A review by Ian Thomson in the FT 25th August 2012 of a new translation by Peter Manson of Mallarmé’s poetry reminded me of my own attempts to come to grips with this most innovative of poets. It took place in a dissertation on Un coup de dés which was part of my degree course many years ago.
It all seems so simple - ‘La chair est triste et j’ai lu tous les livres’ is translated by ‘The flesh is sad and I’ve read all the books’.
‘Un coup de dés’ (title of his most mind-blowing poem) is translated by ‘A dice-throw’.
This could have been rendered by ‘a throw of the dice’ but of course this implies that some person or agent is throwing the dice, whereas the translator has chosen dice-throw because of its more disembodied impersonal feel.
After all chance is just that, a random phenomenon, for which no one or no thing is responsible.
But of course the main feature of this particular work is its typography.
The words seem to fly off the page in some great primeval explosion, in which language is rendered meaningless and becomes the robotic utterance of mere words.
Here Mallarmé seems to have intuited the paradox of a world in which order and chaos are hand in hand, one threatening to overwhelm the other, but never quite succeeding.
Not really translatable. You either appreciate this train of thought or not.
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