Que l' on n' est plus qu' un seul.
Soudain, dans le même linceul,
On se voit deux ensemble.
Près des flots aux chantants adieux
Dinard tient sa boutique...
Ne pleure pas : d' être identique,
C' est un rêve des dieux.
Fused by a dark streak,
one is no longer unique.
In the shroud, out of the blue
one becomes two.
By the waves of farewells fading
Dinard keeps trading…
Don’t cry: to be the same
Is the gods' dream.
I have no idea what Toulet is getting at in this poem. Some clue might be provided by the suggestion (by Steinmetz) that Toulet was thinking of Bis repetita placent deis.
I can find no source for this Latin tag; there is a line in Horace, Ars Poetica line 365, which states: haec placuit semel, haec deciens repetita placebit. (This pleases just once, that gives pleasure even if ten times repeated.)
Tristan Derème compared these lines with those in Mallarmé's sonnet Tristesse d’été: Nous ne serons jamais une seule momie/ Sous l’antique désert et les palmiers heureux.
The entire sonnet reads:
Le soleil, sur la table, ô lutteuse endormie,
En l’or de tes cheveux chauffe un bain langoureux
Et, consumant l’encens sur ta joue ennemie,
Il mêle avec les pleurs un breuvage amoureux.
De ce blanc Flamboiement l’immuable accalmie
T’a fait dire, attristée, ô mes baisers peureux,
« Nous ne serons jamais une seule momie
Sous l’antique désert et les palmiers heureux ! »
Mais ta chevelure est une rivière tiède,
Où noyer sans frissons l’âme qui nous obsède
Et trouver ce Néant que tu ne connais pas.
Je goûterai le fard pleuré par tes paupières,
Pour voir s’il sait donner au cœur que tu frappas
L’insensibilité de l’azur et des pierres.
We are a country of extreme heat. The shy Mallarmé has disappointed his wife by his timidity. She concludes that they will never be One. Sous refers both to Mallarmé, and for concision to the ancient desert. Antique - this adjective is synonymous for Mallarmé with the ancestral therefore the eternal. The word heureux is placed dismissively at the end of the line - it actually relates to us. Mallarmé unites the idea of happiness with the idea of being a mummy. The inability of man to achieve happiness - "We will never be a single mummy in the desert and under the palms, we will never be happy."
Mallarmé wrote this sonnet at Tournon in 1864, when he was 22. He had no taste for the life of a school teacher that exhausted him physically and mentally, and prevented him from devoting himself entirely to poetry. Financial worries were piled on the drudgery of his job, and he was separated from his friends. He lived in an apartment that was too small with his wife and newborn daughter Genevieve. Mallarmé spent most of his nights trying to write, but he was depressed and on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
As for Dinard, a seaside resort 4 kilometres east of St-Malo on the left bank of the Rance estuary, On November 2nd, 1909, Toulet wrote to Debussy : « Dinard est agréable, mais un peu éventé :les gens aussi…. Mais j’ai été au Mont-Saint-Michel. C’est beaucoup mieux que le boulvevard du même nom »
The entire sonnet reads:
Le soleil, sur la table, ô lutteuse endormie,
En l’or de tes cheveux chauffe un bain langoureux
Et, consumant l’encens sur ta joue ennemie,
Il mêle avec les pleurs un breuvage amoureux.
De ce blanc Flamboiement l’immuable accalmie
T’a fait dire, attristée, ô mes baisers peureux,
« Nous ne serons jamais une seule momie
Sous l’antique désert et les palmiers heureux ! »
Mais ta chevelure est une rivière tiède,
Où noyer sans frissons l’âme qui nous obsède
Et trouver ce Néant que tu ne connais pas.
Je goûterai le fard pleuré par tes paupières,
Pour voir s’il sait donner au cœur que tu frappas
L’insensibilité de l’azur et des pierres.
We are a country of extreme heat. The shy Mallarmé has disappointed his wife by his timidity. She concludes that they will never be One. Sous refers both to Mallarmé, and for concision to the ancient desert. Antique - this adjective is synonymous for Mallarmé with the ancestral therefore the eternal. The word heureux is placed dismissively at the end of the line - it actually relates to us. Mallarmé unites the idea of happiness with the idea of being a mummy. The inability of man to achieve happiness - "We will never be a single mummy in the desert and under the palms, we will never be happy."
Mallarmé wrote this sonnet at Tournon in 1864, when he was 22. He had no taste for the life of a school teacher that exhausted him physically and mentally, and prevented him from devoting himself entirely to poetry. Financial worries were piled on the drudgery of his job, and he was separated from his friends. He lived in an apartment that was too small with his wife and newborn daughter Genevieve. Mallarmé spent most of his nights trying to write, but he was depressed and on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
As for Dinard, a seaside resort 4 kilometres east of St-Malo on the left bank of the Rance estuary, On November 2nd, 1909, Toulet wrote to Debussy : « Dinard est agréable, mais un peu éventé :les gens aussi…. Mais j’ai été au Mont-Saint-Michel. C’est beaucoup mieux que le boulvevard du même nom »
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