Heather Williams, New Welsh Review, Summer 2004

If you think of Mallarme as the solitary elitist who is responsible for the death of the author, and even the demise of common-sense criticism in our literature departments, think again. Or if you think of Mallarme as an unparalleled wordsmith and punster, creator of equisite but empty sound pictures, think again. The papers translated here for the first time by Patrick McGuinness show us a young Mallarme grappling with fatherhood and poethood, with unutterable loss and poesis. These notes, probably written in the winter of 1879-80, in the months following the dath of his second child and only son Anatole, aged eight, were not published until 1961 (as Pour un tombeau d'Anatole, edited by Jean-Pierre Richard), and were never referred to by the poet himself. What they reveal is a unique version of the conflict between the abstract and the concrete that had long preoccupied Mallarme (e.g. 'Igitur', c. 1869), and that would reach new heights in his greatest works: the late sonnets, 'Prose (pour des Esseintes)', and 'Un Coup de des'. For Anatole's Tomb is more than a translation; McGuinness's succinct introduction, along with his essay published as 'afterword', together constitute an important work of contextualization and sensitive reading.

In this interpretive work, McGuinness resists the biographical route: in any case Jean-Pierre Richard had already guided the reader to the key moments in the Mallarme family correspondence in his edition. On the thematic level, Richard also showed in painstaking detail how Anatole announces themes that are developed elsewhere in Mallarme's oeuvre. Rather than restate the coherence of this oeuvre through parallel quotation, McGuinness draws on the work of Mallarme's close friend Villiers de l'Isle-Adam to allow him into the crux of the matter. Death - particularly that of a son as opposed to the departure of a poet or artist - proves an extreme test-case for Mallarme's investigation of the relationship between the world of abstract ideas and that of everyday reality. This crucial relationship is acted out as a conflict between 'mother' and 'father', where the mother is 'in league' with mother earth: 'mother wants to have him to herself, she is earth'. Incidentally, the succinctness of the play 'terre/mere' is one of the few casualties of the translation process here (the other notable one being the homophony of 'mer/mere', about which McGuinness is upfront.) While the father-poet's choice of abstraction might seem to offer consolation, it is the world of things - the furniture in the flat, Anatole's 'little clothes', reminders of the sailor suit in which he was buried - that brings home the pain of his loss.

It is the gap between this flight into 'consolatory abstraction' and the materiality of the dying boy, followed by the funeral rites, that McGuinness identifies as the very space of poetry. Anatole's precarious state, and the opposing reactions it has evoked in his parents, has brought all this to the surface: for Mallarme, McGuinness expains: 'sickness is the ally of poetry, because, at once deadly and death-defying, it provides the writing-space'. In the late work, Mallarme famously articulates metaphysical doubt or his version of the 'space inbetween', by manipulating ambiguity, or through what has been called by Malcolm Bowie his 'art of being difficult'. If understanding late Malllarme is all about understanding his 'difficulty' as the result of a minutely controlled semantic overflow, then For Anatole's Tomb can offer us insights into the experimentation that went before. Rather than the Bach fugue that the student of late Mallarme might expect, these notes suggest a lone Romantic melody.

The Mallarme known to the Anglophone world has long been in need of some updating. We are fortunate that Mallarme has found in this translator such a sensitive reader and critic. We need more such translations, and indeed the signs are good. There have been some impressive recent attempts to bring French poetry to an Anglophone readership. Rosemary Lloyd's enthusiastic and enigmatic Baudelaire's World (2002) contains detailed discussion of the challenges and joys of translating some of the founding works of modernity. Clive Scott has devoted his latest book to the same master: Translating Baudelaire (2000). And a selection of Mallarme's prose was translated into English for the first time in Mallarme in Prose, ed. Mary Ann Cawes(2001). As a new 'way into Mallarme', For Anatole's Tomb offers some distinct advantages: our understanding of the famously contrapuntal nature of Mallarme's late poetic textures is enhanced by focusing on the conflicts in his thought that are observable here in slow motion thanks to this text's brokenness, and remembering all the time that this is, as McGuinness puts it: 'the poetry of the undecidable, not poetry for the indecisive.'


Heather Williams is Lecturer in French at the University of Aberystwyth.