Peter Manson’s Mallarmé translations have just been published.
“The Poems in Verse is Peter Manson’s translation of the Poésies of Stéphane Mallarmé. Long overshadowed by Mallarmé’s theoretical writings and by his legendary visual poem “Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard,” the Poésies are lyrics of a uniquely prescient and generative modernity. Grounded in a scrupulous sounding of the complex ambiguities of the original poems, Manson’s English translations draw on the resources of the most innovative poetries of our own time — these may be the first translations really to trust the English language to bear the full weight of Mallarméan complexity. With The Poems in Verse, Mallarmé’s voice is at last brought back, with all its incisive strangeness, into the conversation it started a hundred and fifty years ago, called contemporary poetry.”
“Peter Manson’s versions of Mallarmé are inspired: inventive but true, they capture the originals’ intoxicating mix of mystery and compression, recreating in English not just Mallarmé’s famous suggestiveness, but the concentration and precision of his language which have all too often been
lost in translation.”
- Patrick McGuinness
“In his current Mallarmé project, Peter Manson restores a sense of poetic power & dis-ease often missing in other works of translation – a reminder too of Mallarmé’s central place among the poètes maudits of the later nineteenth century. The Mallarmé presented here is both true to its original & a major work for our own time as well.”
- Jerome Rothenberg
“Manson’s technique is to embroider pieces of real modern English onto a base text that broadly follows the shape, sounds and syntax of the original French verse. The poems that result retain the vagaries of their models while creating a persuasive illusion of living speech, almost as if the language were being distorted for the purposes of original expression, and not translation.”
- Jeremy Noel-Tod
Elsewhere: Freebase Accordion.
Also just published: Certain Prose of ‘The English Intelligencer’ ed. by Neil Pattison, Reitha Pattison, Luke Roberts.
