One Toss of the Dice: The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made Us Modern

Praising Stéphane Mallarmé’s 1897 poem “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard” (translated here as “One Toss of the Dice”) as “the birth certificate of modern poetry,” Bloch (A Needle in the Right Hand of God) meticulously reconstructs the events leading to its composition. He shows how the poem was a synthesis of the poet’s experiences and influences and an “enormous break with the conceptual world in place since the Renaissance” that anticipated developments in painting, music, and dance. From a densely detailed biographical sketch packed with accounts of Mallarmé’s family life and his association with the Mardists—a salon whose members included Paul Verlaine, André Gide, Edgar Degas, and other leading artists—Bloch singles out two major influences on the poem’s final structure: the “all-embracing total artwork” of Richard Wagner’s operas, then all the rage in Europe; and the Lumière brothers’ pioneering work in cinema. The full text of the poem (as translated by J.D. McClatchy) is reproduced here in its entirety, and it’s a visually striking collage of fonts, type sizes, fragmented phrases, and empty spaces that encourage and inhibit interpretation. Bloch’s analysis of the poem’s verbal and syntactical acrobatics and its resonance with later works is enlightening. For most readers, this book will be an engrossing introduction to a work of literature whose artistic significance the author makes seem inarguable. (Nov.)