The Invention of Solitude

a friend of his, J., a well-known French writer. There was another American among the guests, a scholar who specialized in modern French poetry, and she spoke to A. of a book she was in the process of editing: the selected writings of Mallarme. Had A., she won dered, ever translated any Mallarme?
    The fact was that he had. More than five years earlier, shortly after moving into the apartment on Riverside Drive, he had translated a number of the fragments Mallarme wrote at the bedside of his dying son, Anatole, in 1879. These were short works of the great est obscurity: notes for a poem that never came to be written. They were not even discovered until the late 1950 ’ s. In 1974, A. had done rough translation drafts of thirty or forty of them and then had put the manuscript away. When he returned from Paris to his room on Varick Street (December 1979, exactly one hundred years after Mallarme   had scribbled those death notes to his 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, Mallarme ’ 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 Mallarme and his wife had sat helplessly at Anatole ’ s bedside as doctors tried various remedies and adminis tered unsuccessful treatments. The boy was shuttled from the city to the country and back to the city again. On August 22 Mallarme 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 final ly 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 Mallarme 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, 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

    *

    Setting sun
    a nd wind
    now vanished, and
    wind of nothing
    that breathes
    (here, the modern
    nothingness)

    *
     
    death—whispers softly
    —I am no one—
    I do not even know who I am
    (for the dead do not
    know they are
    dead—, nor even that they
    die
    —for children at least
    —or
     
    heroes—sudden
    deaths
    for otherwise my beauty is
    made of last
    moments —
    lucidity, beauty
    face—of what would be
    me, without myself
    *
     
    Oh! you understand
    that if I consent
    to live—to seem
    to forget you—
    it is to
    feed my pain
    —and so that this apparent
    forgetfulness
    can spring forth more
    horribly in tears, at
    some random
    moment, in
    the middle of this
    life, when you
    appear to me

    *
    true mourning in
    the apartment
    —not cemetery—

    furniture

    *
     
    to find only
    absence —
    —in presence
    of little clothes
    —etc—

    *
     no—I will not
    give up
    nothingness
     
    father—I
    feel nothingness
    invade me

    Brief commentary on the word “ radiance. ”
    He first heard this word used in