javorstein's review against another edition
3.0
Beautiful poetry and Throw of the Dice was crazy cool. Translation was extremely impressive, still matching metrically and rhyming without really changing the meaning. Otherwise, couldn't tell what the hell he was talking about. Average French modernist poet I suppose.
casparb's review
Okay I finally worked through this here's Mallarmé & it turns out this is a COLLECTED which I somehow didn't notice beforehand but it's fine I've read it all now. French french French He's a bit of a genius it's pedestrian to say ugh translation bad BUT I think here I allow the less goodness because it manages to underscore what SM is doing here w/r/t what Foucault describes as his discovery of 'the word in its impotent power', its 'fragile density'. He shines.
taitmckenzie's review against another edition
5.0
While more often poetic then a prose writer, the Symbolist Mallarmé, along with Baudelaire in "Paris Spleen" and Rimbaud in "Seasons of Hell," attempted to destroy the boundary between poetry and prose, creating narratives outside of traditional syntactic forms that could be read for both the story and images at once. These works also capture the picture of the distraught French writer so eloquently distilled later in Sartre's "Nausea." On the other hand, Mallarmé's most famous poem, "A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance," is a sprawling meta-poem about writing where words strewn everywhere on the page can be read in whatever order the reader chooses
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