Kyōjirō Hagiwara: Death Sentence (1925) [Japanese]

The poetry anthology Shikei senkoku “is one of Mavo’s best-known projects and the group’s only collaborative book design. Mavo executed the entire layout of Hagiwara’s anthology, deciding everything down to the pitch of the text. It is one of the finest examples of a successful integration of text, design, typography, and illustration.

At the time, Shikei senkoku was considered extremely experimental graphically. As Takahashi Shūichirō has noted, it was designed to fit Hagiwara’s persona as a kuroki hannin (black criminal, that is, an anarchist). Without the artistic constraints placed on many commercial publications, Mavo artists were free to produce a strong visual response to the tumultuous poems. Okada did most of the illustrations for the volume, as well as designing the cover. It consists of two bold black lattices on both the left and right borders, a yellow band at the top with the author’s name, a thicker red band with the book title below this, a bluish circle in the center, and a black-and-white grid pattern at the bottom with boxes filled in to create an abstract pattern. The tide consists of irregularly rendered, blocky characters, playfully tilted against one another, creating a horizontal rhythm across the top of the book.

Several of the illustrations inside Shikei senkoku are photographic reproductions of Mavo work already published in the group’s magazine. The rest are abstract linocuts. Line, dot, and arrow border patterns dynamically frame the texts, which are interspersed with full-page illustrations, some featuring bold, black-and-white abstract patterns.

In one example, illustrations by Okada Tatsuo and Yabashi Kimimaro face each other (pp 34-35). Okada’s untitled print, on the right-hand page, is largely rectilinear, with a few crisscrossing diagonals. The Still Life Yawns, Yabashi’s work on the left-hand page, consists of a black rectangular form with white areas cut away inside, producing free-form shapes. In another of Okada’s many untitled designs in Shikei senkoku, an anthropomorphic head springs into the composition from the left, its segmented neck pierced by a long protruding cone; black-and-white abstract shapes and line patterns animate the background (p 155). The typography used for the poems is also experimental, often incorporating symbols and shapes to substitute for characters and letters (pp 130-131).” (from Gennifer Weisenfeld, Mavo, 2002, pp 197-200)

With illustrations by Mavo (Tatsuo Okada, Kimimaro Yabashi, Tomoyoshi Murayama, Masamu Yanase, Hisao Maki, Shuzo Oura, Seiho Sawa, Tatsuo Toda, Michinao Takamizawa)
Publisher Chōryūsha, Tokyo, 1925
161+6 pages
via Waseda University Library, (2)

Commentary (John Solt, 1999)
MAVO at Monoskop wiki

PDF, JPGs (First edition, PDF 46 MB)
PDF, JPGs (Second edition, PDF 48 MB)
HTML (added on 2014-10-8)

Iliazd: Lidantiu faram (1923) [Russian]

Lidantiu faram [Le-Dantyu as a Beacon] is a play typed in zaum language by the Georgian-French artist-typographer Iliazd (Ilya Zdanevich). It remains an unsurpassed example of visually fascinating typographical contrivances and was to exert a decisive influence on the typographical component of international dadaist poetry.

“The book is preceded by a table of symbols which indicate how the sounds they stand for, such as a click of the tongue, are to be pronounced. The stressed symbol is given a capital letter, often large and bold, in the middle of the word, while unstressed vowels are written as pronounced, not necessarily as normally spelt.

The plot, in a parodic inversion of Gogol’s short story ‘The Portrait’, investigates the nature of reality in its relation to art. It begins with the Spirit [Zaperedukhyai] muttering a soliloquy over the body of a dead woman. The Spirit’s words do not contain vowels, an omission suggesting firmness. The villain of the piece, the realist painter [peredvizhnik] who is presented as a lisping phoney, paints a lifelike portrait of the dead woman. Then comes an obscure avant-garde artist, Mikhail Ledentu, who represents genuine liberated art and he paints an unlike portrait of the same lady. Both portraits come alive during the play, with Unlike killing Lifelike. The Spirit also dies but the forces of life are resurrected. The play ends with an ensemble superimposed on each other: the harmonious trio of the living is echoed by the dissonant octet of the dead. The forces of death include a Greek chorus of five ugly realism-loving women, usually singing in quintet. They are defined as truperdy (this combines death and decay with scatology) and their individual names are mostly rare Russian folk words with sexual anatomical meanings. The quintets show strong individualisation of each part: one of them speaks in vowels only; another hissing and lisping; another in abrupt and primitive tones adding clicks of her tongue to her words; the other two speak in a coarse and unpleasant idiom.

