Translator's Introduction

The starting point for the following 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. These new translations are intended not to replace but to augment and reconfigure both Auster's translations and the task itself of translating from French to English. 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 Mallarm,'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.

from A Tomb for Anatole

(Pour un tombeau d'Anatole by Stéphane Mallarmé)

[sections 1-10]