L'après-midi d'un faune (poem)
"L'après-midi d'un faune" (or "The Afternoon of a Faun") is a poem by the French author Stéphane Mallarmé. It is his best-known work and a landmark in the history of symbolism in French literature. Paul Valéry considered it to be the greatest poem in French literature.[1]
Initial versions of the poem were written between 1865 (the first mention of the poem is found in a letter Mallarmé wrote to Henri Cazalis in June 1865) and 1867, and the final text was published in 1876 (see 1876 in poetry). It describes the sensual experiences of a faun who has just woken up from his afternoon sleep and discusses his encounters with several nymphs during the morning in a dreamlike monologue.
Mallarmé's poem formed the inspiration for the orchestral work Prélude à l'après-midi d'un faune by Claude Debussy and the ballets Afternoon of a Faun by Vaslav Nijinsky, Jerome Robbins and Tim Rushton. The Debussy and Njinsky works would be of great significance in the development of modernism in the arts.
Editions
Translations
- (English) The Afternoon of the Faun, translated by Roger Fry, in The Poems of Mallarmé, Chatto and Windus, 1936 OCLC 1616026
- (English) A Faun in the Afternoon, translated by E.H. Blackmore and A.M. Blackmore, in Collected Poems and Other Verse, 2006
- (English) Collected Poems: A Bilingual Edition, Stéphane Mallarmé, translated by Henry Weinfield, University of California Press, OCLC 9780520948112 (1st edition 1994 ISBN 9780520948112; 2nd edition 2011 ISBN 0520948114)
- (Finnish) Faunin iltapäivä: valitut runot, Einari Aaltonen, 2006
Notes
- ↑ Weinfield, Henry. Stephane Mallarme, Collected Poems. Translated with commentary. 1994, University of California Press. Online version at GoogleBooks
Sources
- Hendrik Lücke. Mallarmé - Debussy. Eine vergleichende Studie zur Kunstanschauung am Beispiel von „L'Après-midi d'un Faune“. (Studien zur Musikwissenschaft, Vol. 4). Dr. Kovac, Hamburg 2005, ISBN 3-8300-1685-9.
External links
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French Wikisource has original text related to this article: |
- The poem in French on wikisource
- English translation (2004–2009) by A.S. Kline