Mallarmé was born in Paris on 18 March 1842.[3] He was a boarder at thePensionnat des Frères des écoles chrétiennes à Passy between 6[4] or 9 October 1852 and March 1855.[5] He worked as an English teacher and spent much of his life in relative poverty but was famed for hissalons, occasional gatherings of intellectuals at his house on the rue de Rome for discussions of poetry, art and philosophy. The group became known asles Mardistes, because they met on Tuesdays (in French,mardi), and through it Mallarmé exerted considerable influence on the work of a generation of writers. For many years, those sessions, where Mallarmé held court as judge,jester and king, were considered the heart of Paris intellectual life. Regular visitors includedW. B. Yeats,Rainer Maria Rilke,Paul Valéry,Stefan George,Paul Verlaine and many others.[6] Along with other members ofLa Revue Blanche such asJules Renard,Julien Benda andIoannis Psycharis, Mallarmé was aDreyfusard.[7]
On 10 August 1863, he married Maria Christina Gerhard. They had two children, Geneviève in 1864 and Anatole in 1871. Anatole died in 1879. Mallarmé died in Valvins (present-dayVulaines-sur-Seine), near Fontainebleau, on September 9, 1898.[8]
Mallarmé's earlier work owes a great deal to the style ofCharles Baudelaire who was recognised as the forerunner of literarySymbolism.[9] Mallarmé's laterfin de siècle style, on the other hand, anticipates many of the fusions betweenpoetry and the otherarts that were to blossom in the next century. Most of this later work explored the relationship between content and form, between the text and the arrangement of words and spaces on the page. This is particularly evident in his last major poem,Un coup de dés jamais n'abolira le hasard ('A roll of the dice will never abolish chance') of 1897.[10]
Some consider Mallarmé one of the Frenchpoets most difficult to translate into English.[11] The difficulty is due in part to the complex, multilayered nature of much of his work, but also to the important role that the sound of the words, rather than their meaning, plays in his poetry. When recited in French, his poems allow alternative meanings which are not evident on reading the work on the page. For example, Mallarmé'sSonnet en '-yx' opens with the phraseses purs ongles ('her pure nails'), whose first syllables when spoken aloud sound very similar to the wordsc'est pur son ('it's pure sound'). Indeed, the 'pure sound' aspect of his poetry has been the subject of musical analysis and has inspired musical compositions. Thesephonetic ambiguities are very difficult to reproduce in a translation which must be faithful to the meaning of the words.[12]
Man Ray's last film, entitledLes Mystères du Château de Dé (The Mystery of the Chateau of Dice) (1929), was greatly influenced by Mallarmé's work, prominently featuring the line "A roll of the dice will never abolish chance".
Mallarmé is referred to extensively in the latter section ofJoris-Karl Huysmans'À rebours, where Des Esseintes describes his fervour-infused enthusiasm for the poet: "These were Mallarmé's masterpieces and also ranked among the masterpieces of prose poetry, for they combined a style so magnificently that in itself it was as soothing as a melancholy incantation, an intoxicating melody, with irresistibly suggestive thoughts, the soul-throbs of a sensitive artist whose quivering nerves vibrate with an intensity that fills you with a painful ecstasy." [p. 198,Robert Baldick translation]
The critic and translatorBarbara Johnson has emphasized Mallarmé's influence on twentieth-century French criticism and theory: "It was largely by learning the lesson of Mallarmé that critics likeRoland Barthes came to speak of 'the death of the author' in the making of literature. Rather than seeing the text as the emanation of an individual author's intentions,structuralists anddeconstructors followed the paths and patterns of the linguisticsignifier, paying new attention to syntax, spacing,intertextuality, sound, semantics, etymology, and even individual letters. The theoretical styles ofJacques Derrida,Julia Kristeva,Maurice Blanchot, and especiallyJacques Lacan also owe a great deal to Mallarmé's 'critical poem.'"[14]
It has been suggested that "much of Mallarmé's work influenced the conception ofhypertext, with his purposeful use of blank space and careful placement of words on the page, allowing multiple non-linear readings of the text. This becomes very apparent in his workUn coup de dés."[15][self-published source]
In 1990, Greenhouse Review Press publishedD. J. Waldie's American translation ofUn coup de dés in a letterpress edition of 60 copies, its typography and format based on examination of the final (or near final) corrected proofs of the poem in the collection of Harvard's Houghton Library.
