Aussi/Or

Toby Fitch

forthcoming 2025

Stéphane Mallarmé’s early modernist, ur-visual poem Un Coup de dés, with its indeterminacy and chains of association, has inspired numerous translations, versions, imitations, and artistic extrapolations. “Shipwrecked on the shoals of contingency”, poets from so-called Australia seem particularly haunted by Un Coup de dés. Its publication in Cosmopolis in Paris in 1897 struck a nerve or, rather, a vessel within antipodean poetic bloodlines, starting with Christopher Brennan. Un Coup de dés was the score that inspired him to compose “Musicopoematographoscope”, also in 1897, a large handwritten mimique manuscript, or pastiche, that transposed the more extreme aesthetics of an avant-garde French Symbolism into the settler Australian poetic psyche (though it languished in manuscript form until finally published in 1981). Now well into the twenty-first century, Un Coup de dés is still a blueprint for experimentation Down Under, spawning two significant homophonic mistranslations—“A Fluke” (2005) by Chris Edwards and “Desmond’s Coupé” (2006) by John Tranter—both revelling/rebelling in the abject, and in “errors and wrecks”, as Ezra Pound might have put it. This experimental long essay provides a comparative reading of these homophonic bedfellows, traces their relation(ship)s to their antecedents in Mallarmé and Brennan, and then divagates into various theories of translation and punning to open up the valencies of mistranslation, before considering its implications in the settler Australian poetry context.

TOBY FITCH (he/they) is a poet, editor, critic, and teacher raised in Australia on Gadigal land. He is a lecturer in creative writing at the University of Sydney, a former poetry editor of Overland (2015–2025), and the author of eight collections of poetry, most recently Sydney Spleen (Giramondo, 2021) and Object Permanence: Calligrammes (Puncher & Wattmann, 2022). He is the editor of the anthologies Best of Australian Poems 2021 (with Ellen van Neerven) and Groundswell: The Overland Judith Wright Poetry Prize for New and Emerging Poets 2007–2020. His poetry has been awarded the Grace Leven Prize and the Charles Rischbieth Jury Prize, while his PhD, consisting of a poetry book, The Bloomin’ Notions of Other & Beau, and a thesis, ‘Themparks: Alternative Play in Contemporary Australian Poetry’, won the University of Sydney’s Dame Leonie Kramer Prize for Australian Poetry.

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“Punning is easy, but good puns are hard—some say even impossible. For the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, however, picking up on Sigmund Freud and James Joyce’s fantastical translingual homophonies, puns are not the lowest form of wit, but rather the condition of inventive thinking as such. Toby Fitch’s work—both his poetry and prose—is firmly in this lineage of modernist experimentation and interpretation. Taking up Stéphane Mallarmé’s running disjuncts in Un Coup de dés and their transliteration into contemporary Aussie English (Ozlish?), Fitch makes not only an intelligent, inventive, and important intervention into the impact of Mallarmé on experimental Australian poetry, but uses this singularity to construct and stage questions of wider—dare I say ‘global’?—poetic creation. The fragmentary composition, tied together by the repeated ‘or’, is eminently readable and conceptually strong. I love this essay—it’s a beautiful piece of contemporary literary criticism, witty yet utterly serious.” —Justin Clemens

ISBN (print): 978-1-916541-18-4 ISBN (ebook): 978-1-916541-19-1