Collected Prose

son), he dug out the folder that contained the handwritten drafts and began to work up final versions of his translations. These were later published in the Paris Review , along with a photograph of Anatole in a sailor suit. From his prefatory note: “On October 6, 1879, Mallarmé’s only son, Anatole, died at the age of eight after a long illness. The disease, diagnosed as child’s rheumatism, had slowly spread from limb to limb and eventually overtaken the boy’s entire body. For several months Mallarmé and his wife had sat helplessly at Anatole’s bedside as doctors tried various remedies and administered unsuccessful treatments. The boy was shuttled from the city to the country and back to the city again. On August 22 Mallarmé wrote to his friend Henry Ronjon ‘of the struggle between life and death our poor little darling is going through … But the real pain is that this little being might vanish. I confess that it is too much for me; I cannot bring myself to face this idea.’”
    It was precisely this idea, A. realized, that moved him to return to these texts. The act of translating them was not a literary exercise. It was a way for him to relive his own moment of panic in the doctor’s office that summer: it is too much for me, I cannot face it. For it was only at that moment, he later came to realize, that he had finally grasped the full scope of his own fatherhood: the boy’s life meant more to him than his own; if dying were necessary to save his son, he would be willing to die. And it was therefore only in that moment of fear that he had become, once and for all, the father of his son. Translating those forty or so fragments by Mallarmé was perhaps an insignificant thing, but in his own mind it had become the equivalent of offering a prayer of thanks for the life of his son. A prayer to what? To nothing perhaps. To his sense of life. To the modern nothingness .

you can, with your little
hands, drag me
into the grave—you
have the right—
—I
who follow you, I
let myself go—
—but if you
wish, the two
of us, let us make …

an alliance
a hymen, superb
—and the life
remaining in me
I will use for——

    *

no—nothing
to do with the great
deaths—etc.
—as long as we
go on living, he
lives—in us

it will only be after our
death that he will be dead
—and the bells
of the Dead will toll for
                           him

    *

sail—
navigates
river,
your life that
goes by, that flows

    *

    Brief commentary on the word “radiance.”
    He first heard this word used in connection with his son when he had shown a photograph of the boy to his good friend, R., an American poet who had lived for eight years in Amsterdam. They were drinking in a bar that night, surrounded by a press of bodies and loud music. A. pulled the snapshot out of his wallet and handed it to R., who studied the picture for a long time. Then he turned to A., a little drunk, and said with great emotion in his voice: “He has the same radiance as Titus.”
    About one year later, shortly after the publication of “A Tomb for Anatole” in the Paris Review , A. happened to be visiting R. R. (who had grown extremely fond of A.’s son) explained to A.: “An extraordinary thing happened to me today. I was in a bookstore, leafing through various magazines, and I happened to open the Paris Review to a photograph of Mallarmé’s son. For a second I thought it was your son. The resemblance was that striking.”
    A. replied: “But those were my translations. I was the one who made them put in that picture. Didn’t you know that?”
    And then R. said: “I never got that far. I was so struck by the picture that I had to close the magazine. I put it back on the shelf and then walked out of the store.”
    *

    His grandfather lasted another two or three weeks. A. returned to the apartment overlooking Columbus Circle, his son now out of danger, his marriage now at a permanent standstill. These were probably the worst days of all for him. He could not work, he could not think. He began to neglect himself, ate only noxious foods (frozen dinners, pizza, take-out Chinese noodles), and left the apartment to its own devices: dirty clothes strewn in a bedroom corner, unwashed dishes piled in the kitchen sink. Lying on the couch, smoking cigarette after cigarette, he would watch old movies on television and read second-rate mystery novels. He did not try to reach any of his friends. The one person he did