The madness of translating Mallarmé

Abstract

ABSTRACTMallarmé’s “Sonnet en –yx” offers a unique challenge to the translator. Developed through various versions between 1868 and 1887, it is built round an ultra-rich and ultra-rare rhyme-scheme, which remains largely unchanged over twenty years of gestation. The sonnet includes from the start one invented word, “ptyx”, to complete the octave’s quadruple rhyme scheme. Is it madness to try to reproduce this highly determined pattern in a different language? This paper responds to the question by exploring in the final version of the poem aspects of language that, counter to expectation, enable the creation of formal and semantic equivalence. The translator’s strategy is thus to translate the same into the same as well as into the different, to mitigate nonsense through a certain correspondence. In this it follows Mallarmé’s own strategy in transforming the first version of the sonnet into the second as a kind of the translatory process.