Essay
Divagations
Stéphane Mallarmé · 1897
Opening lines
Un ciel pâle, sur le monde qui finit de décrépitude, va peut-être partir avec les nuages : les lambeaux de la pourpre usée des couchants déteignent dans une rivière dormant à l’horizon submergé de rayons et d’eau.
A pale sky, over the world that is ending in decrepitude, may perhaps depart with the clouds: the tatters of the worn purple of the sunsets fade into a river sleeping on the horizon, submerged in rays and water.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from fr.wikisource.org
Synopsis
Ten sections of prose. The first gathers prose poems: in one, a man who has set out in a boat on a narrow waterway stops, caught in the reeds, before the property of a woman he does not know, whom he was to greet and whose presence is all he perceives. There follow pages on the theatre and dance, on Wagner, on painters and poets of the day, an essay on the crisis affecting verse, reflections on the book and, to finish, commentaries on the great news items.
Context
The volume appeared in 1897 from Eugène Fasquelle, in the Bibliothèque Charpentier, a year before the death of its author, who described it in his prefatory note as “a book such as I do not like, scattered and lacking architecture”. The texts are taken out of their original setting and mix the prose poem, the chronicle and theoretical reflection, to the point that people have spoken of critical poems. Barbara Johnson gave in 2007 the first English translation that follows the order intended by the author.
Who it is for
A collection of prose pieces with inverted syntax, full of parenthetical clauses: the difficulty lies in the sentence more than in the vocabulary. It is read in sections.
Prizes and reception
The book counts for twentieth-century literary criticism and theory, down to Jacques Derrida; it exists in English from Harvard.
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