The Poems in Verse

Stephane Mallarmé, translated by Peter Manson

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.