a repost for myself, as i keep forgetting who i am, and my strengths and purposes.
From -- Pour un tombeau d'Anatole by Stéphane Mallarmé
RÉSUMÉ :
Le 6 octobre 1879 mourait de maladie, à l'âge de huit ans, le petit Anatole,fils tendrement aimé de Stéphane Mallarmé. Les deux cents feuillets présentés ici par Jean-Pierre Richard furent rédigés par le poète à la suite de cet événement, et pour tenter d'en amortir en lui le choc. Ceci déjà annonce leur valeur : elle tient à leur extraordinaire poids humain ; aucun écrit de Mallarmé ne possède cette qualité brûlante, immédiate, cette puissance crue d'émotion. Mais le pathétique s'en trouve aussi médité et dominé, repris par un esprit souverain, l'esprit d'un grand poète qui met en oeuvre toutes ses ressources créatrices afin de dépasser ce fait indépassable et insupportable : la mort d'un être cher. Comme tant de grands poèmes mallarméens, ces notes décrivent un combat, la "lutte d'un génie et de la mort", lutte à l'issue de laquelle la mort eût été vaincue par le génie. Anatole eût finalement été sauvé par un poème dont ces pages tracent le plan et constituent l'ébauche. Si Mallarmé n'a pu finalement écrire ce poème, il est déjà très important pour nous qu'il ait pu le rêver : car l'on voit ici s'annoncer, ou se prolonger, maint thème développé dans l'oeuvre publiée. Une longue introduction redonne à cette méditation funèbre toute sa cohérence ; elle montre la profondeur, la rigueur, le caractère très purement mallarméens.
Retired Educator here. This is the esquisse, the design, the carefully laid out spaces of an architecture in decline that never knew the light of day and whose replication is full of violence and 'translationary' rape. I love the Paul Auster translation but haven't the inclination to type out his doings of the first ten poem-fragments. Here, however, is his translation of the first section:
child sprung from
the two of us -- showing
us our ideal, the way
-- ours! father
and mother who
sadly existing
survive him as
the two extremes --
badly coupled in him
and sundered
-- from whence his death -- o -
bliterating this little child "self"
There is an inside joke among language teachers and that is to say, liltingly, "Native speakers disagree..." But I hold translations and translators to a higher standard than one of simply being able to correctly channel word and sentiment. "Translators disagree..." is not a problem to be left alone -- rather it is like solving a crime: The problem must be worked.
Or maybe it is more the artifice in play, like that of building replicas of gothic ruins. There is, you know, a robust aesthetic of ersatz ruins, despite the sniff:sniff of those who claim it all romantic kitsch. For the literal minded, it is more a question of restoration.
We work it, we work it, we end up, still, with over 200 ruinous fragments -- la genèse d'un poème -- about the death of his son. Never does the original take completed form; Never could the translation be more than ego-driven lattice work that might bolster the crumbling brick and stone of the original.
Remember always -- and this is, I think, specific to all of Mallarmé -- that in his originality, even his [soi-disant] completed works, there is a high concentration of negative space: the "irrecoverable state of devastation and destruction" that defines a ruin, n.
Were I to work it instead of admiring the sweat of someone else's brow, I would not be snobbish envers literary history -- This work, in particular, demands it. But how do you work and knead anything beyond "[l]e 6 octobre 1879 mourait de maladie, à l'âge de huit ans, le petit Anatole, fils tendrement aimé de Stéphane Mallarmé"? Where is the literary history in that, beyond the date, beyond the age, beyong the provenance?
This is what William Marsh wants us to know -- that Walter Benjamin informs his translation and that he has been respectful of spatial and architectural elements in Mallarmé through some very successful homophonic and anagrammic schemes. There are dangers in citing the authority of Benjamin here, as I don't see the role of the translator of Pour un tombeau d'Anatole as primary authorship, no matter how solemn the task. At the same time, there is no room for error. On this one, native speakers in no way disagree. The less we can posit through the work of literary history and analysis of style, the more dangerous and fictitious our bold restatements become.
Denials of death and negations of history, the fake piles and slivers of disrepair of plaster and paint, trompe-l'oeil trumped, while what is real and undone, or real and never finished, stands as a testament to death, and a validation of certain history: ruins of roman kitchens, the arches and apses of abbeys and cloisters, the armaments of towers, turrets and battlements ("oh, my!")
The ruin can be exploited as a point of meditation -- and as a place of mediation between those things we all are caught in -- life after the other's death, the unimaginable death of a child. Mallarmé is cobbling together all that he can of the experience, saving in his way his son's life, literally making, and carefully crafting, the artifice that is the tomb for Anatole. This ruin of a tomb wants to make the reader squirm, makes the reader question what is inside verus outside, what is private, what is public, what is visible, what is hidden, and what may well be absent, gone forever.
