October 6, 2023

Summer Sadness by Stéphane Mallarmé (France, 1887)

Summer Sadness

Stéphane Mallarmé

translation Ad Blankestijn



The sun on the sand, my dozing wrestler,
Heats a languid bath in the gold of your hair,
And, dissipating the perfume from your hostile cheek,
Mixes with your tears an amorous drink.

In that white-hot blaze the motionless silence
Made you say sadly, oh, my timid kisses,
"We shall never be a single mummy.
Under the ancient desert and the happy palm trees!"

But your hair is a lukewarm river
In which drowns without shuddering the soul that haunts us,
And finds the emptiness that you don't know.

I will taste the maquillage that your eyelids have wept,
To see if it knows how to give to the heart that you have broken
The numbness of azure and stone.


Le soleil, sur le sable, ô lutteuse endormie,
En l’or de tes cheveux chauffe un bain langoureux
Et, consumant l’encens sur ta joue ennemie,
Il mêle avec les pleurs un breuvage amoureux.

De ce blanc Flamboiement l’immuable accalmie
T’a fait dire, attristée, ô mes baisers peureux,
« Nous ne serons jamais une seule momie
Sous l’antique désert et les palmiers heureux ! »

Mais ta chevelure est une rivière tiède,
Où noyer sans frissons l’âme qui nous obsède
Et trouver ce Néant que tu ne connais pas.

Je goûterai le fard pleuré par tes paupières,
Pour voir s’il sait donner au cœur que tu frappas
L’insensibilité de l’azur et des pierres.



[Antoon Derkinderen, Portrait of Stephane Mallarme, 1891]

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-98) sits at a crossroads of styles at the end of the 19th century in France. His early work closely follows the style as established by Charles Baudelaire. He is also known as a direct precursor of the Symbolist movement, which emerged in France in the 1880s. From the 1860s, he developed a hermetic style marked by intellectualism and by the abstraction of German idealism. According to Mallarmé, poetry must suggest and act on the reader unconsciously. The poet can transform reality by consistently employing the human intellect and by using all the musical and magical powers of language. In his literary-aesthetic essays, Mallarmé distinguishes everyday, communicative language (la parole immédiate) from poetic language (la parole essentielle). The latter acts on the reader with sounds, agrammatical associations and (magical) symbols so that inner reality would be best approached. In this way, his fin-de-siècle style already anticipates 20th-century art forms such as Dadaism and Surrealism.