Fathers and Sons: Paul Auster Reads Stéphane Mallarmé

Death is a constant motif in the poetry of Stéphane Mallarmé. In his earliest verse he commemorates the passing of his mother, of his sister Marie, and of his childhood friend Harriet Smyth. Projected images of death and at least speculative resurrection will follow throughout the decades. The poetic works that pick up on this motif are among the principal part of the œuvre. One loss in the poet's life fell outside of this creative sublimation nearly entirely, and that was the death of his young son, Anatole who succumbed to what seems to have been rheumatic fever in 1879 at eleven years of age. One can only imagine the devastation that the event brought to Stéphane and Maria Mallarmé. For Mallarmé the poet, the loss was all the more incomprehensible in that—for someone such as he whose understanding of the world was mediated through poetic language—he was unable to confront his grief through language. He certainly tried, as the long, unfinished and fragmented attempt bears witness. Known as "For a Tomb for Anatole," it is the poetic equivalent of a shipwreck. American poet, novelist and film maker, Paul Auster, translated the Anatole fragments into English in 1983. The rendered text and the extended introduction are illuminating; Auster understands the fragments as a finished work and brings a reading that is as fresh as it is suggestive. Auster is intimately familiar with Mallarmé's poetry; he is also sensitive to the motif of fathers and sons which runs through his own work—in novels and in films.