The forerunner of our digital age, a French poem about a shipwreck published in 1897, with its mind-bending possibilities of being read up and down, backwards and forwards, even sideways, launched modernism. Stephane Mallarme's "One Toss of the Dice" has for over a century tantalised everyone from physicists to composers to graphic artists. R. Howard Bloch decodes the poem still considered among the most enigmatic ever written. Creating a shimmering portrait of Belle-epoque Paris with a cast of exotic characters-Napoleon III, the Lumiere brothers, Auguste Rodin, Berthe Morisot, even an expatriate American dentist, Bloch positions Mallarme as the spiritual giant of late-nineteenth-century France. Featuring a new translation of the poem by J.D. McClatchy, One Toss of the Dice reveals how a masterpiece shaped our perceptual world.
- ISBN10 0871406632
- ISBN13 9780871406637
- Publish Date 6 December 2016
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Publisher WW Norton & Co
- Imprint Liveright Publishing Corporation
- Format Hardcover (Deckle Edge)
- Pages 320
- Language English