Mallarmé, Stéphane: The Book

Translated & with an Introduction by Sylvia Gorelick (Exact Change, paperback, 2018)

Over the course of Mallarmé’s work and career, he became a prominent figure in the French symbolist movement, and his work influenced creators of diverse mediums. This publication contains the notes and fragments from the last decade of Mallarmé’s life and comprises a painstaking reproduction (including in layout) of his thoughts, considerations, and drafts. This is a look into the inner workings of a poet who worked out of fragment—for the reader, it provides a voyeuristic chance to explore the what-could-be of potential and idea. Thematically, this work is in trend with—but chronologically presupposes—current trends of somatics, divinatory poetics, and the like, and it dances around considerations of the material ideal that hasn’t yet reached its time. As Gorelick notes in her informative introduction, these pages “proceed according to the logic, at once luminous and hidden, of an intricate staging.” Imagine sentence diagramming a manuscript that contains all of its drafts—this book is part hysteria, part philosophy, and genius that unspools itself in continual motion.

—Abi Pollokoff