Mallarme

Mal Armé

Mama Laid

Marmalade

Ma, Malaise

Mallarmé

Ever since Maria left me to go to another star––which one? Orion, Altair, or possibly you, green Venus?––I have always loved solitude. How many long days I have spent alone with my cat! By ‘alone’ I mean without a material creature: my cat is a mystic companion, a spirit. So I can say that I have spent long days alone with my cat, and alone with one of the last authors of the Latin decadence; because, singularly and strangely, ever since the fair creature passed away I have loved everything that can be summed up in the word ‘fall’. Thus my favourite time of year is the final languid phase of summer that comes immediately before autumn; and the time of day when I go for a walk is the time when the sun is resting just before it vanishes, when copper-yellow shafts are on the greyish walls and copper-red shafts on the windowpanes. And likewise, the literature to which my spirit turns for pleasure is the poetry of Rome in its final death-throes––as long, that is, as it doesn’t bear any whiff of the Barbarians’ rejuvenating advance or babble the puerile Latin of the early Christian hymns.

I have a 'collected poems and other verse' of mallarme. And revisiting it, I enjoy the poems a lot - and it has the French too. But I don't know French, can't get the rhythm pronunciation. Am I losing a great deal reading it in English?

got these fellows' translation recently, don't know what i think of it yet

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/09/on-azure-and-translating-mallarme/

Cool - let me know how you find it!

I suppose it's really just the usual contradictions/tensions about translated poetry. If the french text wasn't there it wouldn't bother me at all - I'd just take the poems as they are. The presence of the original text forces me to view the translation as an imitation, in some way, rather than texts of their own. Though I re-read Edwin Morgan's essays recently, and he's very much a 'translation optimist', a sort of humanism to his approach.

I really just bought it for his 'constellation' style poems, which interest me, and which I like a lot, but I've been enticed by his standard verse. I guess I just need to keep at it.

i have never really made any headway with french poetry, probably because the old enough stuff obeys such different norms that i just don't get a feel for it in the supposedly hamstrung translations

i read some howard (?) translations of baudelaire recently e.g. and the conceptual universe made sense to me but aside from a sort of stateliness the translations seemed quite devoid of poetry

different norms than english poetry, i mean