Mallarmé and Circumstance: The Translation of Silence

The first comprehensive study of Mallarmé's "poetry of circumstance" in any language, this book is a companion volume to the author's well-received Unfolding Mallarmé: The Development of a Poetic Art . It provides a series of lucid and accessible readings of Mallarmé's verse and prose writings. This book is the second in the two-volume study of the work of Stéphanie Mallarmé (1842-1898). For Mallarmé, in a world without God, the role of the poet is to break the silence with language and to confer upon the contingency of circumstance a therapeutic semblance of formal and semantic pattern. Literature provides a ‘translation of silence’, ‘intimate galas’ in which the mysterious drama of the human condition is performed for and by the reader on the stage of the verse poem, the prose poem, and what Mallarmé calls the ‘poëme critique’. In Part 1, the book examines the prose poems within the context of Mallarmé's writing about the theatre. In Part II, the book focuses on the ‘circumstanzas’ —, the famous ‘Tombeaux’, ‘Hommages’, ‘Eventails’, and ‘vers de circonstance’ —, in which Mallarmé invests the quotidian with the ‘glorious lie’ of poetry. In a series of close readings the book demonstrates how complex poetic structures, and especially the sonnet, may serve to guide the human search for meaning and shape our anguish in a ‘ceremony of the Book’

the First Comprehensive Study Of Mallarmé's Poetry Of Circumstance In Any Language, This Book Is A Companion Volume To The Author's Well-received unfolding Mallarmé: The Development Of A Poetic Art. It Provides A Series Of Lucid And Accessible Readings Of Mallarmé's Verse And Prose Writings.

This is a comprehensive study of Mallarmé's 'poetry of circumstance', a series of lucid and accessible readings of Mallarmé's verse and prose writings