India and Mallarmé: The influence of Indian literature on Mallarmé’s poetry

The poet’s complete works (Œuvres Complètes, Paris, Gallimard, Bibliothèque de La Pléiade, ed. Bertrand Marchal, vol. 1 and 2, 1998) and his Correspondance (Correspondance, 1854- 1898, compiled, presented and annotated by B. Marchal, Paris, Gallimard, 2019)  contain very few references to India. In the late 18th century, however, Sanskrit lexicon and grammar studies revealing consistent phonological links between Indo-European languages prompted a boom in comparative linguistics, which Mallarmé himself also studied and which seemingly played a role in the emergence and rise of his poetry.

References to India in the works of Mallarmé                  

By yielding ‘the initiative to words, through the clash of their ordered inequalities’ (Crise de Vers, Divagations, Paris, Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1897), Mallarmé effectively created ‘a language within a language’, to quote an expression used by Jacques Schérer (Grammaire de Mallarmé, Paris, Nizet, 1977), whose objective was to ‘evoke meaning’ (Le Mystère dans les Lettres, Divagations, Paris, Bibliothèque Charpentier, 1897). While motifs or terms transliterated from Sanskrit helped fortify poetry aimed at creating an element of foreignness in the language, Mallarmé only used them in works relating to private commissions or adaptations with pre-chosen topics :

• Les Dieux Antiques, which the author himself admitted, in his Lettre à Verlaine of 16 November 1885, was a ’free adaptation’ and ‘educational publication’ of R.W Cox’s A mythology under the forms of questions and answers ;
• The poem paying homage to Vasco da Gama, "beyond India fraught and sublime";
• A lost sonnet entitled Inde (‘India’);
• Contes indiens, a re-write, requested by Méry Laurent, of Mary Summer’s Contes et Légendes de l’Inde ancienne (Paris, Ernest Leroux, 1878), published following the poet’s death (Paris, L. Carteret, 1927).

Knowledge of Indian literature

What makes this refusal to incorporate Sanskrit words, motifs or themes all the more troubling is the fact that the poet was familiar with Indian literature. Indeed, his Correspondance reveals that he had read Histoire de la littérature hindoue (Paris, Charpentier, 1888) and Livre du Néant (Paris, A. Lemerre, 1872), written by his friend Henri Cazalis. In his letter of 15 March 1893 to Doctor Fournier, who commissioned Contes indiens, Mallarmé, in reference to the story of Nala and Damayanti  embedded in the Mahābhārata,  epic poem, mentions a ‘memory of the original’ that ‘left an impression’ on him. Mallarmé thus likely had access to Hippolyte Fauche’s translation in Une Tétrade (Paris, A. Durand, 1862), Emile Burnouf’s translation: Nâla, épisode du Mahābhārata (Nancy, Grimblot and Raybois, 1859) or Wilkins’ 1820 English translation. Inspections of his library preserved at the Musée Départemental à Vulaines-sur-Seine also confirm his at least partial receptiveness to Indian literature: Chapter one of Jules Michelet’s La Bible de l’Humanité relates to the Râmâyana ; the preface to John Payne’s Tales from the Arabic of the Breslau and Calcutta  includes references to Indian philosophy, Sanskrit’s evolution and Louis Mathieu Langlès’ translations; Hartmann’s Buddha  recounts the life of the holy figure; and Armand Renaud’s Notice des Nuits Persanes cites the works and translations of Garcin de Tassy.

While his library does not containany works directly translated from Sanskrit and his writings do not reveal any interest in Indian literature – apart from Nala et Damayantî –, the poet does recognise the value of translations from Arabic and Chinese. In an undated letter addressed to John Payne, he praises Payne’s typographic choices and transcription of the Arabic in Tales from the Arabic of the Breslau and Calcutta (London, Villon Society, 1884); he mentions the translation of the Chinese in Emile Blémont’s Poèmes de Chine, whose ‘purity’ he finds to be a sign of ‘exoticism’, (letter to Blémont on 2 March 1887), and, in a letter to Armand Renaud dated 3 April 1870, he acknowledges the way Renaud’s Nuits persanes  incorporated Oriental motifs into the ‘well known French verses’. Mallarmé thus admired anything which, in these translations, denoted a sense of elsewhere or which exuded a foreignness that he associated with exoticism.

The foreignness effect of ancient languages

This interest is also reflected in his Note sur la transcription des noms des dieux antiques in Dieux antiques (Paris, Rothschild, 1880) , which, together with Les mots anglais according to Bertrand Marchal (La Religion de Mallarmé, Paris, José Corti, 1888), would constitute the extent of the poet’s knowledge of comparative mythology and linguistics. Indeed, his interest in Bopp’s Comparative Grammar of the Sanscrit, Zend, Armenian, Greek, Latin… , translated into French by Bréal (Paris, Imprimerie impériale, 1866), prompted him to view poetic language as a constant renewal of the signified, and the development of natural languages as being a result of phonemic transformation. In seeking to integrate ancient, untranslated names into the French language, Mallarmé further developed this theory based on the belief that they needed to be transliterated without ‘distorting the sound’, while retaining the ‘flavour of exotic dialects’, or left untranslated if already known in the language. The challenge appears to have been that of creating a foreign sound throughout the language, hence Mallarmé’s inclusion of Sanskrit names transliterated phonetically into French in Contes indiens, . Without a footnote, these pure signifiers create a foreign sound, while being transliterated according to French language norms, and therefore integrated into the language.

The French translation or transcription of names in ancient languages thus helped recreate the development process of natural languages. Applied to his poetry, this use of signifiers generated a sense of ‘mystery’ or ‘evoked meaning’. It would consequently seem that Mallarmé was essentially receptive to Indian literature – less through the integration of motifs, literary themes and terms transliterated from Sanskrit, and instead more through the application of comparative mythology and linguistics, enabling him to effectively create a foreign language within the French language, without knowing Sanskrit.

Published in septembre 2024