This poem is a fascinating example of the poetic genius of Poe. While it is often thought of as a poem for younger readers, anyone who appreciates the subtle tragedy that is Poe will be deeply moved by this piece - in fact, only a muture reader can fully appreciate all of its' complexity. A must for any fan of Poe, good poetry, American literature, or just plain good writing. Furthermore, you don't have to be a scholar to appreciate this one. Its' appeal is universal, and its' understandability is high. It's just a darn good read.

this is one of poe's greatest poems. there is so much love in his words for his wife (who the poem was intended for but he changed her name to Annabel Lee). A must read!

The brilliant light of this masterful work has been shed into the most reluctant corner, I'm astonished at the revealing glance at fabulous flowers. How refreshing to read something like this, I savor every page! Bravo Rosemary, I would follow you anywhere!

Marian Sugano is an excellent teacher. I have not read her book, but am sure that it is a fine presentation of french poetry.

This offers in startling detail the great French poets works in their variety.From the beautiful & exquisite lyricism of "Herodiade" to the vivid cathartic experience of "Igitur" & finally to the innovative & experimental "Dice Thrown Never Will Annul Chance".This also contains of course his impressionist masterpiece "The Afternoon Of A Faun".Together with the bizarre & self-revelatory letters & prose poems the work offers a good representation of this masterful man & poet.

Slote has ably produced a book filled with both word and pages, a book which, despite the length of its title, is truly finite. A work which will definitely, and without a doubt, be considered part of Slote's ouvre. This book is, rest assured, a work of criticism in the classical sense (i.e. an analysis of texts). For my part, I rather "liked" this book. Not only its heft and complexion, but also its sheer pagination give it an air of ontological certitude. Kudos to Mr. (Dr.) Slote, and may he continue to produce such irrefutable objects as this!

Stephane Mallarme is often approached either with reverance duea god or with the disdain of ignorance. Happily, Daisy Aldan brings alifetime of study, her own opus of poetry and critical work, and a true, intimate bilingualism to a masterful translation of the major verse poems of Stephane Mallarme, TO PURIFY THE WORDS OF THE TRIBE, a book with facing French texts that contains her unsurpassed translation of "A Throw of the Dice" and illuminating expositions of each poem.

Aldan has sometimes described herself as a "former school teacher." The demystification of these often unread, misread, and misunderstood poems testify to her democratic approach as a true pedagogue and to the difficulties of Mallarme's very dense and crafted poems which are explicated with ease and generosity. The poetry of Mallarme is certainly not for a coven of priestly erudities; written during a nineteenth century of smokestacks and alienation brings the history of Western thought and symbolism into the NOW of the poet, into his life and vision.

Thanks to Daisy Aldan, Mallarme's work can now be fully experienced in our language, which is no mean feat. To carry forth his vision Mallarme had to struggle with the material sordidness of his age:

Let the dreary smokestacks ceaselessly pour smoke, and let a roving prison of soot Blot out in the horror of its dismal trains the sun dying in sulfur on the horizon

-The Sky is dead.-Towards you I hasten! Bestow, O matter, Oblivion of the cruel Ideal and of Sin Upon this martyr who comes to share the litter Where the contented herd of humans lies asleep

But he cannot succumb to the temptation to join the crowd, to escape his responsibility as a poet:

Where flee in this futile and perverse revolt? I am haunted! The Azure! The Azure! The Azure!

Aldan, to her credit, serves Mallarme by using her own poetic craft sparingly. In no way does she recreate the poems. Nor does Aldan aim to complicate matters by working out rhyme schemes that, in the end, would be extraneous and fail to do justice to the text. Mallarme is, perhaps the most concise and replete of poets and to be faithful to his content in an aesthetically satisfying way needs no rhyme or foot counting, a la francais. Aldan knows, well, when to stop.

"The Tomb of Edgar Poe" is an example of a perfectly clear translation without the distractions of second hand versification. Aldan has the capacity to keep very close to the original and the skill to move from one language to the other with the ease and rhythmic nuance that her talent as a poet makes possible:

Just as eternity transforms him at last unto Himself The Poet rouses with a naked sword, His age terrified at not having discerned That death was triumphant in that strange voice

They, like a Hydra; vile spasm on hearing the angel Once give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe Loudly proclaimed the sorcery drunk In the dishonored flow of some foul brew...

The famously difficult "Le Vierge, le Vivace et le Bel Aujourd'hui" also illustrates this capacity:

Will virginal, vibrant and beautiful today shatter with a blow of its rapturous wing this solid lost lake where beneath the frost haunts the transparent glacier of unrealized flights!

When Aldan paraphrases stanzas of this poem in the section devoted to exposition, she eschews brilliant interpretation and "the art of criticism." Her aim is simple: to make the poems comprehensible to the reading public. And she succeeds.

