Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898)

Une dentelle s'abolit
Dans le doute du Jeu suprême
À n'entr'ouvrir comme un blasphême
Qu'absence éternelle de lit.

Cet unanime blanc conflit
D'une guirlande avec la même,
Enfui contre la vitre blême
Flotte plus qu'il n'ensevelit.

Mais, chez qui du rêve se dore
Tristement dort une mandore
Au creux néant musicien

Telle que vers quelque fenêtre
Selon nul ventre que le sien
Filial on aurait pu naître.

A lace does away with itself
In the doubt of the supreme Game
To half-open like a blasphemy
Only an eternal absence of bed.

This unanimous white conflict
Of a garland with the same,
Fled against the pale pane
Floats more than it buries.

But, in one who gilds himself with dreams
Sadly sleeps a mandorla
With music's void in its emptiness

Such that toward some window
Depending on no womb but its own,
Filial one could have been born.

Published 1887. A "prose translation" of this difficult poem might be "A still life: a curtain parts, shifted by the dawn wind, revealing a lute instead of the bed one might expect."

Text and translation (by Richard Howard) from Paul de Man's essay "Poetic Nothingness: On a Hermetic Sonnet by Mallarmé (1955)" published in Paul de Man: Critical Writings, 1953-1978,University of Minnesota Press, 1989. This book is probably not in print in 2001.

This site (in French) includes a portrait of Mallarmé.

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June 20th, 2001