Collected Prose

approximation, and there are no fixed rules to follow in deciding what works or does not. It is largely a matter of instinct, of ear, of common sense. Whenever I was faced with a choice between literalness and poetry, I did not hesitate to choose poetry. It seemed more important to me to give those readers who have no French a true sense of each poem as a poem than to strive for word-by-word exactness. The experience of a poem resides not only in each of its words, but in the interactions among those words — the music, the silences, the shapes — and if a reader is not somehow given the chance to enter the totality of that experience, he will remain cut off from the spirit of the original. It is for this reason, it seems to me, that poems should be translated by poets.

    1981
    * Among them are the following: Pierre Albert-Birot, Jean Cocteau, Raymond Roussel, Jean Arp, Francis Picabia, Arthur Cravan, Michel Leiris, Georges Bataille, Léopold Senghor, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, Jacques Audiberti, Jean Tardieu, Georges Schéhadé, Pierre Emmanuel, Joyce Mansour, Patrice de la Tour du Pin, René Guy Cadou, Henri Pichette, Christian Dotremont, Olivier Larronde, Henri Thomas, Jean Grosjean, Jean Tortel, Jean Laude, Pierre Torreilles, Jean-Claude Renard, Jean Joubert, Jacques Réda, Armen Lubin, Jean Pérol, Jude Stéfan, Marc Alyn, Jacqueline Risset, Michel Butor, Jean Pierre Faye, Alain Jouffroy, George Perros, Armand Robin, Boris Vian, Jean Mambrino, Lorand Gaspar, Georges Badin, Pierre Oster, Bernard Nöel, Claude Vigée, Joseph Gugliemi, Daniel Blanchard, Michel Couturier, Claude Esteban, Alain Sueid, Mathieu Bénézet.

Mallarmé’s Son

    Mallarmé’s second child, Anatole, was born on July 16, 1871, when the poet was twenty-nine. The boy’s arrival came at a moment of great financial stress and upheaval for the family. Mallarmé was in the process of negotiating a move from Avignon to Paris, and arrangements were not finally settled until late November, when the family installed itself at 29 rue de Moscou and Mallarmé began teaching at the Lycée Fontanes.
    Mme Mallarmé’s pregnancy had been extremely difficult, and in the first months of his life Anatole’s health was so fragile that it seemed unlikely he would survive. “I took him out for a walk on Thursday,” Mme Mallarmé wrote to her husband on October 7. “It seemed to me that his fine little face was getting back some of its color … I left him very sad and discouraged, and even afraid that I would not see him anymore, but it’s up to God now, since the doctor can’t do anything more, but how sad to have so little hope of seeing this dear little person recover.”
    Anatole’s health, however, did improve. Two years later, in 1873, he reappears in the family correspondence in a series of letters from Germany, where Mallarmé’s wife had taken the children to meet her father. “The little one is like a blossoming flower,” she wrote to Mallarmé. “Tole loves his grandfather, he does not want to leave him, and when he is gone, he looks for him all over the house.” In that same letter, nine-year-old Geneviève added: “Anatole asks for papa all the time.” Two years later, on a second trip to Germany, there is further evidence of Anatole’s robust health, for after receiving a letter from his wife, Mallarmé wrote proudly to his friend Cladel: “Anatole showers stones and punches on the little Germans who come back to attack him in a group.” The following year, 1876, Mallarmé was absent from Paris for a few days and received this anecdote from his wife: “Totol is a bad little boy. He did not notice you were gone the night you left; it was only when I put him to bed that he looked everywhere for you to say good-night. Yesterday he did not ask for you, but this morning the poor little fellow looked all over the house for you; he even pulled back the covers on your bed, thinking he would find you there.” In August of that same year, during another of Mallarmé’s brief absences from the family, Geneviève wrote to her father to thank him for sending her presents and then remarked: “Tole wants you to bring him back a whale.”
    Beyond these few references to Anatole in the Mallarmé family letters, there are several mentions of him in C. L. Lefèvre-Roujon’s introduction to the Correspondance inédite de Stephane Mallarmé et Henry Roujon — in particular, three little incidents that give some idea of the boy’s lively