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ReconsiderationsMarch 2008 Mallarmé's wanderings by John Simon On Barbara Johnson's translation of Divagations by Stéphane Mallarmé. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842–1898) was a very great, difficult poet, perhaps the most obsessively pure of all. For him, everything in the world existed to end as a book (a statement attributed to, then adopted by, him), and that book, one way or another, would be a book of poetry. But Mallarmé the prose writer is a different story. In that capacity, he was more problematic, writing a gnarled, convoluted, studiedly obscure prose, not infrequently to the point of impenetrability. This is why his main collection of prose, Divagations (1897), remained not fully translated into English for 110 years. Now we have the first complete translation by Barbara Johnson, an unholy mess.[1] A very large portion of Mallarmé’s prose is unlike any other. Difficult as his verse is, it is, with considerable loss to be sure, translatable ... This article is available to subscribers and for individual purchaseSubscribe to TNC (Print and Online editions) Subscribe to TNC (Online only) This article originally appeared in The New Criterion, Volume 26 March 2008, on page 30 Copyright © 2009 The New Criterion | www.newcriterion.com http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/mallarms-wanderings-3783
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