Stephane Mallarme (1842 – 1898)
Born Étienne Mallarmé, was a poet and critic.
Are you a living princess or her shadow?
Let me kiss your fingers and their rings, and bid you
Walk no longer in an unknown age...
A kiss would kill me, woman,
If beauty were not death...
By what attraction
Am I drawn, what morn forgotten by the prophets
That pours on the dying distance its sad rites?
Ce n'est pas avec des idées qu'on fait des vers, c'est avec des mots.
Le monde est fait pour aboutir ? un beau livre.
Away with those perfumes that do me harm!
I hate them, nurse, and would you have me feel
Their drunken vapors make my senses reel?
How, save through obscure
Terrors, imagine more implacable still
And as a suppliant the god who some day will
Receive the gift of your grace! and for whom,
Devoured by anguish, do you keep the unknown
Splendor and mystery of your being?
Then shall I awake to the primitive fervour,
Straight and alone, 'neath antique floods of light,
Lilies and one of you all through my ingenuousness.
I, proud of my rumour, for long I will talk
Of goddesses; and by picturings idolatrous,
From their shades unloose yet more of their girdles:
So when of grapes the clearness I've sucked,
To banish regret by my ruse disavowed,
Laughing, I lift the empty bunch to the sky,
Blowing into its luminous skins and athirst
To be drunk, till the evening I keep looking through.
Oh nymphs, we diverse MEMORIES refill.