Collected Poems and Other Verse (Oxford World's Classics) Reissue Edition

I said in my original one-star review of the Kindle edition that, as other reviewers have pointed out, the "facing" translations don't face, on the Kindle, and the mix of English and French generates a lot of confusion. At that time I said the book looked as if the printed version might be very good. I ordered the printed version and it is very good indeed.There's a good introduction and the translations are excellent. Mallarmé was a very careful and perfectionist writer. As a wonderful result of this, he wrote so little that his entire poetic output, including prose poems and mischievous sillinesses, like four-line rhymed addresses on letters to friends, are ALL included, and ALL translated, and footnoted, in this marvelous edition. I don't think an English reader can do better.There are at least three French books that I have looked through in college libraries, which go through Mallarmé line by line and try to explain what each line means, to help native French speakers read his poetry. These books are aimed at educated readers, are entirely scholarly, and of course disagree here and there with one another. It's certainly no shame, then, for an English reader to take all the help he can get from editions like this Oxford one. Of the English editions I have seen, this is the most complete and the best.Nevertheless I take away one star because the introduction talks a lot about Mallarmé's difficulty, but doesn't say a word about his atheism. Some of his very most difficult poems come a lot clearer if you think of him as discussing the problems of people who are fully atheistic, and yet still have spiritual feelings -- feelings which they do NOT believe prove there is a God or some higher plane of reality.In PROSE (POUR DES ESSEINTES), for example, you get stanzas like,Oui, dans une île que l'air chargeDe vue et non de visionsToute fleur s'étalait plus largeSans que nous en devisions.Yes, in an isle the air had chargednot with mere visions but with sightevery flower spread out enlargedat no word that we could recite.The English here is the very good Blackmore translation Oxford gives us, but of course it's not as good as the French. The air is charged, says Mallarmé, with "view, and not with visions," and if you think about an atheist, happy to find a place where you don't get religious visions, it's all what-you-see-is-what-you-get instead ... and yet, "the flowers grow larger even when we aren't talking about them," that is, there is still something in this very real isle that is beyond our casual understanding or control ... if you think about atheism and mysticism like this, the lines become much clearer. It seems to me at least that the lines are near meaningless without this kind of approach, and I know that some Mallarmé experts agree with me.So I take a star away from the best version we can get ... which feels like Mallarmé to me.

This is easily the best translation of Mallarmé ever done. Furthermore, I would go so far as to say that it is one of the greatest translations into English of French poetry ever done. It is that good. Mallarmé is a notoriously difficult poet even for native French intellectuals (cf. Valery's description of his first encounter with Mallarmé's poetry). It is quite literally impossible to translate over French poetic sound effects into English even for simple poems by the earlier French poets. Du Bellay? Forget it. Can't be done. So those are two insurmountable obstacles. Or so it would seem. Of all the French poets, the very last expectation I had was that Mallarmé would be translated well. However, this translation is simply brilliant. What I hate more than anything (on this topic) is when a translator, supposedly for the sake of trying to capture the original's music, takes liberty with the meaning. While posed as a loving attempt to capture music, the reality is that such translations are exercises in sheer vanity: the translator (often a second or third or fourth tier poet himself) smugly alters the meaning to create sound effects that nonetheless have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with the sound effects of the original. So what happens is, not only is the music destroyed, but the meaning is destroyed as well. Mallarmé plays games of contortion with syntax and grammar. The temptation is to straighten those games out in order to gain easier access to meaning. And this is unfortunate, but a strict absolute attempt to replicate Mallarme's syntax simply cannot be done, since French syntax is inherently different than English syntax, except perhaps in some deep meta-syntactical way which need not concern us here. That said, again, more often than not, this translation captures even such fascinating syntactical games. Mallarmé is simply not meant to be understood right away. Period. So simplification is equivalent to destruction. I translated each of the poems in the original Deman edition myself so that I could better appreciate the poems. Of course this volume's translations were much better than mine, needless to say. However, the exercise did leave me awestruck at how great a job the translator's did here. If your French is so-so or non-existent, grab this book, and read it slowly. You will be very pleased. Awesome job!

Side-by-side poetry translations are great in paper book format where you have one language on one side and the other language on the other side, but in ebook format it just doesn't work. The French and the English run into each other at the most inopportune of times. It's hard enough to follow along with Mallarmé's work :) don't make it that much harder by including the French. Please offer a volume that's just the English, in the meantime, this just instills frustration where it is not needed :(

Great edition. Some of the translations could be better but Mallarme is incredibly difficult to translate anyway. Very helpful that it is a dual language edition.

They've replaced meaning for rhythm. Nouns and verbs are freely exchanged for any word with a tenuous association ("martyrise" and "torments," as well as "tiraient" and "derived," are among some of the most shocking), destroying motifs and making the poems incomprehensible. At that, the rhyme and meter for which the translators have sacrificed the essence of the poem is not even the rhyme and meter of Mallarme – they enforce iambic cadence and reconfigure rhyme schemes seemingly on the conviction of their own caprice. A poet is not a great poet because what he writes is interchangeable with anything else (I would say, "with synonyms," but even that would be more loyal to Mallarmé than the Blackmores have been), but the Blackmores (who I can only imagine were pulled out of an intermediate French course to write this book) seem to have missed this insight.Also, apparently to review this and warn you not to buy it I had to rate the quality of the "plot," so I chose "full of surprises," for reasons you can imagine.

Amazing. Arrived early. And the reading material is brilliant (of course).

'A Dice thrown,'written in 1896,perhaps gets to the heart of Mallarme,and symbolist poets of his ilk!The poem is laid out in a 11 page double spread,a visual designed to dramatise the word sense.The intention ,Mallarme said of it ' the blank spaces assume importance,catch the eye..versification has always demanded them as a surrounding si!ence...I am merely dispersing its components..leading a train of thoughts..near or far from the implicit leading thought for reasons of verisimilitude..thus speeding up or slowing down the rhythm and scanning..narrative is avoided'.Such unpunctuated presentation rely entirely upon 'breath length' which together with the double page spread makes it miss Mallarmé's target(I write as a poet who pens such open style poetry)and is therefore disconcerting to the seeing eye.Clearly ahead of his time(although later ,poets like Marianne Moore wrote a more comprehensible version thereof).Symbolists aka Mallarme are however to thanked for both their influence upon Imagism in the English poetic world and for pushing the envelope in poetry.Happily,this collection has a very helpful introduction and extensive notes to help the reader follow the experimental thinking and writing of this extraordinary poet/thinker

the book is a pleasure to read and it comes with an excellent informative introduction

signifying signification!

I don't have good enough French to comment on the translation but it looks fairly close without losing the sense or the melody.Not my favourite among the C19 French poets, too obscure; prefer Baudelaire.