Édouard Manet - Portrait of Stéphane Mallarmé
It was a transposition of things, when he confused himself with the imparisyllabic line. Must be the rhythms between the relations, he thought. The phonetic and the metrical, the modes of denotation. Nevertheless, the versified sensual lamentations impeded his Romantic notions of his predecessors. Rather, to be dead and resurrected with the ultimate treasure held like a weight of impassivity that secrets into the infinity of awe. One, of the sonorous Orphic persuasion of all possible referents, the single fruit of the tree, fixing the relative inaccessible with the syntactical. Ptyx.
Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx,
L’Angoisse ce minuit, soutient, lampadophore,
Maint rêve vespéral brûlé par le Phénix
Que ne recueille pas de cinéraire amphoreSur les crédences, au salon vide : nul ptyx,
Aboli bibelot d’inanité sonore,
(Car le Maître est allé puiser des pleurs au Styx
Avec ce seul objet dont le Néant s’honore.)Mais proche la croisée au nord vacante, un or
Agonise selon peut-être le décor
Des licornes ruant du feu contre une nixe,Elle, défunte nue en le miroir, encor
Que, dans l’oubli fermé par le cadre, se fixe
De scintillations sitôt le septuor.— Stéphane Mallarmé, Poésies (1887)
Her pure nails on high dedicating their onyx,
Anguish, at midnight, supports, a lamp-holder,
Many a twilight dream burnt by the Phoenix
That won’t be gathered in some ashes’ amphora
On a table, in the empty room: here is no ptyx,
Abolished bauble of sonorous uselessness,
(Since the Master’s gone to draw tears from the Styx
With that sole object, vanity of Nothingness).
But near the casement wide to the north,
A gold is dying, in accord with the décor
Perhaps, those unicorns dashing fire at a nixie,
She who, naked and dead in the mirror, yet
In the oblivion enclosed by the frame, is fixed
As soon by scintillations as the septet.
— Translated by A. S. Kline
