Author’s Note

Gustave Flaubert long dreamed of writing a book on nothing, but it is Stéphane Mallarmé, perhaps unwittingly, who came closest to achieving this ultra-refined, and typically French, literary ambition in his often overlooked occasional verse. While much of his life was consumed meditating on the idea of a mythical all-encompassing Book – to embrace theatre, prose, poetry and music – Mallarmé nonetheless dedicated much time in his last years to the composition of apparently trivial occasional verse: quatrains written on fans or to accompany gifts of glacé fruit for the New Year, couplets written for Galets D’Honfleur, or dashed off to accompany a bottle of Calvados. Yet for the poet himself, as the following remarks suggest, the composition of these verses was no trivial pursuit: “I would give the magnificent vespers of Dream, and their virgin gold,” he wrote to his friend François Coppée in 1868, “for a quatrain, destined for a tomb or for a bonbon, which has succeeded in its task.” Among the best of these poems – certainly the most numerous – were a vast number of quatrains sent to friends in the post and written across the seal of the envelope. These Mallarmé sent to writer-friends, painters, doctors, musicians, and many to his one-time mistress and long term friend Méry Laurent. The idea originally came to Mallarmé when he noticed the similarity between a postal address and a quatrain, and the poems usually contain the name and address of the recipient, mixed in with some witty observation which often amounts to a miniature character sketch, or to a penetrating distillation of a place, a moment, a fleeting sensation, a wish, all in the space of four brief lines. It was Oscar Wilde, an occasional visitor at Mallarmé’s mardis, who said: “A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want?” The thought, supremely Mallarméan – and who is to say that the Irishman did not pick it up at one of Mallarmé’s soirées? – might well describe these exquisite poems conjured out of everyday nothings that Mallarmé sent to his friends.
                The poems were published in Mallarmé’s lifetime as Les loisirs de la poste and Recréations postales. This volume pays homage to Mallarmé’s exquisite quatrains by translating them in three different ways. Part I translates selections from Les loisirs de la poste and Recréations postales, as well as some poems that have come to light since the poet’s death, more or less straight. Parts II and III pay homage to Mallarmé’s verse in more oblique ways. When I showed some early drafts of the post poems to the writer and translator Angela Livingstone, she asked, picking on some of the poems where Mallarmé explicitly addresses his postman – “Come on postie…!”, “Quick, postman up with you…” – if the postman ever responded to Mallarmé? The second part grows out of this question, a question that is similar to that asked by feminist and postcolonial literatures, imagining a voice for the silent other, here Mallarmé’s postman, who now talks back to the poet, giving as good as he gets. Part three is another kind of translation again, taking the French of Mallarmé and translating it into English homophonically. Homophonic translation, pioneered by the Oulipo (Workshop of Potential Literature) in France, retains the sound of a piece but radically alters the sense, as in the title of this part, “Verdi, Sir Constance”, derived homophonically from the title of the French edition of Mallarmé’s occasional verse, Vers de circonstance. The diagram below shows one of these homophonic poems, number XXIII, alongside the original French, with its literal translation.

All the other poems in part III are composed using the same technique, a technique which is perhaps supremely suited to translating Mallarmé. In his “Editor’s Note” to the first printing of Un coup de dés in 1897, Mallarmé wrote: “In this work which is of an entirely new kind, the poet has attempted to create music using words.” While this is certainly true of Un coup de dés, it is equally true that Mallarmé’s poetry, throughout his career, and this more than any other writer before or since, aspired to the condition of music. In this, Mallarmé gave a privileged value to the sounds of his verse – and that, precisely, is what homophonic translation leaves, more or less, intact.

Philip Terry