To Purify the Words of the Tribe : The Major Verse Poems of Stephane Mallarme

by Stéphane Mallarmé, Daisy Aldan (Translator)

A bilingual collection of 55 Stephane Mallarme poems. Translated from the French by Daisy Aldan with expositions. Mallarme (1842-1898), renowned French symbolist poet, is famous for his unique approach to poetry, considered today to be brilliant. This new bilingual collection of 55 Stephane Mallarme poems, including one of his masterpieces, "Un Coup De Des" ("A Throw of the Dice"), gives readers a fresh new perspective of Mallarme's genius. Translator Dr. Daisy Aldan discovered and fell in love with Mallarme's work when she was told that her poetry was reminiscent of his. In 1956, she translated "Un Coup De Des" into English for the first time; the result was recognition of Dr. Aldan's unparalleled deep understanding and feeling for Mallarme. Now, more than 40 years later, she has blessed us with To Purify the Words of the Tribe , with expositions, which will surely lead to a deeper comprehension of the poetry of Stephane Mallarme.

Genres: Poetry

224 pages, Paperback

First published April 1, 1999

About the author

Stéphane Mallarmé (French: [stefan malaʁme]; 18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), whose real name was Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools of the early 20th century, such as Dadaism, Surrealism, and Futurism.

Reviews

[Jay · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stephane Mallarme, on his birthday March 18
“The breakage of verse enacts the breakage of the world.” Stephane Mallarme.
Songs of chaos and beauty, Chance as totalizing and absolute, fragmentation, language play which prefigures that of Italo Calvino and Georges Perec, an obsession with secrecy and codes as narrative structure like that of Umberto Eco, founder of the French Symbolist movement which disrupted neoclassical formalism as a mirror image of and reaction to Romanticism and begat the modern world; Stephane Mallarme uses language to de-Authorize the bonds between real things and our ideas of them.
His works are acts of Promethean rebellion and revolutionary transformation of cultural meanings, a mission taken up later by his disciples, Gertrude Stein and James Joyce in the invention of Modernism in literature and language, and Jean Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus in the invention of Existentialism in literature and philosophy.
For Stephane Mallarme the secret of rhetoric is that all writing is fiction; it persuades from signs as an act of detection, shapes meaning, subverts and creates multiplicities of truths. Like Akutagawa’s Rashomon Gate, his work opens the door to the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum theory.
As an exploration of the borders between signs and their objects, he carries forward the iconoclasm of Friedrich Nietzsche, the insight into the irrational underworld of human passion and motives of William James, and the narrative questioning and post-Hegelian dialectics of Edgar Allen Poe. From these three primary sources he brought forth something new and strange, which unbound the tethers of the world and continues to resonate today.
Friend of Manet and defender of Zola and Rodin, Stephane Mallarme influenced great writers as diverse as Valery and T.S. Eliot, Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva. The great philosopher Maurice Blanchot extended his reinterpretation of Nietzsche. His dramatic poem The Afternoon of a Faun inspired Debussy’s great Prelude; and Ravel set a number of his poems to music. Regardless of whether one agrees with him or not, Stephane Mallarme is an important reference for any reader- unless you restrict yourself to books written in Latin. For myself, I cherish classical literature but also enjoy works less antique.
One might begin with To Purify the Words of the Tribe: the Major Verse Poems of Stephane Mallarme, by Daisy Aldan. The result of 40 years of scholarship, her translations and expositions of his 55 major poems are brilliant and captivating.
Azure: Poems and Selections from the Livre, Bronson-Bartlett & Fernandez trans., provides an excellent follow-up to Aldan and showcases his unfinished magnum opus, Livre.
Divigations is a magnificent prose poem, art manifesto, and compendium of literary criticism and philosophy which transforms and reimagines the culture, history, and civilization of Europe. Written with an exquisite musicality, it is a treasure box of ideas and just as illuminating today as it was in 1897.
A Throw of the Dice, an epic meditation on chance, self-reflectivity, and what would become chaos theory nearly a hundred years later, is a unique achievement of poetic insight. A song of transformation and of time, like an ouroboros swallowing its own tail in ceaseless destruction and recreation, the poem has a wonderful guide in The Number and the Siren by Quentin Meillassoux.
Read also the foundational work Mallarme, or the Poet of Nothingness, by Jean Paul Sartre. For current criticism the books of scholar Roger Pearson, Unfolding Mallarme and Mallarme and Circumstance, are superb.
Meetings with Mallarme, edited by Michael Temple, explores his influence on literature, psychology, philosophy, music, and poetry.