Divagations

by Stéphane Mallarmé, Barbara Johnson (Translator)

"This is a book just the way I don't like them," the father of French Symbolism, Stéphane Mallarmé, informs the reader in his preface to Divagations : "scattered and with no architecture." On the heels of this caveat, Mallarmé's diverting, discursive, and gorgeously disordered 1897 masterpiece tumbles forth--and proves itself to be just the sort of book his readers like most. 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.

Genres: Poetry, Essays, France, Literature, Philosophy, Nonfiction, French Literature

312 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1897

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

[Fergus, Weaver of Autistic Webs · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an incorrigible dreamer this guy was!!! Just like me, lost in his own dreamy headspace as the only alternative to brute reality: "selon le decor d'une licorne ruant du feu contre une nixe."

(Just like in a picture of unicorns, running from the fire into the satisfying embrace of a water nymph!)

Although he studiously recorded all his remarkable insights into the nature of existence early on in his life, these insights seemed to Stéphane Mallarmé to have mounted to an intolerable crescendo in early adulthood.

He quickly became caught in an internal vortex, and dropped out of sight.

Was he bipolar like me? Probably, for in one famous couplet he requests his wife, "my dear dreamer, in order that I may plunge into pure pathless delight, please - with one of your subtle untruths - hold on to my wing with your fingers!"

But then he experienced a profound sense of his enlightenment's emptiness. Abstract dreaming was useless!

Reality became diaphanous. He expressed his inner self's new transparency in The Afternoon of a Faun, which Debussy then expressed miraculously well in his translucent musical version (check it out on YouTube)!

https://youtu.be/N5R33v5V5wI

So now, Enlightenment to him was no longer a destination: it was all part of a universal, eternal process of unfolding.

He ditched his precious sense of finality. He became a Mahayanist, as Buddhists say. He was no longer seeking his own salvation, but the world's. And dreaming is a salvation.

So, many years later, when Mallarmé finished this one a few years before he died, he was a man at loose ends.

His life had fallen apart - as it always did, even now in old age - but he always happily put it back together again by reading more books.

Books are minor miracles. A good book can break us into fragments at a point. And a good story - as life breaks us again and again - will artfully put us back together at its end, more complete than ever.

And if we treat life as an art, as he did, we will always "pick ourself up and get back in the race." That's life - that's what all the (smart) people say!

Not a bad idea, that. Thanks, Stéphane! Art mirrors life and life is an art. Few of us dreamers learn that.

You see, life had hurt Mallarmé so much, he simply REMOVED himself from it.

As one of my good GR reader friends likes to repeat, "the world could end and I'd never notice!" And Mallarmé thought the same. "The Whole World exists to end up in a book," he said...

And we readers might agree.

You know, Mallarmé was a poet. He rarely wrote a single straight sentence of prose. This phenomenal book changes that.

It's a chapbook, like the recent great one by S.E. Bourne, Every Awful Thing (isn't that an apt description of our daily news now?).

The latter invokes the Daemon of Mid-Age Crisis; while Mallarmé (Saint Stéphane to Paul Valéry) invokes the Peace of Advanced Age.

It's got stories, a few poems and many fantastic fantasies.

But it's expensive - yikes - and I only splurged because this is the first full translation ever...

And it's a Classic Rainy Day read -

Because Mallarmé never fails to amuse and instruct!

[Daniel Ramírez Martins · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mallarmé shows a huge revolution on his critical prose. When I read this book, I just can't believe he was born in the 20th century. He totally shows a new spirit of modernity. This amazing book also helps a lot to understand many of his works in poetry.