The book concludes with the innovative "A Throw of the Dice." Andre Gide called this "the most untranslatable poem in any language," but Daisy Aldan's translation, published in the fifties, was highly acclaimed and brought her fame in the French community. She was called a "Mallarmiste par excellence."

"The Throw of the Dice," a poem originally written on music paper, has varying typeface and the lines of the poem read from one page to the next, across the inner spine. Each type section (caps, italics, tiny print etc.) can be read as a separate poem but when everything is read as a whole, it is the main poem. Each page is, also, an ideogram, with visual appeal...sky, sea, bird, etc. In this poem Mallarme attempted an evolution of consciousness and the freeing of Mankind, which was his mission. Daisy Aldan assures that we experience this...

'The reader seems to have some disaster of far vaster import than he can fathom. That is the mysterious effect of Mallarme's poetry. One gets a strange emotional effect past analysis'. So declares translator C.F. MacIntyre of a typically impenetrable Mallarme sonnet. Unfortunately, it's an effect the non-French reader will never experience. In translation, somebody like Robert Frost once said, what is lost is the poetry, and no other writer exemplifies this truism more clearly than Mallarme. Most translations will at least yield some sort of broad narrative or imagistic or intellectual sense. Mallarme's self-contained, bookish, exquisitely artificial poetry (Borges was a fan) exists on a plane beyond sense. It is an intensely intricate agglomeration of sounds, forms, distorted grammar, codes and riddles whose 'meaning' is not literal. Mallarme is usually compared to a costumier, jeweller or musician, such is this artisan's devotion to the poem as crafted object. The only real way to translate Mallarme is not to find literal English equivalents for his words as printed, but to find new word-constructions with sounds and resonances that transmute the originals' spirit, rather than sense. But if the translator had that kind of gift, s/he wouldn't be wasting it on Mallarme translations. Despite MacIntyre's best efforts, then, literal Mallarme in English sounds like the worst kind of sub-decadent pot-pourri, like the imitations of French Symbolism Oscar Wilde churned out in his youth. Pick a line, any line: 'The sun that is exalted/by its supernatural halt/forthwith redescends/incandescent/I feel how vertebrae/in the dark give way'; 'You know that, amethystine gardens, hidden/without end in dazzling erudite abysses'; 'Just any solitude/with neither swan nor dock/mirrors its desuetude/in my abdicated look'. Etcetera.

This does not mean the volume is useless. French students struggling with the originals can use the translations as a kind of grammatical glossary, and will find MacIntyre's synopses and explanatory notes, with background and critical infomration, helpful, if dated. The casual reader, however, will find much to enjoy. After a few poems (including the famous 'Herodiade' and 'L'apres-mide d'un faune'), I gave up struggling with Mallarme, and gave into the pleasures of MacIntyre's annotations. A real-life Charles Kinbote, he doesn't even seem to like Mallarme very much: one poem 'is built up of so much nothing, like a fragile pastry of whipped cream. It is artful in the worst sense of the word... He should have had a stern editor! (As I have)'; 'Line 4 is particularly good, [a critic] insists, because it suppresses the classic caesura! I don't think many readers would suffer if the whole sonnet had been suppressed'. He refers to Mallarme's art as a 'dead end', execrates 'his miserably bungled up French', and cheerfully admits that he doesn't really understand the poems! So what qualified him to translate them?! A delectable egotism blows through the pages, from its overheated, homoerotic dedication, and the unwarranted, though very welcome, detours into autobiography and war memories, to the Olympian sneers at previous commentators. Published in sexually unliberated 1957, MacIntyre is forced to euphemise Mallarme's detailed and relentless erotics, which leads to some splendid tongue-twisting; the frequent suspicion that MacIntyre himself misses the point of a poem like 'What silk...' ('the mouth will not be sure/in its bite of finding savor,/unless he, your princely lover,/breathe out, diamond-like, in your/considerable tuft the cry/of Glories stifled as they die'), which he says is about a woman brushing her hair at the mirror (!), is quashed by his mocking one persistently misreading critic: 'Really now. I wish I still had Herr Wais's niaive innocence. I really do'. Barmy, endearing and delightful.

Verlaine is perhaps my favourite poet--many of his poems are exceptionally beautiful, salacious even. However he wrote prolifically, and as is often the case with prolific artists, his work is of uneven quality. Nevertheless, at his best, Paul Verlaine's poetry is among the most remarkable that I've ever read. I highly recommend this collection.

I first read this collection during Christmas break of my freshman year of college, and have never again had a more powerful experience with poetry. Verlaine is often viewed as the poor man's accomplice of Rimbaud; MacIntyre, the translator of this volume, is often dismissed as an awkward versifier. I regard both assessments as absurd.

