“Mallarmé’s notorious difficulty, his untranslatability – figured, for example, in the abyss between the English translations I relied on for the sense of his poems and the mutant music I could hear in the French – inspired A Fluke, my mistranslation of ‘Un Coup de Dés …’, which it only now occurs to me was an attempt at pure literature, marred perhaps inevitably by its own impure thoughts. (One can only remain philosophical about it.).”

Chris Edwards