Sonnets (Shearsman Books)

A fully bilingual edition of Mallarmé's Sonnets, with introduction and notes. An ideal way to find one's way into Mallarmé's engagement with this particular form, which played a central part in his work in the last 15 years of his life. Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) is among the greatest of the French poets, one whose relatively small ouvre has had a disproportionate impact on subsequent developments in theory, in the philosophy of language, and French poetry in the twentieth century. Essentially an occasional poet, Mallarmé's most original and successful writing was done in the 30 years between the later 1860s, when he underwent a spiritual crisis, and 1898 when he died at the age of 56. His writings can be divided into three main areas: the longer poems of his earlier period (1860s to 1870s, including L'Hérodiade and L'Aprčs-midi d'un faune), his various theoretical reflections on poetry, theatre and music of the 1870s, 80s and 90s (in particular those gathered under the heading Divagations) and his sonnets of the 1880s and 90s which, along with his experimental poem Un coup de Dés of 1897, constitute his most original and successful poetic works. The thirty-nine sonnets presented here, with the originals and translations in parallel text, are in many ways his most typical and representative works in that they reflect a radical point of both continuity and discontinuity within a long tradition of European poetic expression and at the same time embody a uniquely modern synthesis of language's multiple potentialities.