«Je t’apporte l’enfant d’une nuit d’Idumée». Mallarmé et l’utopie hermaphrodite

«Je t’apporte l’enfant d’une nuit d’Idumée»: it is the first verse of a poem written by Stéphane Mallarmé at the beginning of 1865. This poem is known under various titles: “Don du poème”, “Le Jour”, “Le Poème nocturne”, “Dédicace du poème nocturne” or even “Don”. In 1931, Denis Saurat expressed an interesting hypothesis: “I bring you the child of a night from Idumea” would allude to Jewish Kabbalah, and the kings of Idumea would be hermaphroditic beings reproducing without the intervention of a woman. The reader would therefore be invited to think that, by analogy, a poem metaphorically resembles a child conceived outside of any carnal intercourse between two individuals. The hypothesis formulated by Saurat is today neglected, even forgotten, by Mallarmean criticism. This hypothesis was, however, relevant: this is what this article aims to show

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