Caws Mary Ann - Selected Poetry and Prose

some gesture vehement and lost

Stphane Mallarm, Action Restricted

Selection is already a gesture, and an homage. It is to be hoped that the positive side of this gesture will outweigh its foolhardy nature: to publish any Mallarm in translation is dangerous, as anyone will agree. There is no possible (and readable) way of conveying each of the multiple meanings of the intricately styled verse or the equally intricate (and often more obscure) prose while keeping the forms Mallarm chose. On the other hand, to sacrifice the forms is often inadvisable, since for Mallarm the complexities of poetic form alone compensate for the inevitable imperfection of language. Footnotes explaining even some of the senses, kept or lost, implicit or explicit, would weigh too heavily upon the translated text, for the original is seldom unambiguous and rarely heavy.

Mallarms diversity is probably best served by diverse hands: thus the variety of translators, over a dozen, from the beginning of the century to our contemporaries. I have chosen what seem to me the best versions from a double point of view: exactitude, formal and meaningful, and poetry (a quality both of verse and prose). Some of the renderings have been previously published, while others were undertaken specifically for this volume. Included here are most of the major poems, selections from the letters, essays, and prose poems, and the play-narration Igitur as well as the celebrated visual poem Un Coup d des.

The language is not familiar: Mallarm would have condemned that roundly. He preferred obliqueness, cherished distance in his workcompelled his reader to sense its foreignness. These translations, from those of the Symbolists and Bloomsbury (George Moore and Roger Fry) to those done expressly for this project, have tried to accept that sense, while also making their own. I should like to thank, in particular, for their advice, Robert Greer Cohn, James Laughlin, Patricia Terry, and Micheline Tison-Braun.

This selection can be best described by Mallarms title for one of his major essays, included here. The Action Restricted is at once a major undertaking and a restricted one, voluntarily assumed, in which the vehemence particular to the gesture referred to in the epigraph may be exercised with no worry as to the outcome or the utility. Perhaps, like some Mallarman lace, self-abolishing and yet not completely effaced, the gesture will not be wholly lost. These readings, individually and collectively, add on to others gone before them:

and this

maybe not

too late

tribute to

once Stephane Mallarme

Louis Zukofsky, A

Mary Ann Caws

Rien, cette cume, vierge vers

A ne dsigner que la coupe;

Telle loin se noie une troupe

De sirnes mainte lenvers.

Nous naviguons, mes divers

Amis, moi dj sur la poupe

Vous lavant fastueux qui coupe

Le flot de foudres et dhivers;

Une ivresse belle mengage

Sans craindre mme son tangage

De porter debout ce salut

Solitude, rcif, toile

A nimporte ce qui valut

Le blanc souci de notre toile.