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"Johnson has accomplished an exemplary work of translation...by carrying off Mallarmés uniquely eccentric prose style without flattening or straightening it out."
--Times Literary Supplement, 19 June 2009
--Times Literary Supplement, 19 June 2009
Product Description
'This is a book just the way I don't like them', the father of French Symbolism, Stephane Mallarme, informs the reader in his preface to "Divagations": 'scattered and with no architecture'. On the heels of this caveat, Mallarme's diverting, discursive, and gorgeously disordered 1897 masterpiece tumbles forth - and proves itself to be just the sort of book his readers like most.
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3 reviews
20 of 20 people found the following review helpful
The Man of the Hour
12 April 2007
Format:Hardcover
I don't always think that the editors of Bookforum pock the right reviewers for most of the books they cover, but when they assigned Wayne Koestenbaum to review Mallarme's DIVAGATIONS they struck gold, and it seems clear to me now that WK is a Mallarmean writer or rather, of the school of Mallarme, and yet, I would never have thought so until I started dipping into Barbara Johnson's fantastic translations here. The wordplay and the love of digression, the little paragraphs and the long, lithe sentences, like Gina Lollobrigida stretched out on the beach, everything about Johnson's Mallarme brings me back to the gifted critic and fiction writer of today. Then I was struck by hos contemporary the whole of Mallarme's DIV. enterprise seems. One piece, "Crisis of Verse," might have been written today, or at any rate the day before yesterday, and page after page of it, with its emphasis on the "white space" surrounding the word, anticipates Jabes, Barthes, all the most beautiful of 20th century critics. "What caused a medium extent of words. under the gaze's comprehension, to take on definitive traits, surrounded by silence?" (The entire paragraph--you see, they're brief enough, in general, to fit inside fortune cookies.)
I like the one where Mallarme claims that, of all the French words for "shade," OMBRE is too opaque and TENEBRES is not very dark. "What a disappointment, in front of the perversity that makes 'jour' and 'nuit,' contradictorily, sound dark in the former and light in the latter. Hope for a resplendent word glowing, or being snuffed out, inversely, so far as simple light-dark alternatives are concerned." What a way to put it! As an American boy growing up in France, I too often pondered the way French people seemed to think of "jour" as a dour, creepy sort of time, while the "nuit" was full of radiance and fun. Well, now I know a little bit more about their ways, and it's no more Nabokov for me. We used to weave complicated fantasies about a group of little fairy people who came out at twilight, the border between night and day just as it seems, in retrospect, like the Maginot Line between life and death. In our language, "light" and "life" are next to each other on the tongue at any rate, and it was an irate schoolmaster who broke up our crepuscular reveries, urging us harshly to take uup our cudgels and proceed home where Weetabix awaited us. I thought at first, before taking up Koestenbaum's review in BOOKFORUM, that I would have to be considerably keener on de Banville, Tailhade, Verlaine, Morisot et al (than I am) to get caught up with DIVAGATIONS, but the truth is, you don't have to know as much as you think you might to enjoy this book tremendously. You'll love the part where he theorizes that the slow, mournful syllables of "Lord Tennyson" account for the poet's popularity, and furthermore for "something serene, isolated, and complete; the proud withdrawal of physiognomy."
I like the one where Mallarme claims that, of all the French words for "shade," OMBRE is too opaque and TENEBRES is not very dark. "What a disappointment, in front of the perversity that makes 'jour' and 'nuit,' contradictorily, sound dark in the former and light in the latter. Hope for a resplendent word glowing, or being snuffed out, inversely, so far as simple light-dark alternatives are concerned." What a way to put it! As an American boy growing up in France, I too often pondered the way French people seemed to think of "jour" as a dour, creepy sort of time, while the "nuit" was full of radiance and fun. Well, now I know a little bit more about their ways, and it's no more Nabokov for me. We used to weave complicated fantasies about a group of little fairy people who came out at twilight, the border between night and day just as it seems, in retrospect, like the Maginot Line between life and death. In our language, "light" and "life" are next to each other on the tongue at any rate, and it was an irate schoolmaster who broke up our crepuscular reveries, urging us harshly to take uup our cudgels and proceed home where Weetabix awaited us. I thought at first, before taking up Koestenbaum's review in BOOKFORUM, that I would have to be considerably keener on de Banville, Tailhade, Verlaine, Morisot et al (than I am) to get caught up with DIVAGATIONS, but the truth is, you don't have to know as much as you think you might to enjoy this book tremendously. You'll love the part where he theorizes that the slow, mournful syllables of "Lord Tennyson" account for the poet's popularity, and furthermore for "something serene, isolated, and complete; the proud withdrawal of physiognomy."
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Beautiful prose
8 April 2010
Format:Paperback
Agree with the previous reviewer: this is lithe, beautiful writing, as fresh as if it were written today. Here is a great mind on display, dallying with digressions and knowing that it is they that actually get at the heart of things. The language is so poetic - made me finally believe that prose could be poetry. Mallarme takes one back to origins, to the need for freshness in approach and disinhibition in writing. Every poet needs to read this. A remarkable translation.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Great collection of essays and lecture by this poet
28 Jan 2011
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book reveals a very different side of this fabulous poet. Having only encountered Mallarme through poetry I had no idea he was as funny and down to earth (in a very French way) as he is. He makes intelligent, mostly coherent comments on many subjects. Well worth having.
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