9 /10 1 Votes
Country France Publication date 1961 Pages 315 Publisher Éditions du Seuil | 4.5/5 Goodreads Language French Published in English 1983 Originally published 1961 Page count 315 Editor Jean-Pierre Richard | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Original title Pour un tombeau d'Anatole Translators Paul Auster, Patrick McGuinness Similar Stéphane Mallarmé books, Other books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
For Anatole's Tomb (French: Pour un tombeau d'Anatole) is an unfinished poem by the French writer Stéphane Mallarmé. It is also known as A Tomb for Anatole. It was written after the death of Mallarmé's son Anatole. The finished fragments were published in 1961.
Contents
Writing process
In 1879, the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé's eight-year-old son Anatole died. Mallarmé had previously written a "tomb" ("tombeau") poem after the death of Edgar Allan Poe, and would later write tombeaux for Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine. The aim of the tombeaux genre was not only to mourn, but also in a certain way to eternalize the dead person by means of the poem. He started to work on a "tomb" poem about the dead son, but it was never finished before Mallarmé himself died in 1898. Left were 202 sheets of fragmentary notes.
Publication
The finished material was published as Pour un tombeau d'Anatole in 1961 through Éditions du Seuil, with an introduction by Jean-Pierre Richard. An English translation by the American author Paul Auster was published in 1983, with the title A Tomb for Anatole. A new translation by Patrick McGuinness, with the title For Anatole's Tomb, was published in 2003, and was selected as the year's Translation Choice by the Poetry Book Society.
Reception
Will Stone reviewed the book in The Guardian in 2003, and called it "an honest, unaffected work", which "can be read with equal satisfaction by both an admirer of Mallarmé and someone who has read little or nothing of the poet before". Stone continued: "This collection has a curious intimacy and poignancy. It is hard to believe that these poem shards were written well over 100 years ago, since they seem so contemporary and accessible, despite any initial obscurity. The translation is careful but confident, finding the right balance between faithfulness to the French and sustaining a creative thrust in English."