Works
Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard
Stéphane MallarméBrise Marine
Stéphane MallarméUn Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard
Stéphane MallarméBrise Marine
Stéphane MallarméFamous Stéphane Mallarmé Quotes
Hérodiade.
Hérodiade (1898)
Context: I am alone in my monotonous country,
While all those around me live in the idolatry
Of a mirror reflecting in its depths serene
Herodiade, whose gaze is diamond keen...
O final enchantment! yes, I sense it, I am alone.
“A kiss would kill me, woman,
If beauty were not death…”
Hérodiade.
Hérodiade (1898)
Context: A kiss would kill me, woman,
If beauty were not death...
By what attraction
Am I drawn, what morn forgotten by the prophets
That pours on the dying distance its sad rites?
L'oeuvre pure implique la disparition élocutoire du poëte, qui cède l'initiative aux mots.
"Crise de Vers", La Revue Blanche (September 1895 )as translated in Mallarmé : The Poet and his Circle ([1999] 2005) by Rosemary Lloyd, p. 55.
Observations
Hérodiade.
Hérodiade (1898)
Context: I feel in my sinews
The spreading of shadows
Converging together
With a shiver
And in solitary vigil
After flights triumphal
My head rise
From this scythe
Through a clean rupture
That serves to dissever
The ancient disharmony
With the body
As drunk from fasting
It persists in following
With a haggard bound
Its gaze profound
Up where the frozen
Absolute has chosen
That nothing shall measure
Its vastness, O glacier
But according to a ritual
Illumined by the principle
That chose my consecration
It extends a salutation.
The Afternoon of a Faun (1876)
Stéphane Mallarmé Quotes about ideas and thoughts
L'acte poétique consiste à voir soudain qu'une idée se fractionne en un nombre de motifs égaux par valeur et à les grouper; ils riment.
"Crise de Vers", La Revue Blanche (September 1895) as translated in Mallarmé : The Poet and his Circle ([1999] 2005) by Rosemary Lloyd, p. 231.
Observations
“We do not write poems with ideas, but with words.”
Ce n'est pas avec des idées qu'on fait des vers, c'est avec des mots.
A remark reported in Psychologie de l'art (1927) by Henri Delacroix, p. 93; as translated in Literary Impressionism (1973), Maria Elisabeth Kronegger, p. 77.
Observations
From Degas, Manet, Morisot by Paul Valéry (trans. David Paul), Princeton University Press, 1960.
Observations
Stéphane Mallarmé Quotes
“I inaugurate through science
The hymn of all hearts spiritual”
"Prose" (1885).
Observations
Context: Hyperbole! can you not rise
In triumph from my memory,
A modern magic spell devise
As from an ironbound grammary:
For I inaugurate through science
The hymn of all hearts spiritual
In the labor of my patience,
Atlas, herbal, ritual.
“The visible serene artificial breath
Of inspiration, which regains the sky.”
The Afternoon of a Faun (1876)
Context: No water murmurs but what my flute pours
On the chord sprinkled thicket; and the sole wind
Prompt to exhale from my two pipes, before
It scatters the sound in a waterless shower,
Is, on the horizon's unwrinkled space,
The visible serene artificial breath
Of inspiration, which regains the sky.
On his unfinished work Hérodiade, in a letter to Henri Cazalis (30 October 1864); Oeuvres Complètes (1945) edited by Mondor & Jean-Aubry, p. 307, as translated in Mallarmé : The Poet and his Circle ([1999] 2005) by Rosemary Lloyd, p. 48.
Observations
Context: I have finally begun my Herodiade. With terror, for I am inventing a language that must necessarily burst forth from a very new poetics, that could be defined in a couple of words: Paint, not the thing, but the effect it produces. … the line of poetry in such a case should be composed not of words, but of intentions, and all the words should fade away before the sensation..
“I feel in my sinews
The spreading of shadows
Converging together
With a shiver”
Hérodiade.
Hérodiade (1898)
Context: I feel in my sinews
The spreading of shadows
Converging together
With a shiver
And in solitary vigil
After flights triumphal
My head rise
From this scythe
Through a clean rupture
That serves to dissever
The ancient disharmony
With the body
As drunk from fasting
It persists in following
With a haggard bound
Its gaze profound
Up where the frozen
Absolute has chosen
That nothing shall measure
Its vastness, O glacier
But according to a ritual
Illumined by the principle
That chose my consecration
It extends a salutation.
“Walk no longer in an unknown age…”
Nurse.
Hérodiade (1898)
Context: Are you a living princess or her shadow?
Let me kiss your fingers and their rings, and bid you
Walk no longer in an unknown age...
“When the sad sun sinks,
It shall pierce through the body of wax till it shrinks!”
Nurse.
Hérodiade (1898)
Context: When the sad sun sinks,
It shall pierce through the body of wax till it shrinks!
No sunset, but the red awakening
Of the last day concluding everything
Struggles so sadly that time disappears,
The redness of apocalypse, whose tears
Fall on the child, exiled to her own proud
Heart, as the swan makes its plumage a shroud
For its eyes, the old swan, and is carried away
From the plumage of grief to the eternal highway
Of its hopes, where it looks on the diamonds divine
Of a moribund star, which never more shall shine!
“If only I'd chosen an easy work!”
On his unfinished work Hérodiade, in a letter to Henri Cazalis (15 January 1865), as translated in Mallarmé : The Poet and his Circle ([1999] 2005) by Rosemary Lloyd, p. 48.
Observations
Context: If only I'd chosen an easy work! But, precisely, I, who am sterile and crepuscular, have chosen a terrifying subject, whose sensations, if they are strong, reach the point of atrocity, and if they are vague, have the strange attitude of mystery. And my Verse hurts me at times, and wounds me as if it were of iron! I have, moreover, found an intimate and unique way of painting and noting down the very fleeting impressions. I should add, which is even more terrifying, that all these impressions follow one another as in a symphony, and I often have entire days when I ask myself if this impression can accompany that one, what is their relationship and effect … You can guess that I write few lines in a week.
Letter to Henri Cazalis (April 1866), published in Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé (1988), p. 60.
Observations
Context: Yes, I know, we are merely empty forms of matter, but we are indeed sublime in having invented God and our soul. So sublime, my friend, that I want to gaze upon matter, fully conscious that it exists, and yet launching itself madly into Dream, despite its knowl edge that Dream has no existence, extolling the Soul and all the divine impressions of that kind which have collected within us from the beginning of time and proclaiming, in the face of the Void which is truth, these glorious lies!
“The world was made in order to result in a beautiful book.”
Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre.
Remark made to Jules Huret, who published it in his Enquête sur l’évolution littéraire (1891); as translated in Stéphane Mallarmé (1969) by Frederic Chase St. Aubyn, p. 23.
Observations
“All alone I gave
Myself for triumph the ideal sin of roses.”
The Afternoon of a Faun (1876)
“It is in front of the paper that the artist creates himself.”
Letter to Eugène Lefébure (February 1865), published in Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé (1988), p. 48.
Observations
“A throw of the dice will never abolish chance.”
Stéphane Mallarmé Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard
Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard
Title of poem (1897), as quoted in Mallarmé's Un coup de dés : An Exegesis (1949) by Robert Greer Cohn.
Observations
The Afternoon of a Faun (1876)
“The flesh is sorrowful, alas! And I've read all the books.”
Stéphane Mallarmé Brise Marine
La chair est triste, hélas! et j'ai lu tous les livres.
"Brise Marine", line 1 (1887), as translated in Mallarmé : The Poet and his Circle ([1999] 2005) by Rosemary Lloyd, p. 70.
Observations
