Stéphane Mallarmé citations

Étienne Mallarmé, dit Stéphane Mallarmé, né à Paris le 18 mars 1842 et mort à Valvins le 9 septembre 1898, est un poète français, également enseignant, traducteur et critique d'art.

Admirateur de Théophile Gautier, de Charles Baudelaire et de Théodore de Banville, Stéphane Mallarmé fait paraître en revue quelques poèmes en 1862. Professeur d'anglais par nécessité, il est nommé en septembre 1863 au lycée de Tournon-sur-Rhône en Ardèche et séjourne à Besançon et Avignon, avant d'arriver à Paris en 1871. Il fréquente alors des auteurs littéraires comme Paul Verlaine, Émile Zola ou Auguste de Villiers de L'Isle-Adam et des artistes comme Édouard Manet, qui a peint son portrait en 1876.

S'il rencontre des difficultés dans son métier de professeur , il mène une vie familiale paisible, ponctuée de difficultés financières et de deuils, en particulier la mort de son fils Anatole en 1879 à l'âge de huit ans. Il écrit des poèmes très élaborés et reçoit ses amis créateurs lors des Mardis de la rue de Rome ou dans sa maison de campagne, à Valvins, près de Fontainebleau, où il meurt le 9 septembre 1898 à 56 ans.

Attiré par l'esthétique de L'art pour l'art, il collabore au Parnasse contemporain dès 1866, cherchant à dépasser son sentiment d'impuissance lié à un état dépressif, il est dès lors en quête d'une beauté pure que seul peut créer l'art : « le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre », affirme-t-il. Il entreprend des œuvres ambitieuses qu'il retravaillera longtemps comme Hérodiade ou L'Après-midi d'un faune . Admirateur d'Edgar Poe, il traduit Le Corbeau , qui est publié en 1875 avec des illustrations d'Édouard Manet, et écrit le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe en 1876 , avant de traduire en prose d'autres poèmes.

En 1887, il fait paraître une édition de ses Poésies qui montrent sa recherche stylistique, comme dans le « Sonnet en X », « Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx », ou le sonnet en octosyllabes « Une dentelle s'abolit » . L'aboutissement de cette ambition du poème absolu apparaît dans le poème graphique de 1897 « Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard ». Cette recherche d'une expression tendue vers l'épure lui vaut cependant dès l'époque le reproche d'hermétisme qui reste attaché à l'art mallarméen.

La renommée de Stéphane Mallarmé se consolide encore à partir de 1884, quand Paul Verlaine l'inscrit dans sa série des Poètes maudits par la publication d'un long article sur Mallarmé, et, porteur de modernité et proche des avant-gardes en art comme en littérature, il est reconnu comme un maître par les jeunes générations poétiques, d'Henri de Régnier et des symbolistes à Paul Valéry. Ainsi, auteur d'une œuvre poétique ambitieuse, Stéphane Mallarmé a été l'initiateur, dans la seconde moitié du XIXe siècle, d'un renouveau de la poésie dont l'influence se mesure encore auprès de poètes contemporains comme Yves Bonnefoy. Wikipedia  

✵ 18. mars 1842 – 9. septembre 1898
Stéphane Mallarmé photo

Œuvres

Poésies
Poésies
Stéphane Mallarmé
Stéphane Mallarmé: 45   citations 1   J'aime

Stéphane Mallarmé citations célèbres

“Un Coup de Dés Jamais N'Abolira Le Hasard”

Observations

“[…] le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre.”

Enquêtes
Variante: Le monde est fait pour aboutir à un beau livre.

“Aboli bibelot d'inanité sonore […]”

Poésies

Stéphane Mallarmé: Citations en anglais

“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.”

Hérodiade.
Hérodiade (1898)
Contexte: 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.

“A kiss would kill me, woman,
If beauty were not death…”

Hérodiade.
Hérodiade (1898)
Contexte: 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?

“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 …”

Hérodiade.
Hérodiade (1898)
Contexte: 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.

“The work of pure poetry implies the elocutionary disappearance of the poet, who yields the initiative to words.”

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

“I inaugurate through science
The hymn of all hearts spiritual”

"Prose" (1885).
Observations
Contexte: 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)
Contexte: 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.

“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.”

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
Contexte: 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)
Contexte: 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)
Contexte: 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)
Contexte: 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
Contexte: 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.

“Yes, I know, we are merely empty forms of matter, but we are indeed sublime in having invented God and our soul.”

Letter to Henri Cazalis (April 1866), published in Selected Letters of Stéphane Mallarmé (1988), p. 60.
Observations
Contexte: 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

“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

“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

“Inert, all burns in the fierce hour”

The Afternoon of a Faun (1876)

“The poetic act consists in suddenly seeing that an idea splits into a number of motives of equal value and in grouping them; they rhyme.”

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

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