Prior to 2004,Un coup de dés was never published in the typography and format conceived by Mallarmé. In 2004, 90 copies on vellum of a new edition were published by Michel Pierson et Ptyx. This edition reconstructs the typography originally designed by Mallarmé for the projected Vollard edition in 1897 and which was abandoned after the sudden death of the author in 1898. All the pages are printed in the format (38 cm by 28 cm) and in the typography chosen by the author. The reconstruction has been made from the proofs which are kept in theBibliothèque Nationale de France, taking into account the written corrections and wishes of Mallarmé and correcting certain errors on the part of the printers Firmin-Didot.
A copy of this edition is in the Bibliothèque François-Mitterrand. Copies have been acquired by the Bibliothèque littéraire Jacques-Doucet andUniversity of California, Irvine, as well as by private collectors. A copy has been placed in the Museum Stéphane Mallarmé at Vulaines-sur-Seine, Valvins, where Mallarmé lived and died and where he made his final corrections on the proofs prior to the projected printing of the poem.[16][17]
In 2012, the French philosopherQuentin Meillassoux publishedThe Number and the Siren, a rigorous attempt at 'deciphering' the poem on the basis of a unique interpretation of the phrase 'the unique Number, which cannot be another.'[18]
In 2015, Wave Books publishedA Roll of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance, a dual-language edition of the poem, translated by Robert Bononno andJeff Clark (designer). Another dual-language edition, translated by Henry Weinfield, was published by University of California Press in 1994.
The poet and visual artistMarcel Broodthaers created a purely graphical version ofUn coup de dés, using Mallarmé's typographical layout but with the words replaced by black bars. In 2018, Apple Pie Editions publishedun coup de des jamais n'abolira le hasard: translations by Eric Zboya, an English edition that transforms the poem not only through erasure, but through graphic imaging software.
^Stéphane Mallarmé, trans. E.H. and A.M. BlackmoreCollected Poems and Other Verse. Oxford: Oxford World's Classics, 2006, p. xxix.ISBN978-0-19-953792-1
^Roger Pearson,Unfolding Mallarme. The development of a poetic art. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996.ISBN0-19-815917-X
Hendrik Lücke: Mallarmé - Debussy. Eine vergleichende Studie zur Kunstanschauung am Beispiel von „L'Après-midi d'un Faune“. (= Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, Bd. 4). Dr. Kovac, Hamburg 2005,ISBN3-8300-1685-9.
Johnson, Barbara. "Erasing Panama: Mallarmé and the Text of History", "Les Fleurs du Mal Larmé: Some Reflections of Intertextuality", and "Mallarmé as Mother". InA World of Difference. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987. 57–67, 116–33, 137–43.
Lloyd, Rosemary.Mallarmé: The Poet and his Circle. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1999.
Millan, Gordon.A Throw of the Dice: The Life of Stephane Mallarme. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994.
Rancière, Jacques.Mallarmé: The Politics of the Siren. Trans. Steve Corcoran. London and New York: Continuum, 2011.
Richard, Jean-Pierre.L’univers imaginaire de Mallarmé. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1961.
Robb, Graham.Unlocking Mallarmé. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996.
Sartre, Jean-Paul.Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness. Trans. Ernest Sturm. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1988.
Sethna, K. D. (1987). The obscure and the mysterious: A research in Mallarmé's symbolic poetry. Pondicherry: Sri Aurobindo International Centre of Education.
Scherer, Jacques.Le "Livre" de Mallarmé: Premieres recherches sur des documents inedits. Paris: Gallimard, 1957.
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