Under the ancient sands and palms so happy?’ O my fearful kisses, makes you say, sadly, The immutable calm of this white burning, Melting the incense on your hostile features, Warms a languid bath in the gold of your hair, The sun, on the sand, O sleeping wrestler, You who know more of Nothingness than the dead.įor Vice, gnawing this inborn nobleness of mineīut shroud-haunted, pale, destroyed, I flee Sleep you can savour after your dark deceits, Under curtains alien to remorse, I ask of your bed, In whom are the sins of the race, nor to stirīeneath the fatal boredom my kisses pour:Ī heavy sleep without those dreams that creep I don’t come to conquer your flesh tonight, O beast Pale, rosy as a shell from the Spanish Main. Raising the black flesh split beneath its mane, Laughing with her bared teeth at the child:Īnd, between her legs where the victim’s couched, Waiting upside down, she keenly admires herself, That trembles, on her back like an elephant gone wild, Just like a tongue unskilled in pleasure.įacing the timorous nakedness of the gazelle Thrusts the dark shock of her booted legs To her belly she twins two fortunate titsĪnd, so high that no hand knows how to seize her, This glutton’s ready to try a trick or two: Would taste a girl-child saddened by strange fruitsįorbidden ones too under the ragged dress, Princess, name me the shepherd of your smiles. Paints me there, lulling the fold, flute in hand, Name me…you whose laughters strawberry-crammedĪre mingling with a flock of docile lambsĮverywhere grazing vows bleating joy the while, I spend my fires with the slender rank of prelateĪnd won’t even figure naked on Sèvres dishes.Īnd know your shuttered glance at me too well,īlonde whose hairdressers have goldsmiths’ names! Rising over this cup at your lips’ kisses, ‘The Siren clothed in barbs, emerged from the waves’ The impression is therefore given of a gleaming fin-de-siècle void, the gleam indeed strongly related to the world of Impressionist painting, the void partly a consequence of the earlier poetry of Baudelaire and Rimbaud with its analysis of the emptiness and frustrations of modern life, and partly derived from his own experience and thought. Philosophically he is associated with ideas of absence and emptiness, but also of a quasi-Platonic realm of forms inherent in that emptiness, though paradoxically his verse, which often attempts to realise the ideal essence of the perceived external reality, through its images, symbols, and metaphors, appeals strongly to the senses. Part of the charm of his poetry is his ability to create a rich and detailed edifice from the simplest of ideas, objects, or occasions. His use of complex syntax, and subtle turns of phrase, often makes his verse seem more abstruse than its content indicates, revealing as it does a relatively narrow though sophisticated world, predominantly literary and philosophical in nature. These translations of Mallarmé’s major poetry reflect his position as a leading Symbolist poet of the nineteenth century. Sonnet: ‘Pour votre chère morte, son ami…’.
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