Phantom assigned to this place by pure brilliance, he is paralyzed in the cold dream of contempt put on in useless exile by the Swan. His whole neck will shake off this white death-throe inflicted by space on the bird denying it, but not the horror of soil where the feathers are caught. The virginal, enduring, beautiful today will a drunken beat of its wing break us this hard, forgotten lake haunted under frost by the transparent glacier of unfled flights!Ī swan of old remembers it is he magnificent but who without hope frees himself for never having sung a place to live when the boredom of sterile winter was resplendent. The translation is by the Scottish poet Peter Manson, in a collection published by Miami University Press in 2012: Consider the sonnet “Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui,” whose first version probably dates from the late eighteen-sixties, when Mallarmé was in his mid-twenties. After only one or two lines, though, you are engulfed in fine mist, and a certain terror sets in. Many of his poems take the form of sonnets, and many employ the twelve-syllable alexandrine, the meter of classical French tragedy. Mallarmé’s revolution arrived in an outwardly conservative guise. Such was the import of a note that I recently found in a library copy of Mallarmé’s selected letters: “Please pray that God would give me the patience and perseverance to get through this next week.” Upon his death, in 1898, he left behind a body of work so inscrutable that it still causes literature students to fall to their knees in despair. Arguably, the Amundsen of fin-de-siècle art-the first to plant a flag at an outer extreme of artistic possibility-was the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé. The goal was to discover novel spheres of expression: the unspoken word, the unpainted image, the unheard sound. Illustration by Hugo GuinnessĪt the dawn of modernism, in the late nineteenth century, the activity of avant-garde artists often resembled rival expeditions into uncharted polar regions.
After only a few lines of Mallarmé, you are engulfed in fine mist, and terror sets in.
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