A Roll of the Dice

Previously only available in hardcover, and after a long period of being unavailable, one of Wave’s most popular titles, A Roll of the Dice by Stéphane Mallarmé, is now available in paperback.

Through brilliant collaboration, Robert Bononno and book designer Jeff Clark translated one of Mallarmé’s most well-known and visually complex poems into contemporary English language and design. This bilingual softcover edition not only includes Mallarmé’s original preface, but also matches the typography of the last round of proofs that Mallarmé was correcting at the time of his death. Clark’s presentation is both visually stunning and typographically radical, mirroring the dark mystery of Mallarmé’s poem. With a keen understanding of poetics, Bononno’s translation offers myriad interpretations, while capturing the visionary spirit of the original. Together, Clark and Bononno have created a singular version of A Roll of the Dice that is markedly unique in its attention to the ways layout, design, typeface, and language all contribute to the meaning making of this masterpiece.

Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898) was born in Paris and lived there for many years. He held salons whose regular visitors included W.B. Yeats, Rainer Maria Rilke, Paul Valéry, Paul Verlaine, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Claude Monet, Edgar Degas and many others. Mallarmé is widely regarded as one of the most important figures of 19th century French poetry.

Jeff Clark is the author of Ruins and Music and Suicide (winner of the James Laughlin Award), among other works, and has made his living as a book designer for nearly thirty years. He is the designer for Wave Books. His studio, Crisis, is based in Ypsilanti, Michigan, where he also does some community organizing and radical publishing.

Robert Bononno has been a freelance translator from the French for more than 20 years. He was an adjunct professor in New York University’s Translation Studies program and at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Bononno is credited with the translation of over a dozen full-length books and numerous shorter pieces. These include René Crevel’s My Body and I, a finalist for the 2005 French-American Foundation Prize, Hervé Guibert’s Ghost Image, and Henri Raczymow’s Swan’s Way. In 2002 he received a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to complete a translation of the non-fiction work of Isabelle Eberhardt and in 2010 he received an NEA grant for the retranslation of Eugène Sue’s classic crime novel, The Mysteries of Paris. Bononno’s latest translation, Jean Grenier’s Considerations on the Death of a Dog, was published by Turtle Point Press in 2013.