Colouring écriture féminine in Peter Manson’s translations of Mallarmé

This article considers the possibilities of ecriture feminine in Peter Manson’s translations of Mallarme, particularly focussing on the use of colour in Herodiade, ‘Don du Poeme’, and ‘Les Fenetres’. 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 Audre 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 Mallarme’s work exemplifies ecriture feminine because it draws the reader into a state anterior to language, which she compares to the pre-linguistic communion between mother and infant. In Mallarme’s work, colour reveals the materiality of light, transforming it into a bodily force that Mallarme initially codes (perhaps too simplistically) as feminine. I begin by reading reds and purples in Herodiade as allusions to blood, then the golds of coloured glass in ‘Les Fenetres’ and ‘Don du Poeme’ 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 Mallarme’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 Mallarme’s combinations of the ‘heavy/matter-producing’ and the ‘light/intangible’, and I argue that Manson’s word choices emphasise an erotic force in Mallarme’s use of azure, treating this colour as a reservoir that, in Manson’s translation, threatens to ‘drown’ the ‘self-coloured cinders’ of Mallarme’s speaker, colouring symbolic boundaries between languages and genders, and between self and other.

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. 1 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. 2 In Mallarmé's work, colour reveals the materiality of light, transforming colour into a bodily force or, in Barbara Johnson's words, a 'nourishing non-language' that can be coded (perhaps too simplistically) as feminine. 3  Peter Manson's translation. 4 In this 'Scene' from Stéphane Mallarmé's Hérodiade, Hérodiade (a girl entering adolescence) argues with her nurse, who is urging her to think of marriage. Hérodiade is determined to stay singular and virginal: 'who would touch me? I am respected by lions./Besides, I want nothing human'. 5 Her nurse likens this choice to death, and the seraphic, smiling blue also seems to foretell this fate. Hérodiade asks her to shutter the windows against this threatening azure expanse.
In Biblical accounts, Hérodiade is better known as Salome, the girl who dances before King Herod. Charmed, Herod promises her a gift of anything she desires, and Salome, on the vengeful instruction of her mother, demands the head of John the Baptist, who is duly executed, and his head brought in on a platter. Salome's story is therefore one of anxiety about erotic power (Salome's dance) leading to emasculation (John the Baptist's beheading). Symbolist and Decadent works such as Mallarmé Colour, even in written form, carries a sensory force: reading the word 'red' may not be the same as seeing the colour red, but the presence of that unseen colour still moves the reader and creates a semiotic response. Colours therefore attract desire, and this is only accentuated by their elusiveness. In her essay 'Touchy-Feely Colour', Mazviita Chirimuuta notes that an Aristotelian understanding of colour as intrinsic to material things was challenged in the seventeenth century by ' a revised scientific ontology which posited that the only qualities belonging to material things were quantitative or mathematical ones, not qualitative ones like colour': This, in essence, is the metaphysical problem of colour: how can it be that we see a world full of colours, if no such properties could belong to the world? 9 Chirimuuta is probably referring here to John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1671-1690), in which he writes 'For the power in fire to produce a new colour, […] is as much a quality in fire, as the power it has to produce in me a new idea or sensation of warmth or burning'. 10 In other words, Locke understands colour as a sensory quality of light, rather than as a quantifiable property contained inside the object we are looking at. For Chirimuuta, colour emerges through our field of vision, in much the same way that the sense of touch moves through our skin: colours are revealed by the contact of our gaze with the visual world. They are not intrinsic, and Maggie Nelson argues that the objective reality of colour is extremely dubious: a honeybee sees a poppy as a 'gaping violet mouth', not a red or In some ways, colour is one of the least malleable elements of translation, because colour can remain visible through many versions, unlike other aspects of rhyme and form. Sappho has gone through multiple transformations, but her rosy-fingered dawn stays, like a fingerprint, marking the song or poem as hers.
However, Mallarmé's work is especially apt to treat every element, including colour, as a metaphysical substance that is malleable in the poet's -and thus also in the translator's -hands. He is repeatedly preoccupied with the work of art as an unnatural conception, and uses colour to convey its birth. In 'Don du poème' ('Gift of the Poem', 1865), the poem's gift bursts through stained glass as 'the child of an Idumaean night!'. 16 Manson notes that 'The kings of Idumea (the biblical Edom), according to the Kabbala, were sexless beings who reproduced without women. Cohn states that this poem uses the windowpane as a 'pure source, limpid as air and light, from which it was born, but caught and frozen in a palpable concretion of earthly being'. 19 I would argue that there's nothing pure about it; the horizon is 'gorged' with light, 'gorgé' deriving from the throat, as if the sky itself is a mouth. Disgusted by the patient's sensual nostalgia, the speaker of 'Les Fenetres' ultimately tries to flee from this appalling material world. Compared to 'art, or the mystical', the windowpane acts as a golden body standing between material and immaterial being, as the speaker wants 'to smash the crystal insulted by the monster' (D'enforcer le cristal par le monstre insulté). 20 The word 'monstre' (monster) puts the body on show, as if the hospital patient, in his sickness, brings abjection too clearly into view.

