Please join us for a discussion of Stéphane Mallarmé’s enigmatic, unfinished text known as Le Livre. Sylvia Gorelick will read from her translation of The Book, which was published this past fall. Mary Ann Caws will speak about the text, translation, and Mallarmé’s poetics. A rich conversation will ensue.
Mary Ann Caws is Distinguished Professor Emerita and Resident Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Her many areas of interest in twentieth-century avant-garde literature and art include Surrealism, poets René Char and André Breton, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, and artists Robert Motherwell, Joseph Cornell, and Pablo Picasso. Conceptually, one of her primary themes has been the relationship between image and text. Among her many other works, Professor Caws is co-translator and editor of Mallarmé’s Selected Poetry and Prose(New Directions, 1982) and Mallarmé in Prose(New Directions, 2001).
Sylvia Gorelick is a second-year PhD student in Comparative Literature at NYU. Her research interests include philosophy, feminism, and testimony. Sylvia is also a poet and translator. Her chapbooks include Olympians, we are breathless (Poetry will be made by all!, 2014) and Seven Poems for Bill Berkson (Kostro Editions, 2009), and her next book of poems is forthcoming from Breather Editions. Her translation of Mallarmé’s The Book came out from Exact Change in 2018, and her translation of Nietzsche’s Journey to Sorrento by Paolo D’Iorio was published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016.
