grazes, or encounters, and fixes, in crumpled velvet with a sombre burst of laughter, that rigid whiteness, derisory, in opposition to the heavens, too much so not to signal closely any bitter prince of the reef, heroically adorned with it, indomitable, but contained by his petty reason, virile in lightning
anxious expiatory and pubescent dumb laughter that IF the lucid and lordly crest of vertigo on the invisible brow sparkles, then shades, a slim dark tallness, upright in its siren coiling, at the moment of striking, through impatient ultimate scales, bifurcated, a rock a deceptive manor suddenly evaporating in fog that imposed limits on the infinite
IT WAS THE NUMBER, stellar outcome, WERE IT TO HAVE EXISTED other than as a fragmented, agonised hallucination; WERE IT TO HAVE BEGUN AND ENDED, a surging that denied, and closed, when visible at last, by some profusion spreading in sparseness; WERE IT TO HAVE AMOUNTED to the fact of the total, though as little as one; WERE IT TO HAVE LIGHTED, IT WOULD BE, worse no more nor less indifferently but as much, CHANCE Falls the plume, rhythmic suspense of the disaster, to bury itself in the original foam, from which its delirium formerly leapt to the summit faded by the same neutrality of abyss
NOTHING of the memorable crisis where the event matured, accomplished in sight of all non-existent human outcomes, WILL HAVE TAKEN PLACE a commonplace elevation pours out absence BUT THE PLACE some lapping below, as if to scatter the empty act abruptly, that otherwise by its falsity would have plumbed perdition, in this region of vagueness, in which all reality dissolves
EXCEPT at the altitude PERHAPS, as far as a place fuses with, beyond, outside the interest signalled regarding it, in general, in accord with such obliquity, through such declination of fire, towards what must be the Wain also North A CONSTELLATION cold with neglect and desuetude, not so much though that it fails to enumerate, on some vacant and superior surface, the consecutive clash, sidereally, of a final account in formation, attending, doubting, rolling, shining and meditating before stopping at some last point that crowns it All Thought expresses a Throw of the Dice
The larger and smaller words in capitals in the poem are to be read as intertwined statements, and dominant and secondary threads of the poem, in accordance with the hints in Mallarmé’s Preface.
The French Septentrion meaning the North, derives from the Latin Septentrio also meaning the North, but specifically referring in addition to the constellation Ursa Major known variously as the Great Bear, Wain, Plough or Big Dipper. Note that a constellation is a chance arbitrary visual formation of often widely disparate stars, delineated and designated purely by the human mind.
Note the following possible literary echoes, which may equally indicate no more than Mallarme’s absorption of, and interest in, common 19th century themes:
Coleridge’s The Ancient Mariner (1797-1799: especially the casting of dice on the deck of the spectral barge);
The legends of the Flying Dutchman, and of the Maelstrom (See for example the final chapter of Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, 1870);
Shakespeare’s Hamlet who also appears in a Mallarmé sonnet (The Clown Chastised);
Rostand’s Cyrano (First performed 1897) with his defiant plume (also of course in French a pen and a quill or swan’s feather, a key multiple meaning impossible to capture in English);
Melville’s Moby Dick (1851: for Ahab’s defiance, and his pursuit of the White Whale that signifies Le Néant, and not merely for its compulsive and obsessive digressions!)
Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) was born in Paris. He was strongly affected by the early deaths of his mother, and younger sister, and later by that of his father. After learning English in London in 1862/3, he worked for most of his life as an English teacher, at first in the provinces and later in Paris. Mallarmé was relatively poor, but became noted for his literary salons on the rue de Rome, which were a centre of Parisian intellectual life, and with which he greatly influenced the literary direction of his time, through his poetry, his criticism, and his poetic theory, despite his relatively limited output. Of his two children, his son Anatole died sadly young. He himself died at Valvins, on the Seine near Fontainebleau, the location of his holiday home and retirement residence.
Anthony Kline lives in England. He graduated in Mathematics from the University of Manchester, and was Chief Information Officer (Systems Director) of a large UK Company, before dedicating himself to his literary work and interests. He was born in 1947. His work consists of translations of poetry; critical works, biographical history with poetry as a central theme; and his own original poetry. He has translated into English from Latin, Ancient Greek, Classical Chinese and the European languages. He also maintains a deep interest in developments in Mathematics and the Sciences.
He continues to write predominantly for the Internet, making all works available in download format, with an added focus on the rapidly developing area of electronic books. His most extensive works are complete translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses and Dante's Divine Comedy.
Nothing, this foam, virgin verse
Princess! To be jealous of a Hebe’s fate
Possessed by some demon now a negress
I don’t come to conquer your flesh tonight, O beast
The sun, on the sand, O sleeping wrestler,
Eyes, lakes of my simple passion to be reborn
I bring you the child of an Idumean night!
These nymphs, I would perpetuate them.
To you, gone emblem of our happiness!
Such as eternity at last transforms into Himself,
The buried shrine shows at its sewer-mouth’s
The black rock enraged that the north wind rolls it on
When the shadow with fatal law menaced me
The virginal, living and lovely day
Victoriously the grand suicide fled
Her pure nails on high dedicating their onyx,
– ‘Over the lost woods when dark winter lowers
What silk of time’s sweet balm
To introduce myself to your story
Crushed by the overwhelming cloud
My books closed again on Paphos’ name,
My soul, towards your brow where O calm sister,
She slept: her finger trembled, amethyst-less
O so dear from far and near and white all
Since Maria left me to go to another star - which one, Orion, Altair - or you