Colouring écriture féminine in Peter Manson’s translations of Mallarmé

Abstract

This article considers the possibilities of écriture féminine in Peter Manson’s translations of Mallarmé, particularly focussing on the use of colour in Hérodiade, ‘Don du Poème’, and ‘Les Fenêtres’. In this work, I firstly trace an association between colour and the erotic in feminist theory and art, which can be seen in works such as Audré Lorde’s ‘Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power’ (1978), Pipilotti Rist’s ‘Ever is Over All’ (1997), and in Meiling Cheng’s ‘The Unbearable Lightness of Sight’ (2003), in which she writes: the image seized for view, however deliberately designed, exists in a state of indifference, whereas the viewer is most likely already overdetermined by his/her interpretive desire. Perhaps the best we can do is to bypass the conundrum by pursuing the liberating potential of that discrepancy, recognizing the being of an image as light/intangible and the core of desire as heavy/matter-producing. In translation, the translator negotiates with their source text, and with the sensual dimensions of the source language, in a manner that is comparable to this interpretation of colour vision. Julia Kristeva argues that Mallarmé’s work exemplifies écriture féminine because it draws the reader into a state anterior to language, which she compares to the pre-linguistic communion between mother and infant. In Mallarmé’s work, colour reveals the materiality of light, transforming it into a bodily force that Mallarmé initially codes (perhaps too simplistically) as feminine. I begin by reading reds and purples in Hérodiade as allusions to blood, then the golds of coloured glass in ‘Les Fênetres’ and ‘Don du Poème’ as a way of making conflicts between bodily abjection and transcendence visible (the pane of glass becoming a coloured body between the lyric ‘I’ and the sky). I finally consider Mallarmé’s use of the word ‘Azur’ as a metaphor for virginity (azure being associated, through lapis lazuli, with the blue of the Virgin Mary). Manson’s translations are particularly attuned to Mallarmé’s combinations of the ‘heavy/matter-producing’ and the ‘light/intangible’, and I argue that Manson’s word choices emphasise an erotic force in Mallarmé’s use of azure, treating this colour as a reservoir that, in Manson’s translation, threatens to ‘drown’ the ‘self-coloured cinders’ of Mallarmé’s speaker, colouring symbolic boundaries between languages and genders, and between self and other.