"One of the most moving accounts of a man trying to come to grips with modern death—that is to say, death without God, death without hope of salvation—and it reveals the secret meaning of Mallarmé's whole aesthetic: the elevation of art to the stature of religion."—Paul Auster, from the Introduction

The great French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), who changed the course of modern French literature (and influenced writers from James Joyce to T.S. Eliot to Wallace Stevens), suffered many tragedies. His mother died when he was just five years old, but in 1879 the cruelest blow of all struck when his beloved son Anatole died at the age of eight.

A Tomb for Anatole presents the 202 fragments of Mallarmé's projected long poem in four parts. By far the poet's most personal work, he could never bring himself to complete it. To speak publicly of his immense sorrow, Mallarmé concluded, "for me, it's not possible." Unpublished in France until 1961, these works are very far from the oblique, cool "pure poetry" Mallarmé is famous for, poetry that sought to capture—painstakingly—"l'absente de tous bouquets" (the ideal flower absent from all bouquets).

Paul Auster, who first published A Tomb for Anatole with the North Point Press in 1983 (a volume long out of print), notes in his excellent introduction that facing "the ultimate horror of every parent," these fragments "have a startling unmediated quality." As Mallarmé writes, it is "a vision / endlessly purified / by my tears."

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.