Marmalade

From the perspectives of an accomplished contemporary artist, William Benton's MARMALADE takes the words of the French poet Mallarme (note pun) into an American idiom that both explodes and tightens poetic mysteries and mischief. Some 50 years from its first publication, complemented with the original watercolors of James McGarrill, this classic of autonomic and visionary translation remains testament to our human and "faunean" imagination unbridled. As the poet Guy Davenport writes in his introduction, "And if one dreamed, and was too feral to sort dream from flesh, and took up a flute and began to see how dream and reality are flower and leaf on the one stem, and a French poet [Mallarme] in a plaid shawl who loved old gardens and mirrors and Greek poetry wrote what he thought the faun thought, and an American poet [Benton] has a bright impulse to speak for Mallarmé speaking for the faun? Turn the page and read on."