Two revolutionary texts by Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) lie at the heart of this book, the poem Un Coup de dés and the prose collection Divagations. An international team of scholars from Paris to New York explores the multiple connections between Mallarmé and Australia, especially as they are embodied in the works of Sydney poet Chris Brennan (1869-1932), whose writing, according to Mallarmé, offered a «parenté de songe» («a kinship of dream») with his own. With its focus on divagation - or wandering, reverie, and exploration - this book summons forth a Mallarmé seen through a specifically Australian lens, through the focus of a century of critical and creative responses to his work, a Mallarmé whose poetics enfold a particular femininity as well as a particular response to the feminine, and a Mallarmé who possessed the extraordinary gift of seeing inspiring contemporary art.

Countering the conventional image of the deliberately obscure "ivory-tower poet," Frameworks for Mallarmé presents Stéphane Mallarmé as a journalist and critic who was actively engaged with the sociocultural and technological shifts of his era. Gayle Zachmann introduces a writer whose aesthetic was profoundly shaped by contemporary innovations in print and visual culture, especially the nascent art of photography. She analyzes the preeminence of the visual in conjunction with Mallarmé's quest for "scientific" language, and convincingly links the poet's production to a nineteenth-century understanding of cognition that is articulated in terms of optical perception. The result is a distinctly modern recuperation of the Horatian doctrine of ut pictura poesis in Mallarmé's poetry and his circumstantial writings.

Avant-garde poetry in the Antipodes causes all sorts of trouble for literary history. It is an avant-garde that seems to arrive too late and yet right on time. In 1897, Christopher Brennan made his own version of Un Coup de Des, the same year Mallarme published it in Cosmopolis. In the 1940s, the same period avant-gardism was declared dead or fatally injured due to the Ern Malley affair, Harry Hooton began writing a significant body of experimental poetry. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Australian Dada emerged 'belatedly' through figures like Jas H. Duke (Tristan Tzara had previously sung Aboriginal songs at the Cabaret Voltaire in 1916). First Nations and Migrant poets then began reinventing avant-garde poetry in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This book maintains that such a confounding literary history poses a distinct challenge to the theories of the avant-gardes we have become accustomed to and changes our perspective of avant-garde time.

The canon of Ezra Pound would be incomplete without a representative collection in the master's lighter vein. Pavanes and Divagations seeks to meet this need. Included are Pound's long essay ''Indiscretions, '' one of his rare autobiographical writings, an assortment of facetious verses, his superb translations from the dialogues of Fontenelle, causeries on topics ranging from religion to the mores of moneyed society, as well as a miscellany of editorials, denunciations, and literary masquerades. Pound's barbed wit is displayed here to its best advantage. But more than a simple diversion, this volume presents an important but neglected aspect of the prime shaper of modern poetry in English.

Publisher Description

For Mary Ann Caws - noted translator of surrealist poetry - the most appealing translations are also the oddest; the unexpected, unpredictable, and unmimetic turns that translations take are an endless source of fascination and instruction. Surprised in Translation is a celebration of the occasional and fruitful peculiarity that results from som...

In celebrating the academic career and practice of a distinguished scholar of French literature, this volume concentrates on one of Peter Broome's major preoccupations and attainments: translation. Eschewing a dogmatic, theoretical approach, the contributors (former colleagues and students) tackle four rich areas of study: modern anglophone poets' reactions to, and translations of, authors with whom they have closely identified (Racine, the Symbolists, Saint-John Perse, Valéry); problematics of translating specific poets of recent centuries (Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Valéry, Césaire, some contemporary poets); reception and interaction in two foreign countries (Australia, Spain); and a more fluid interpretation of translation, moving the notion across into wider realms of literary expression (Mallarmé, Proust, Assia Djebar). A focalising feature, punctuating the volume, are Peter Broome's own translations of hitherto unpublished poems by five major contemporary French writers: Jean-Paul Auxeméry, Marie-Claire Bancquart, Louise Herlin, Vénus Khoury-Ghata and Jean-Charles Vegliante. The book thus intertwines theory and practice in a non-prescriptive manner which invites further elaboration and analysis.

Australian literature wasn¿t all stockmen and billabongs when it blossomed in the 1890s. From then till now the parallel strand of modernist sophistication has been equally popular with top writers. John Hawke looks at the enthusiastic reception European symbolism got in Colonial times, as well as the alarming politics of literary figures, and the striking originality that modern global influences brought out in Slessor, Judith Wright, A.D. Hope and other leading writers.

This is a wide-ranging, incisive study of contemporary poetry, its predicament and its rich traditions. While it focusses on Australian cultural conditions, it sees them in terms of the English-language ecumene, for example setting an Irish poet beside an Australian, and ranging from Keats, as our strong forebear, to the modern Polish poet Zagajewsky. In this book, Wallace-Crabbe examines the role of poetic discourse in the face of both popular and high cultures. He also asks what remains for us of the sacred, that wizened category of attention. Among his Australian protagonists are A.D. Hope, the Mallarméan John Forbes, and the painter, Sidney Nolan, whose images of the bushranger Ned Kelly have become powerfully iconic. These critical essays are coloured both by the abiding traditions of a formative landscape and by the postmodern city, with its dwindled, acerbic gaze. They should seize the attention of anyone concerned with the fate of poetry in a PlayStation age.