9 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Buy it for the bonkers annotation., April 2, 2002
This review is from: Selected Poems (Paperback)
'The reader seems to have some disaster of far vaster import than he can fathom. That is the mysterious effect of Mallarme's poetry. One gets a strange emotional effect past analysis'. So declares translator C.F. MacIntyre of a typically impenetrable Mallarme sonnet. Unfortunately, it's an effect the non-French reader will never experience. In translation, somebody like Robert Frost once said, what is lost is the poetry, and no other writer exemplifies this truism more clearly than Mallarme. Most translations will at least yield some sort of broad narrative or imagistic or intellectual sense. Mallarme's self-contained, bookish, exquisitely artificial poetry (Borges was a fan) exists on a plane beyond sense. It is an intensely intricate agglomeration of sounds, forms, distorted grammar, codes and riddles whose 'meaning' is not literal. Mallarme is usually compared to a costumier, jeweller or musician, such is this artisan's devotion to the poem as crafted object. The only real way to translate Mallarme is not to find literal English equivalents for his words as printed, but to find new word-constructions with sounds and resonances that transmute the originals' spirit, rather than sense. But if the translator had that kind of gift, s/he wouldn't be wasting it on Mallarme translations. Despite MacIntyre's best efforts, then, literal Mallarme in English sounds like the worst kind of sub-decadent pot-pourri, like the imitations of French Symbolism Oscar Wilde churned out in his youth. [...]This does not mean the volume is useless. French students struggling with the originals can use the translations as a kind of grammatical glossary, and will find MacIntyre's synopses and explanatory notes, with background and critical infomration, helpful, if dated. The casual reader, however, will find much to enjoy. After a few poems (including the famous 'Herodiade' and 'L'apres-mide d'un faune'), I gave up struggling with Mallarme, and gave into the pleasures of MacIntyre's annotations. A real-life Charles Kinbote, he doesn't even seem to like Mallarme very much: one poem 'is built up of so much nothing, like a fragile pastry of whipped cream. It is artful in the worst sense of the word... He should have had a stern editor! (As I have)'; 'Line 4 is particularly good, [a critic] insists, because it suppresses the classic caesura! I don't think many readers would suffer if the whole sonnet had been suppressed'. He refers to Mallarme's art as a 'dead end', execrates 'his miserably bungled up French', and cheerfully admits that he doesn't really understand the poems! So what qualified him to translate them?! A delectable egotism blows through the pages, from its overheated, homoerotic dedication, and the unwarranted, though very welcome, detours into autobiography and war memories, to the Olympian sneers at previous commentators. Published in sexually unliberated 1957, MacIntyre is forced to euphemise Mallarme's detailed and relentless erotics, which leads to some splendid tongue-twisting; the frequent suspicion that MacIntyre himself misses the point of a poem like 'What silk...' ('the mouth will not be sure/in its bite of finding savor,/unless he, your princely lover,/breathe out, diamond-like, in your/considerable tuft the cry/of Glories stifled as they die'), which he says is about a woman brushing her hair at the mirror (!), is quashed by his mocking one persistently misreading critic: 'Really now. I wish I still had Herr Wais's niaive innocence. I really do'. Barmy, endearing and delightful.
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