"In October 1879 Stephane Mallarme's eight-year-old son Anatole died after several months of illness. Mallarme (1842-1898), the great poet of French Symbolism, heir of Baudelaire and one of the founders of modern poetry, made notes towards a poem that was to become the Tombeau d'Anatole - Anatole's Tomb. The poem was never written, and Mallarme makes no reference to the project in his correspondence. When they were first published in French in 1961, the notes revealed a largely unknown side of Mallarme, which even now disturbs the idea of the poet of pristine impersonality and detachment. In the Tombeau d'Anatole he expresses his 'fury against the formless'; the consolations - and inconsolability - of bereavement."--BOOK JACKET.

An immensely moving poetic work addressing inconsolable sorrow: a father's pain over the death of his child. Bilingual.

A number of sections are devoted to Mallarme's great magazine of wit and opinion, La Derniere Mode, or The Latest Fashion, every page of which he wrote himself under various pseudonyms of both genders.

The essential work of Mallarmé, collected in a bilingual French and English edition.

From the archives of Libby Scheier (Fonds 130).

Poetry. Translated from the French by Peter Manson. THE POEMS IN VERSE is Peter Manson's translation of The Poésies of Stéphane Mallarmé. Long overshadowed by Mallarmé's theoretical writings and by his legendary visual poem "Un coup de Dés jamais n'abolira le Hasard," the Poésies are lyrics of a uniquely prescient and generative modernity. Grounded in a scrupulous sounding of the complex ambiguities of the original poems, Manson's English translations draw on the resources of the most innovative poetries of our own time these may be the first translations really to trust the English language to bear the full weight of Mallarméan complexity. With THE POEMS IN VERSE, Mallarmé's voice is at last brought back, with all its incisive strangeness, into the conversation it started a hundred and fifty years ago, called contemporary poetry."

Among the most ambitious works that Stéphane Mallarmé attempted, these poems--reflections on the death of his eight-year-old son--remain a moving reading experience and reveal a side to the poet largely unknown. This en-face translation, based on a recent text established in the Pléiade Mallarmé, is preceded by a substantial introduction.