The Recent And The French
A Tomb for Anatole
By Stephane Mallarme
Translated by Paul Auster
New Directions
228 pages, $16.95
There's little question why these fragments, jotted down by Stephane Mallarmé (1842-95) by the bedside of his dying son Anatole, have haunted Paul Auster for three decades, ever since he was first introduced to them as a struggling poet himself in the early 1970s. They speak to every father, to every son, to every sensitized soul.
A Tomb for Anatole, the work totalized by these disparate wisps of texts, was never completed; it remains almost as much of a mystery as it was when found buried in a red box, hidden for a century until published by the poet's estate in 1961. Amazingly, after 100 years and a lamentable publishing history, this window into Mallarme's process remains powerfully relevant, eerie testimony to the driving pulse that forces writers to write, and readers to read, even when facing unimaginable pain and ultimate tragedy.
Faced with such legacy, Auster had a nearly impossible task: Translating the work of a French Symbolist-who composed in post-Romantic ether, and compared his pages to a musical score-into an English "traduction" no less abstracted. Of course, no translation into any language could ever do Mallarmé justice. Here, Auster does justice to himself.
But there's something deeper driving A Tomb for Anatole: Auster clearly saw this bigger picture in a faded photograph of Mallarmé's son, featured on the cover of this edition. (In a 1997 LINEbreak interview with the poet Charles Bernstein, Auster explains how the picture of Anatole has a haunting similarity with a picture of his own son at the same age). Auster's risk of sacrificing reproduction to artful translation works, and works well; even a stereotypical patriot whose only experience with French translation was ordering "Freedom Fries" could comprehend what Auster has done with this text: He has made it his own.
One of the more powerful realities of these fragments is that tens of thousands of grad students later, A Tomb for Anatole remains somewhat of an unclassifiable genre: poem, prose-poem, novel-in-verse, panegyric, threnody, whatever. In true Modernist practice (which was then a whole generation before coming into its own), Mallarmé was grappling with a work whose very form was contradictory, self-negating, a quality speaking directly to his confusion and inability to understand-and subsequently aesthetic-ize-the tragic death of his young son. Mallarmé grasps at anything at hand, often mad, often desperate, combining the elements of elegy, a form which would bring him to a point of "closure," mixed with the genre of the long-poem, a form that constellates openness, epic continuation, an antipodal lack-of-closure.
Mallarmé seems to be aware of the inevitable failure of this mixology. By never finishing the work, he acknowledges the epic proportions of the task, the comic futility involved, and perhaps realizes his own limitations as a poet when subject and object become one, a blood-relative:
Heart/Beat for things/Too vast
-and which came here/to fail
Yet, though Mallarmé never completed this work, he did remarkably succeed in his poem in asserting his utility-or meaning-in the world: To think and to write, even-no, especially-in times of incomprehensible loss: Art-therapy, sure, but also a reversion to an essential self. Indeed, the text's most eerie moments come at these certain turns when Mallarmé juxtaposes the death of his son with the birth of a poetic idea: An extraordinary-though natural-contradiction, inextricably bound with the balance of elegy and epic.
The grave father/it is/up to me
having given being/not to let him
be lost/-trouble/and mother?I do not want
him to stop/(idea there!)
The indulgence to follow Mallarmé through debilitating-though inspiring-depression into moments of euphoria and revelation, in which he comes to realize his need to write, is reason enough to wrestle angelic with this text. Laudably, the New Directions version uses a page space that almost forces the English-language reader to engage with the French text presented opposite, both "versions" sunk deep in white, allowing both work and reader to breathe.
Perhaps most importantly, A Tomb for Anatole is a strong argument for the necessity of poetics in trying times. Through Mallarmé's text, the reader witnesses the power of creation in the face or wake of destruction. Eventually, one comes to the realization that even in the worst moments, there is a poetic necessity, or a necessity to frame life in poetry, to dig down and build a fire in language, in order to sustain oneself when everything else is lost, or too dark and painful to approach.