By Stéphane Mallarmé, trans. Peter Manson.
Of Mademoiselle Mallarmé
Dreamer, that I might plunge
into pure unguided delight,
learn, by a subtfle lie,
how to guard my wing in your hand.
A twilight coolness
comes your way with each beat
whose captive stroke delicately
pushes back the horizon.
Vertigo! see space
shivering like a great kiss
that, mad to have been born for no-one,
can neither break free nor calm down.
Do you feel the untamed paradise
slip like a buried laugh
from the corner of your mouth
to the base of the unanimous fold?
The sceptre of rose-coloured shores
stagnant on golden evenings, this is it,
this white closed flight you pose against
the fire of a bracelet.
Elsewhere: The Poems in Verse (2012), Peter Manson’s translation of the Poésies of Stéphane Mallarmé.
Still farther: Lady Windermere’s Fan, ed. N. Scargill (Pride Press, 2012)
