Marcella Durand Reviews Sylvia Gorelick's Translation of Stéphane Mallarmé's 'Experimental' Le Livre

Poet and translator Marcella Durand reviews Sylvia Gorelick's translation of Stéphane Mallarmé's The Book (Exact Change, 2019), "an immensely complex lifework that was only first published in its entirety (in French) in 1957." More, from Hyperallergic:

Of Le Livre, Mallarmé wrote in a letter to Paul Verlaine: “[B]ut I am possessed by it and I will succeed perhaps — not in producing this work in its entirety … but to show a fragment of it completed, to make its glorious authenticity flicker from one position, indicating the totality of the rest for which a life is not enough” (from Sylvia Gorelick’s introduction).

Working directly from the more than 200 pages of notes and diagrams that comprise Le Livre, Sylvia Gorelick, a poet herself, translates, transcribes and most importantly, realizes Mallarmé’s intricate piece in English. She writes that she maintained a “radical fidelity” to the originals, which contain crossed-out and diagonal lines, underlining, and other typographical divergences. The result is just as experimental today as when it was written (even if the term “experimental” itself had yet to be applied to poetry in Mallarmé’s time).

Gorelick ensures that her process is visible, avoiding the common mistake of transcribers and translators who subvert the author’s intentions in order to make the work “legible.” Instead, Gorelick writes, “I have endeavored to communicate, in this translation, the profound discontinuity of the text — the relationship it has to its own obsessive revision and refashioning — its internal disjunction.” This includes respecting the visual impact of each page, which helps cohere the highly experimental text.

Read all of this engrossing review right here.