Dictionary and Divination: Mallarmé Translating, Back-Translating, and Not Translating

When offered a position as a translator in the Hachette publishing house, Stéphane Mallarmé gave the following reasons for why he considered himself to be unqualified: "Je ne connais de l'anglais que les mots employés dans le volume des poésies de Poe, et je les prononce, certes, bien—pour ne pas manquer au vers. Je puis, le dictionnaire et la divination aidant, faire un bon traducteur, surtout de poètes, ce qui est rare. Mais je ne crois pas que cela constitue une place dans la maison Hachette" (Correspondance 339). Given that Mallarmé was an English-language teacher by profession (albeit a reluctant one), who would go on to write a philological study of English, he was most likely being facetious in claiming that his knowledge of the language was limited to the words used by Edgar Allan Poe. Nevertheless, the comment points to a connection between Mallarmé's sense of his English proficiency, his familiarity with Poe's poems, and his particular practice of translation. More significantly, it discloses both the method of translation that Mallarmé privileged (the combined use of "dictionary and divination") and the nature of the texts that he considered himself to be most able to translate (poetry).

Mallarmé's remark is sometimes cited by critics in conjunction with his translations of Poe's poems, a project that lasted for over twenty years, beginning in 1862 and reaching completion in two separate editions, the Deman edition of 1888 and the Vanier edition of 1889. The remark is typically invoked to account for the particular nature of these translations, which are often characterized as idiosyncratic, dotted with inadvertencies, imprecisions, and mistranslations.¹ Such peculiarities are normally explained by referring to Mallarmé's dictionary-divination method: on the one hand, the poet-translator opts to stay close to the letter of the original, producing word-for-word renditions of the poems into prose, according to the word-centered format of the dictionary; on the other, he gives in to occasional flights of creativity, which produce distance between the translation and the original.

However, circumscribing Mallarmé's remark to these considerations risks limiting its import, because such a stance questions neither Mallarmé's choice to transform the poems into prose, nor the influence that Poe's poetics might have had on the translation process itself. In fact, while much has been written on Mallarmé's avowed debt to Poe's poetics and on the latter's conception of a "poetics of effect"—whereby the poem is considered to be a calculated artifact for the production of a specific effect on the reader—little has been said about how such a poetics might have influenced Mallarmé's understanding of translation.

Framing Mallarmé's practice of translation within a broader consideration of the influence of Poe's poetics of effect has significant implications. Translation, for Mallarmé, becomes something akin to rendering the effect of the original rather than communicating its meaning or retaining its form; while such a practice, which we might call "translation as effect," is not uncommon in the translation of poetry, here, it helps shed light on the distinction that Mallarmé draws between translating poetic texts (for which he considers himself to be suited) and translating non-poetic texts (for which he deems himself to be unsuited), a distinction that mirrors the one that Mallarmé establishes elsewhere between poetic and ordinary language.² As a result, studying Mallarmé's translations of Poe in light of his remark and in conjunction with a reading of his interpretation of Poe's poetics reveals a two-fold relation between, on the one hand, poetic and non-poetic texts and, on the other, poetic and non-poetic language.

Yet, Mallarmé's implementation of this notion of "translation as effect" is idiosyncratic to say the least, complicated by the fact that the poet produced a number of translations for pedagogic purposes that reflect the aforementioned comment about his abilities (and preferences) as a translator, in terms of both the nature of his chosen source texts and the translation methods that...