Stéphane Mallarmé

Un coup de dés

Preface: mistranslated by Chris Edwards

I wish I knew what lunatic pasted this Note here—park it elsewhere, I say—these maimed, oblivious and hellish apprehensions remind me of Hannibal Lecter. What pedant of choice situations could possibly penetrate—may I?—or be troubled about, or linger over, at risk of applying, the first words of a Poem proclaiming a queer savant, a disposable commie, a lament for those who follow after, a novel the size of a lecture, and so on, begetting a blank “spaced-out” effect assumed to be important? Whereas in fact it’s a kind of frappéd boredom, a versification of exigency followed by silence, aleatory commas, some ordinary pointed morsels, maybe the lyrical patter of millenial feet. Such tiered environs being futile (don’t transgress Monsieur, lest the settlement disperse), the paper invents a shadowy fold, false image of itself, at its centre, then rents, rends or renders itself, accepting or not the succession of authors passing comment on its agitated pathways; antsy as usual, their main trait is a regular snoring—verse plotters, prissy yet priapic subdivisions, Ideations, instant paratroopers haunting the lurid concourse at an exactly calculated mental setting, though the place seems variable, they press their loins (or longings perhaps, or filaments of feeling) to the latent conductor unreasoning verisimilitude imposes on the text. The advantage, if I may dwell on it here, literarily speaking, consists in the distance the copy creates as it mentally separates out into groups, of words within words just moseying along, its foot on the accelerator, torn between unrelenting movement and the scandal now imminent in Madame’s simultaneous vision of the Page: a cell-like prism of unity cobbling pale versions to a lingering perfection. The fiction effloresces and disperses, vite, in the wake of its mobile writer, yet this tour of arresting fragments, capital phrases and introductions continues. All that passes is, so far as the racecourse is concerned, hypothesis; oh, one needs a receipt. And yet repeatedly, one jets about, employed as a pensive nude with vacuum—tracing, prolonging, fluking and no doubt redesigning the result, poured forth in a lyrical voice at last from here behind the partition. The difference separating character from imprint is the preponderant motif (also secondary and adjacent), its importance being dictated by the oracular emissions of the porter—moaning haughty bastard—who notes down the intonations of everyone mounting and descending. Certain very hardy defective impediments etc. form a counterpoint to this prosody—damned oeuvre—that of the presidential monkey in its elemental state: never underestimate the opportunism of timid assistants; it’s no apparition, this hoary, specially paginated volume à moi, in which the periodical dancing-about of the valiant mime who so graciously wrote it—kill the monster!—takes liberty by the bell, then agitates amongst the troops, its partialities contrary to usage. Sure, any toot or foiled indication that the Poem was born of a joint, mulled exquisitely—a “state” alright—and the romp passes the point right by, evacuates tradition, puts its presentation in the hands of an oh-so-avuncular effusive person: suffice it to say, poor you. For today, without presumption, I say to you: run—past the queue along the avenue, past the assorted dissertations on the ruined preciosities of art, past the results of this reconnaissance (same old tentative and impassive particularisations, vacuous and impromptu) in pursuit of the cherished, temporary Note, extemporising vers libre and the prose poem. Their reunion is accomplished under the influence, I would suggest, of the stranger: seldom has Music so indented a concert that it does not find itself pluralised—maybe, maybe not—in some shabby Department of Letters. But the genre in question diverges—commie symphony, sympathy concert—and little by little costs the disenchanted personnel, loosed intact upon the antique verse, their squelched guardianship of culture, which they attribute to the empire of passion and dreams; tenderly sequestered in his cause, the traitor, the preference (also an ill-fitting suit) tells us as much (his subjects), our imaginations pureéd by the complexities of his cunning: can’t arrest him, or exclude him from the Pose—unique source.