Mallarmé’s Phantom Swan: Problems of Hermeneutics, Reception, and Translation

In the article, written as part of a project dedicated to the issue of multilingualism and reverse translation, the author asks whether the method introduced by Alexander Mikhailov, which has already proven its effectiveness, works in cases where “reverse translation” and “original place” are difficult to comprehend for both descendants and contemporaries. The history of Mallarmé’s reception and translations in Russia, which is extensively documented in R. Dubrovkin’s monograph Stéphane Mallarmé and Russia (1998), is filled with various kinds of qui pro quo, demonstrating the complexity of the process of introducing a poet, who was known to be admired but not clearly understood for into Russian culture. Such a receptive story was not exclusively Russian. Mallarme, having a narrow circle of admirers in his homeland, generally represented a difficult mystery to solve as a poet, which is difficult to translate even into French. In Russia, one of the paradoxes of his perception was that the spirit of Mallarme’s poetry was infected not so much by those who initially imitated and translated him (V. Bryusov or M. Voloshin), but by poets who rather concealed their selective affinity with him (F. Sologub, O. Mandelstam, and A. Bely). Further, the article attempts to show how various translations into Russian of the sonnet Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui, known in Russia as “The S wan,” displaced, each in its own way, the author and removed the contradictions of the original text. And why was the author’s intention not to give the sonnet a title ignored, and why was Mallarmé’s male character (both the protagonist and the chronotope of his poem) replaced by a swan, whose figure overshadowed the other meanings of the sonnet?