Purple of a sky! Pond complicit in purple! 21
In contrast to these bleeding purples and reds, Hérodiade likens herself to metallic golds, as if she has developed from precious stones, or is a living jewel. She is aware That there is no "feminine writing" must be said at the outset, and one makes a mistake in using and giving currency to this expression. […] "Feminine writing" is the naturalizing metaphor of the brutal political fact of the domination of women, and as such it enlarges the apparatus under which "femininity" presents itself: that is, Difference, Specificity, Female Body/Nature […] the words "writing" and "feminine" are combined in order to designate a sort of biological production peculiar to "Woman," a secretion  The colors, […] offer a certain vibrancy to the visions, coating them with an additional texture and seemingly making the phantasmic floating sights more focused, hence more "materialized," especially at the earlier moments when the colors are first introduced to the pond one by one. 38 Cheng connects this pouring of colours to the interpretation of an image: 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. We allow the heavy to impinge on the light, not to deaden the light, but to turn it into a certain illuminating matter. 39 Looking is not -quite -the same as reading, but these theories of colour re-enact écriture féminine in a visual context, and this 'heavy/matter producing' quality is pertinent to our activities in literary interpretation. The translator works with their source text, bringing their desires and preferences to it, so that each translation is ' coloured' by its translator, as well as by its source.
I will now return to the most central colour in Mallarmé's work, Azur (azure), and its treatment within Peter Manson's translations. Azure derives from lapis lazuli, a precious metamorphic rock that was used in the Renaissance as a powdered ultramarine dye. Ultramarine was the most expensive colour, used to paint angels and the Madonna; Victoria Finlay notes that the stone in its raw state contains 'specks of iron pyrite -fool's gold -and it makes the best stones look like the firmament'. 40 The mystery and holiness attached to lapis lazuli and to ultramarine pigment derived in part from its distant origin, in a set of Afghanistan mines ' collectively called Sar-esang, the Place of the Stone': part of the mystery of lapis was that although for millennia it travelled to Europe and Egypt it was always known to come from a mythical land so far away that no European or Egyptian had actually been there.  to the idea of Hérodiade as a being produced without sex -as a clone of her motherbut is also, perhaps, chosen for the word 'rigid' contained inside it. Manson  Basil Blackwell, 1986), pp. 89-136 (p. 97; p. 122). 3 Barbara Johnson writes that the question of gender 'haunts him [Mallarmé] from the very beginning: is writing a gendered act? […in 'Don du poème'] The opposition between male and female is an opposition between half-dead language and nourishing non-language. But while many writers have valued the woman as something extra-textual, such non-language is valued in Mallarmé's system not