Divagations [Hardcover]

Stephane Mallarme (Author), Barbara Johnson (Translator)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0674024389 | ISBN-13: 978-0674024380 | Publication Date: March 30, 2007

"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.

(20071101)

Editorial Reviews

Review

For Mallarmé, poetry is more than words on a page; it is at the center of what it means to be human. An appreciation of music, painting, and poetry is inextricably interwoven with his comments on the works of German composer Richard Wagner and French painter Edouard Manet. Mallarmé's writings are in a dense, rich, hypnotic prose. (Anthony Pucci Library Journal )

[A] lustrous new English translation...[A] remarkable book [and a] wise translator...I don't know whether I've expressed excitedly or lucidly enough my sense of this translation's importance. (Wayne Koestenbaum Bookforum )

Johnson is among the world's foremost Mallarmé scholars, and this translation of "the author's 1897 arrangement" of this work, "together with 'Autobiography' and 'Music and Letters,'" is an unequivocal tour de force. Mallarmé's French echoes through and the English sounds authentic and coherent. But the fact that this translation is Johnson's reading of Mallarmé is its chief value. And this is why Mallarmé scholars who read Mallarmé in French will look at it and why scholars of comparable periods in English-language literatures and performance arts will consult it for Mallarmé's commentaries. In addition, Johnson's rendering of Mallarmé's voice will undoubtedly interest translation theorists. Surely this is the way Mallarmé must have sounded to the English speakers intermittently translating what he was saying as he held forth at his Tuesday evening receptions: witty and insightful, to be sure, but sometimes pretentious and fatuous. (M. Gaddis Rose Choice )

Reading Divagations today, we see how resonantly [Mallarmé's] world rhymes with ours: inequality, sleaze, financial crashes, terrorism and state repression, along with an acute sense of the spectacular nature of modern life, its commodity-fetishism and materialism, its paradoxes of plenitude and emptiness. Key to Mallarmé's thinking is his refusal of those two great late-nineteenth-century paradigms, those mutually stabilizing opposites: Progress and Decline. He enjoys the democratization of luxury and beauty brought about by mass production, and does not denounce the glitter of fancy goods and their ephemeral pleasures. Nor does he "buy into" the belief that capital will always right itself or that science and technology guarantee social progress...Barbara Johnson has accomplished an exemplary work of translation, not just by making this important book available to non-French readers, but by carrying off Mallarmé's uniquely eccentric prose style without flattening or straightening it out...Where Mallarmé's poems strip away all that is not poetry, his prose brings it back into the fold, incorporates and recycles it. Recycling being the pragmatist's alchemy, and Mallarmé being more of a pragmatist than we allow, Divagations can be read as the great recycling project that balances out the alchemy of his poetry. (Patrick McGuinness Times Literary Supplement )

Review

The translation is outstanding, and the collection (arranged according to the French writer's own plan) makes available in English a much fuller sample of Mallarmé's remarkable and influential prose writings than was previously available. This book makes a major contribution to modern literary studies and aesthetics. (Kevin McLaughlin, Brown University 20070301)

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Belknap Press (March 30, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0674024389
• ISBN-13: 978-0674024380
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.8 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,665,919 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Man of the Hour, April 11, 2007

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Divagations (Hardcover)

I don't always think that the editors of Bookforum pock the right reviewers for most of the books they cover, but when they assigned Wayne Koestenbaum to review Mallarme's DIVAGATIONS they struck gold, and it seems clear to me now that WK is a Mallarmean writer or rather, of the school of Mallarme, and yet, I would never have thought so until I started dipping into Barbara Johnson's fantastic translations here. The wordplay and the love of digression, the little paragraphs and the long, lithe sentences, like Gina Lollobrigida stretched out on the beach, everything about Johnson's Mallarme brings me back to the gifted critic and fiction writer of today. Then I was struck by hos contemporary the whole of Mallarme's DIV. enterprise seems. One piece, "Crisis of Verse," might have been written today, or at any rate the day before yesterday, and page after page of it, with its emphasis on the "white space" surrounding the word, anticipates Jabes, Barthes, all the most beautiful of 20th century critics. "What caused a medium extent of words. under the gaze's comprehension, to take on definitive traits, surrounded by silence?" (The entire paragraph--you see, they're brief enough, in general, to fit inside fortune cookies.)

I like the one where Mallarme claims that, of all the French words for "shade," OMBRE is too opaque and TENEBRES is not very dark. "What a disappointment, in front of the perversity that makes 'jour' and 'nuit,' contradictorily, sound dark in the former and light in the latter. Hope for a resplendent word glowing, or being snuffed out, inversely, so far as simple light-dark alternatives are concerned." What a way to put it! As an American boy growing up in France, I too often pondered the way French people seemed to think of "jour" as a dour, creepy sort of time, while the "nuit" was full of radiance and fun. Well, now I know a little bit more about their ways, and it's no more Nabokov for me. We used to weave complicated fantasies about a group of little fairy people who came out at twilight, the border between night and day just as it seems, in retrospect, like the Maginot Line between life and death. In our language, "light" and "life" are next to each other on the tongue at any rate, and it was an irate schoolmaster who broke up our crepuscular reveries, urging us harshly to take uup our cudgels and proceed home where Weetabix awaited us. I thought at first, before taking up Koestenbaum's review in BOOKFORUM, that I would have to be considerably keener on de Banville, Tailhade, Verlaine, Morisot et al (than I am) to get caught up with DIVAGATIONS, but the truth is, you don't have to know as much as you think you might to enjoy this book tremendously. You'll love the part where he theorizes that the slow, mournful syllables of "Lord Tennyson" account for the poet's popularity, and furthermore for "something serene, isolated, and complete; the proud withdrawal of physiognomy."

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful prose, April 7, 2010

By 

BKotevski (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Divagations (Paperback)

Agree with the previous reviewer: this is lithe, beautiful writing, as fresh as if it were written today. Here is a great mind on display, dallying with digressions and knowing that it is they that actually get at the heart of things. The language is so poetic - made me finally believe that prose could be poetry. Mallarme takes one back to origins, to the need for freshness in approach and disinhibition in writing. Every poet needs to read this. A remarkable translation.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great collection of essays and lecture by this poet, January 28, 2011

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Paul Rowe (Madison, WI) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Divagations (Paperback)

This book reveals a very different side of this fabulous poet. Having only encountered Mallarme through poetry I had no idea he was as funny and down to earth (in a very French way) as he is. He makes intelligent, mostly coherent comments on many subjects. Well worth having.