DTFC Stephane Mallarme Memorial Tournament

This is a chess 960 tournament.

THREE DAYS WILL BE 3 ROUNDS AND THE FINAL BETWEEN THE BEST NINE PLAYERS.

125th anniversary of the death of Stéphane Mallarmé, French poet ("A Throw of Dice will Never Abolish the Hazard" (1987)), co-originator of the Symbolist movement in poetry.

Etienne (Stéphane) Mallarmé was born on March 18, 1842, in Paris. He was the son of Numa Mallarmé, a civil servant, and Elisabeth Desmolins.

Mallarmé did not follow his father’s or grandfather’s paths of civil servitude, instead excelling at languages and writing often, influenced by poets Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire. Mallarmé received his baccalaureate in 1860 and went on to publish his first poem “Placet” in the French magazine Le Papillon in 1862. He pursued further studies in London to improve his knowledge of English. In 1863, he married German governess Christina “Maria” Gerhard and obtained his certificate for teaching English. He and Maria traveled to Tournon where he taught in a provincial secondary school. In 1864, Maria gave birth to their daughter, Genevieve. Mallarmé’s teaching career took him to Besancon, Avignon, and back to Paris again until he retired in 1893.

One of Mallarmé’s most well-known poems, L’Aprés Midi D’un Faun (The Afternoon of a Faun) (1865), inspired Debussy’s tone poem (1894) of the same name and was illustrated by Edouard Manet. Among his other works are Hérodiade (1896) and Toast Funèbre (A Funeral Toast), which was written in memory of the author Théophile Gautier. Mallarmé’s later works include the experimental poem Un Coup de Dés (1914), published posthumously.

Besides his own writings, Mallarmé was well-known for his Tuesday evening salons at his home on the Rue de Rome in Paris. These gatherings were a hub of Parisian intellectual life and attracted the likes of writers André Gide, Paul Valéry, Oscar Wilde, Paul Verlaine, Rainer Maria Rilke, and W. B. Yeats, the painters Pierre Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, Odilon Redon, and James Abbott McNeill Whistler, as well as the sculptor Auguste Rodin, among others. Those who attended became known as Les Mardistes, derived from the French word for Tuesday.

In the 1880s, Mallarmé was at the center of a group of French writers including Valéry, Andre Gide, and Marcel Proust. Mallarmé referred to their group as The Decadents, a comment on their bohemian lifestyles. He and Valéry, following Baudelaire, would later become known as two of the leaders of the Symbolist movement in poetry. While French poetry had traditionally held fairly strict conventions of rhyme, meter and theme, Mallarmé and his contemporaries departed from these traditions, employing condensed figures and unorthodox syntax. Mallarmé’s work was often termed as difficult or obscure. His later works, including Un Coup de Des, explored the relationship between content and form, between the text and the arrangement of words and spaces on the page.

Mallarmé died in Valvin, Vulaines-sur-Seine on September 9, 1898, before finishing what he called his “Grande Oeuvre.”

Apparition

^{translated by Wilfrid Thorley}

The moon grew sad, and weeping seraphim,
Musing among the vaporous flowers aswim,
With slow bows from the sobbing viols drew
White tears that sank in their corónals blue.
It was the blesséd day of your first kiss.
My reverie, eager with new miseries,
Was all a-swoon with perfume of shy grief
That leaves the heart to gather its own sheaf,
And frets not, nor yet sickens of its prize.
I wandered, and the worn way held my eyes
When in the street I saw your sun-girt hair
And you all smiling in the twilit air.
I took you for that elf who, crowned with beams,
Once passed before me in my childish dreams,
And shed white posies of sweet-smelling flow’rs
Star-like for tiny hands in snowy show’rs.

Apparition 

 La lune s’attristait. Des séraphins en pleurs
Rêvant, l’archet aux doigts, dans le calme des fleurs
Vaporeuses, tiraient de mourantes violes
De blancs sanglots glissant sur l’azur des corolles.
—C’était le jour béni de ton premier baiser.
Ma songerie aimant à me martyriser
S’enivrait savamment du parfum de tristesse
Que même sans regret et sans déboire laisse
La cueillaison d’un Rêve au cœur qui l’a cueilli.
J’errais donc, l’œil rivé sur le pavé vieilli,
Quand avec du soleil aux cheveux, dans la rue
Et dans le soir, tu m’es en riant apparue
Et j’ai cru voir la fée au chapeau de clarté
Qui jadis sur mes beaux sommeils d’enfant gâté
Passait, laissant toujours de ses mains mal fermées
Neiger de blancs bouquets d’étoiles parfumées.

Aparición

[Poema - Texto completo.]

Stéphan Mallarmé