[Gary · Rating 5 out of 5]

stephane mallarmé's poetry is often absolutely untranslatable [but listen to the music in a line such as "abolit le bibelot d'inanité sonore"], and his brilliant prose ain't easy either, but ripe with new directions and often still virgin soil. this editon tackles a good number with decent respect, rewarding attention. [speaking translation and [author: stephane mallarmé], it's interesting to read his translation of monsieur poë's raven (courbeau) and also his text book of english grammar (E.G., translating "matching" for pareil is on the dime, perfect anglo-sax, rather than the usual latinate "similar to."

baudelaire grabbed the heart

rimbaud aced the imagery

mallarmé caught the music of thought

(and lautrec cashed a check ... )

[Mitch · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mallarmé explores the meaning of poetry, literature and the contentious philosophies of fin-de-siécle 19th Century Paris, with a horizon that occasional increases to include Germany and other parts of Europe. He's a blowhard, crafting deliriously vertiginous sentences to convey his ideas, but they are very interesting ideas. You'll come away feeling like you've endured a blustery day, with all the invigoration and difficulty that entails.

[Jeremy George · Rating 5 out of 5]

The best book ever !

[david-baptiste · Rating 5 out of 5]

Mallarme's prose is very beuatiful--if one is able to follow through with attention he leads one to a better understanding not only of his own poems but of a great deal of poetry qua poetry
thisis thekindof bopok i read once and then continue to do for the rest of mylife, as each time one learns something new from it
my favorite mallarme book is actully the fragements whcih contitute Un Tombeau pour Anatole (Tomb for Anatole, his son who died very young)
if you read mallarme in french, he adds a whole new intonation and tonality to the language as well as the viusal layout influrening Visual Poetry found in Un Coup de des
i put off reding Mallarme along time, knowing someday the right dayh wd come o really read him beyond poems for school etc-
He has many brillioant ideas leading to the literary criticism since Tel Quel inFrance--
By onlity--Mallarme has a music unqieuly his own--
i am glad i waited so long to read mallarme as now i deeply appreciate and learn from his works--

[Ryan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Mallarmé is a bit tedious in my opinion, but he stumbles across some very interesting nuances to poetry among which is my most favorite "the breakage of verse reenacts the breakage of the world". His post-revolutionary execution of poetic fragmentation and lexical slippage add wonderful avenues for comparative readings for other post-violence verse.

[Irinel · Rating 4 out of 5]

On Crise de Vers
Written towards the end of the 19th century, the text by Mallarmé collects a series of crystallized testimonials regarding the occurrence, improvement, and prevalence of the free verse in French literature. Imbued by ennui, but also under the conscripts of a literature in crisis, he lets the remembrances of a not so distant affair actualize and unfold in an inarticulate and a tumultuous manner; the text mirrors that which it champions, the free verse. Drawing from the likes of some as Victor Hugo, Richard Wagner, or the whole of the decadent movement, Mallarmé bestows upon himself the task of such an unfolding firstly by exposing the worn-down threads of versification and prosody and the shortly-lived attempts at a rebellion against it that had given course to the uprising of the free verse. Secondly, gradually titillating between the failures of language as either vulgar or too essential and material held in balance by a supplementary encroaching of the verse, between the failures of translation of the ancient proportions through rhyme and prosody, he introduces Transposition – which pertains to music for once, but also to allusion or suggestion as seen with the decadents – in order “to liberate […] the volatile dispersal of the spirit, which has to do with nothing but the musicality of everything.”

_hypertext:
“I say: a flower!”
To say, to have, to be a flower – and from within its charted petals grown unmade, to feel the flower, nonetheless; yet, in its contour to be an other.
To say a flower would have, as such, to do with nothing but the musicality of everything; to have it, then, would be that in the Poet’s hand of necessity in an art devoted to fiction, to recover its virtuality; and, hence, to be a flower would imply not just of expressing oneself, but of modulating oneself, as one likes. And to feel the flower, as it were, in the absence of the cumbersomeness of a near or concrete reminder, the pure notion, would be to let it be thundering and harmonious with plenitude, of transposing it into its vibratory near-disappearance according to the play of language. Yet, only as an other, which is foreign to language, despite the repeated reformulations between sound and sense, negating the arbitrariness that remains in the terms, it brings forth itself bathed in a brand new atmosphere; it, the flower, the free verse.

[Yalena · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Everything is summed up between aesthetics and political economy"

[Mills College Library]

848.807 M2524 2007