So, yeah, fearless translator, set yourself up as intrepid author! Just kidding.
It's late and we're all tired.
William Marsh explicates his process:
Drawing impetus from Walter Benjamin's claim in "The Task of the Translator" that "a translation issues from the original--not so much from its life as from its afterlife," the following poems attempt to define the "afterlife" of Mallarmé's Anatole while carefully acknowledging both Auster's work and the notion (again Benjamin) that "a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language." With the intention of honoring both the sense and form of Mallarmé's poem (its mode of signification), these new renderings make use of both homophonic and anagrammic translation tools in constructing the English versions (or harmonies) of the original fragments. Employing a set of devices including anagram, same-sound correlations, exact or near-exact cognates, as well as common etymologies (near-matches of meaning), the poems excerpted here try to rebuild the Mallarmé texts in such a way that both the syntactical variety and the physical shape (letters, words, lines) of the originals are reflected as well in the English.
[sections 1-10] [fragments]
1
enfant sorti de
nous deux--nous
montrant notre
idéal, le chemin
--à nous! père
et mère qui lui
en triste existence
survivons comme
les deux extrêmes--
mal associés en lui
et qui se sont séparés
--d'ou sa mort--annu-
lant ce petit <
an infant dies to
us both--de
monstrates our
ideal, child-man
--anew! father
& mother quietly
entrust existence
survive a son in
the two extremes--
malassociating him
acquiescing separate
--death is more--nul
ling this tiny "self" denied
2
(3
meilleures
comme s'il
était encore--
quelqu'ils fussent,
des qualificatifs
digne--etc.
les heures où
vous fûtes et ne
fûtes pas
(3
better is
he becomes
that which was,
engraved qualities
dignity--etc.
the hours you
fought but never
fought past
3
malade au
printemps
mort en automne
--c'est le soleil
-----
la vague
idée la toux
2
ailing in
springtime
mourned in autumn
--celestial soul
----
the wave -
idea attacks
2
4
fils
résorbé
pas parti
c'est lui
--ou son frère
moi
je le lui
ai dit
deux frères
---
if he's
reabsorbed
is a-part
it's he
--or his brother
me
shall i
say it
two brothers
---
5
refoulée restée
en flanc--
siècle
ne s'écoulera pas
juste pour
m'instruire
repelled - - resting
in womb--
century
won't roll past
just for
my instruction
6
pas connu
mère, et fils ne
m'a pas connu! --
--image de moi
autre que moi
emporté en
mort!
unknown
mother, a face un
recognized! --
--image of me
other than me
transported in
death!
7
qui s'est réfugié
ton futur en moi
devient ma
pureté a travers vie,
à laquelle je ne
toucherai pas --
what's in refuge
your future in me
become my
purity through life,
which i shall not
touch upon --
8
il est époque de
une
l'Existence où nous
nous retrouverons,
sinon un lieu--
--et si vous
en doutez
le monde en
sera témoin,
en supposant que
je vive assez vieux
_______
it's the epoch of
one
Existence in us
in us retrieved,
is not in lieu--
--& if you
doubt these
mundane
testimonies -
let's suppose that
i live long enough
_______
9
préf.
père qui
né en temps
mauvais avait
préparé à fils--
une tâche sublime
--
<
la sienne--la douleur le désire
de se sacrifier à qui n'est
plus l'emporteront-ils sur
vigueur (homme qui'il n'a pas été)
et fera-t-il la tâche de l'enfant
pref.
father who
eve'n in times
gone bad had
prepared a son--
a touch sublime
--
"the double re
plenished--the child's
his own--the dull hour the desir
ed sacrifice to one who's no
more will triumph over
vigor (man he wasn't to be)
& through it all the task of infancy
10
le but suprême
n'eût été
que partir pur
de la vie
tu l'as accompli
d'avance
en souffrant
assez--doux
enfant pour que
Cela te soit compté
pour ta vie perdue--les tiens
ont acheté le reste par leur
souffrance de ne plus t'avoir
the highest aim
nothing but
to part pure
from life
you accomplish it
in advance
in suffering
all this--gentle
infant so that
This will be counted
part of your due--your kin
have bought the rest by their
suffering the loss forever
Bard College's literary journal Conjunctions publishes innovative fiction, poetry, criticism, drama, art and interviews by both emerging and established writers.
The starting point for the [preceding] poems lies in Paul Auster's excellent 1983 translation of
Mallarmé's long poem, Pour un tombeau d'Anatole, released by North Point Press under the title A Tomb for Anatole.