Verlaine is not as close as Rimbaud to the free verse dogma of recent decades, but precisely for this reason he plays a vintage music in his poems, mixing whimsical subject matter with rock-solid traditional verse forms. (I don't agree that he did better work after his encounter with Rimbaud-- far from it, in fact.) Consider this lovely, even haunting refrain:

In the ennui unending
of the flat land,
the vague snow descending
shines like sand.

With no gleam of light
in the copper sky,
one imagines he might
see the moon live and die.

Wind-broken crow
and starving wolves too,
when sharp winds blow
what happens to you?

In the ennui unending
of the flat land,
the vague snow descending
shines like sand.

This sort of melodic drollery is mastered by nobody in the history of poetry like Verlaine, and MacIntyre is just the man to capture it. (He also does fine versions of the early Rilke.)

Don't miss this volume!

This a beautiful edition of the COMPLETE poems of one of the most important French symbolist poets. If only all French poetry books could be printed in handsome, large-format bilingual editions like this! The translation is not even half-bad, with Weinfeld doing his best to maintain the actual flavor of Mallarmé's words. Best of all, the poems are translated in a faithful stylistic way-- prose poems STAY in prose, and the early-surrealist poem "Un Coup de Des" keeps its complex typesetting. The commentary is substantial and the poems are arranged in order of the books they appeared in, which makes it easier to follow the progression. Sometimes it seems that Mallarmé is left out of his rightful place in poetry, and this edition should help to alleviate that problem.

This volume of COLLECTED POEMS by Stephane Mallarme
and translated with commentary by Henry Weinfield
is a joy and a treasure. For it contains Mallarme
poems from various of his collections: First Poems,
Satirical Parnassus, The Contemporary Parnassus,
Other Poems, Album Leaves, Street Songs, Several
Sonnets, Homages and Tombs, Other Poems and
Sonnets, Poems in Prose, and A Throw of the Dice.
The best appreciation of Mallarme is cited by
Henry Weinfield in his "Introduction" to this
volume. The comments were by Paul Valery (and
were about Mallarme): "This poet was the least
-primitive- of all poets, yet it came about that
by bringing words together in an unfamiliar, strangely
melodious, and as it were stupefying chant -- by the
musical splendor of his verse as well as by its
amazing richness -- he restored the most powerful
impression to be derived from primitive poetry: that
of the -magical formula-. An exquisite analysis of
his art must have led him toward a doctrine, and
something like a synthesis, of incantation."
This volume contains the texts of the poems in
French on the right-hand side of each page -- and
the translation in English on the left-hand side.
Mallarme is an extremely interesting poet, artist,
and human thinker/creator, for he has a spiritual
crisis in which he came away perceiving: "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 knowledge that Dream has no existence, extolling
the Soul and all the divine impresssion 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." Yet, even this, is
not precisely what Mallarme finally winds up doing...
for his is a "quest for Beauty and for a transcendent
Ideal and the tragic vision on which that quest is
based."
And all of this is enveloped in the most beautiful
sounds and images...charming and mystifying...for he
is also hermetic in his approach, "Everything that is
sacred and that wishes to remain so, must envelop
itself in mystery."
Here is a portion from "The Afternoon of a Faun" in
English -- then in French:
"...through the motionless and weary swoon/ Of
stifling heat that suffocates the morning,/ Save
from my flute, no waters murmuring/ In harmony flow
out into the groves;" -- "par l'immodible et lasse
pamoison/ Suffoquant de chaleurs le matin frais sil
lutte/ Ne murmure point d'eau que ne verse ma flute/
Au bosquet arrose d'accords;".
"...the ancient technique of verse -- for which I
retain a religious veneration and to which I atribute
the empire of passion and of dreams..."

Mallarme is a classic poet. His poetry made great impact on almost every important modern poet. He follow a road of Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the hard road. Paul Valery's work, for example, can not be even imagined without Mallarme's poems. This book contains all Mallarme's poetry. It is an essential collection for every poetry fan whose taste is not satisfied with mere cliched rhymes. Mallarme is also a paradigmatical figure of modern literature. He is the author of that famous statement: "The world exists in order to become a book."

Mallarmé's poetry can be a bit dense, thick, and perplexing on the first read through (esp. when it's done in French!) but after a closer readings of the poems, you can usually figure out somewhat easily what he is trying to say. And it's very rewarding once you do! So put some time and effort into it and conquer one of the most confusing French poets out there!

Quite an enjoyable read, Millan's book also presents us with a neutral account of his subject's life, which makes this biography all the more interesting and stimulating. Although some may feel a few things are missing, such as details into Herodiade and parts of Mallarme's literary theory, or more examples of Mallarme's interactions with other major writers of his century apart from his closest friends, this biography deserves the attention of anyone considering taking focused interest in Mallarme, or XIXth century French poetry in general.