Interpreting the Newest A Roll of the Dice

Jeremy Glazier writes that "[t]he latest iteration of Mallarmé’s masterpiece, from Wave Books, is a stunning presentation of the poem in French with a new English translation by Robert Bononno and Jeff Clark: a rendering that aspires, in Bononno’s words, 'to be as bold and original as Mallarmé’s French.'" More from this great review of the newest Un Coup de dés at Los Angeles Review of Books:

Clark, an accomplished poet and designer, began working on the translation more than a decade ago. “In about 2004,” he told me in an email exchange, “I read somewhere that [Un Coup de dés] had never appeared according to Mallarmé’s wishes.” He set himself the task not only of translating the words but also of rendering the exacting visual characteristics that constitute the poem’s primary innovation. Later, he decided to find a translator who could help revise his draft of the poem “with a fine-toothed comb,” so he enlisted the help of Robert Bononno, whose work Clark was already familiar with. Bononno’s previous translations included a selection of Foucault’s lectures on literature, a biography of Guy Debord, and a brilliant but dense study of Proust by Henri Raczymow — proving him no stranger to challenging texts.[1] Bononno and Clark worked on the translation for more than a year, drafting and redrafting until, in Bononno’s words, they’d “found a voice.” After that, the challenge was to revisit words and phrases “that had been resistant to translation” — and in Mallarmé, those are many.

So what makes Un Coup de dés so challenging and so groundbreaking? If 21st-century readers have trouble seeing the poem’s shape on the page as risky or radical, it’s largely because this work paved the way for so much of the 20th century’s experimentation. Its unprecedented use of white space to configure the reader’s visual experience resulted in what Mallarmé, in his Preface — though he cheekily tells us not to read it, or to forget if we did — called “prismatic subdivisions of the Idea.” Lines of text, read from the upper left, across the book’s seam, to the lower right, “sometimes accelerate and slow the movement, articulating it, even intimating it through a simultaneous vision of the Page.” Those capitalized words — Idea and Page, as well as the grand Work or Book that occupied and eluded Mallarmé his entire life — represent important archetypes for the father of Symbolism. What that “Idea” is — not to mention its inextricable relationship to the “Page” and the unrealizable nature of the “Book” — has occupied and eluded readers for over a century. The notorious obscurity of even Mallarmé’s short lyrics (epitomized by the famously impenetrable “Sonnet in –yx,” where a key term on which comprehension might hinge is the nonce word ptyx) baffled Mallarmé’s publishers and continues to challenge contemporary critics.

Any attempt to reduce the poem to a plot (a captain at the helm of a ship making a last-ditch attempt to survive an unrelenting storm at sea, as some have suggested) is ultimately as futile as the captain’s “roll of the dice,” but that hasn’t deterred readers from trying their hand at interpretation.

And the project is obviously well-suited for Clark, known for his sharp book design:

Bononno and Clark’s handsome, hardcover book — an aesthetic object in itself — not only gets Mallarmé’s “effect” right, it outdoes its predecessors by casting two different versions (or visions) of the poem. The French original that follows the translation appears to follow closely Mallarmé’s intentions — at least to an eye that, though untrained in the finer points of typography, has examined facsimiles of the poet’s corrected proofs. Clark’s French version recreates the typography Mallarmé was looking at in those proofs, though a purist might balk at the book’s smaller trim size or the 21st-century digitization of the typeface Didot.[7] But part of Clark’s idea for the design of this book was to use today’s capabilities not just to reproduce but essentially to remodernize the work. “For the English translation of the poem,” Clark writes, “I tried to channel what might have been Mallarmé's desires regarding type as if he were here now. My feeling is that he'd want it to be modern, maybe even radically so.” (Clark isn’t the only advocate of this idea: Waldie had defended his own subtle alterations by arguing, “It’s important not to fetishize these physical properties of Un Coup de Dés, but more important not to etherealize them.”)

Read more at LARB.