Le-Dantyu as a Beacon is an astonishing tour-de-force. Every page number, for instance, is created in a different and inventive manner (and there are sixty-one of them), and the variety of typeforms used must surely have entailed ransacking the typecases of several printers.” (from Alan Bartram’s Futurist Typography and the Liberated Text, 2005, altered)

Lidantiu faram (Лидантю фарам; Ledentu le Phare: poème dramatique en zaoum)
Preface by Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes, in French (attached at the end)
Cover by N. Granowsky
Typography by Ilya Zdanevich
Publisher Éditions du 41º, Paris, 1923
61 pages + 8-page prospectus

Commentary: Lewis Blackwell (20th-century Type, 2004: 35), Alan Bartram (Futurist Typography, 2005: 50-69).

PDF (15 MB, via Iowa Digital Library)
PDF (107 MB, added on 2020-12-5, via Kunsthaus Zurich)

Stéphane Mallarmé: A Throw of Dice Will Never Abolish Chance (1897–) [FR, PT, ES, IT, EN]

Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard is one of the most well-known works of the French Symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé.

In 1874, Mallarmé made his early mark in the field of “graphic design by creating single-handedly one of the first fashion journals, La Dernière mode, which ran for six issues. Consequently, he began around this time to take notes on what he considered to be his ultimate poetic project, the publication of what he called ‘the Book’, a poetic object that would replace the Bible as a central figure in a sort of secular art/religious ritual. While the Book was never fully realized, Mallarmé’s increasing concern over the ‘crisis in verse’ — basically, the arrival of free verse in France, and the untoward retirement of the much-loved alexandrine — led him to conceive the 12 pages of Un coup de dés, whose words spill across the pages like stars strewn across the sky or, indeed, like throws of the dice. Mallarmé’s fellow Symbolist Paul Valéry wrote a memorable description of first seeing the poem in The Master’s workshop:

‘It seemed to me that I was looking at the form and pattern of a thought, placed for the first time in finite space. Here space itself truly spoke, dreamed, and gave birth to temporal forms. Expectancy, doubt, concentration, all were visible things. With my own eye I could see silences that had assumed bodily shapes. Inappreciable instants became clearly visible: the fraction of a second during which an idea flashes into being and dies away; atoms of time that serve as the germs of infinite consequences lasting through psychological centuries — at last these appeared as beings, each surrounded with a palpable emptiness [..] There in the same void with them, like some new form of matter arranged in systems or masses or trailing lines, coexisted the Word!’

Like many readers of Un coup de dés, Valéry thought he was gazing on a poem that reflected an improvisatory air: a map of a human mind, not to mention a chart through “psychological centuries.” The heroic nature of Mallarmé’s achievement, of a sort that seems decidedly unfashionable in poetry today, is palpable in Valéry’s breathless encomium. The poem has since been seen as one of the most successful typographical achievements ever, harbinger of the experiments of the Futurists and Dadaists, not to mention the mesostics of John Cage, Brazilian concrete poetry, Flash and animated poetry, and interactive iPad apps like Jörg Piringer’s whimsical ‘abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz’.” (from Brian Kim Stefans’ review of Meillassoux’s The Number of the Siren)

First published in Cosmopolis: Revue internationale 4(17), May 1897
Publisher Armand Colin, Paris
Pages 417-427
via Gallica.fr

Un coup de dés in PEPC Library (with an English translation of Mallarmé’s Preface of 1897)
Wikipedia (English)

Jamais un Coup de Dés n’abolira le Hasard (French, manuscript, 1897, from Maldoror ediciones)
Un Coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard (French, 1897, first print)
Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard (French, 1897/1914), spreads (from PEPC Library)
Un coup de Dés jamais n’abolira le Hasard (French, ed. Michel Pierson, 1897/2004, from Michel Pierson & Ptyx, an edition reconstructing Mallarmé’s intended layout)
Um Lance de Dados Jamais Abolirá o Acaso (Portuguese, trans. Haroldo de Campos, 1975/1991)
Jugada de dados (Spanish/French, trans. Federico Gorbea, 1982)
Un tiro di dadi mai abolirà il caso (Italian, trans. Enrico Pozzi, 2002)
Un Tratto di Dadi mai abolirà il Caso (Italian, trans. Francesco Piselli, 2003)
A Throw of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance (English, trans. Basil Cleveland, 2005, from UbuWeb)
A Fluke (English, a mistranslation by Chris Edwards, 2005, HTML, from Jacket2)
One Toss of the Dice Never Will Abolish Chance (English, trans. Christopher Mulrooney, undated, HTML, from UbuWeb)
A Dice Throw At Any Time Never Will Abolish Chance (English, trans. E.H. and A.M. Blackmore, 2006)
A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance (English, trans. A.S. Kline, 2007, multiple formats)
A Throw of Dice Will Never Abolish Chance (English, trans. Robin Mackay, 2012)
Um lance de Dados jamás abolirá el Azar (Spanish, trans. Jorge Segovia, 2013)

See also Marcel Broodthaers’ rendering of the poem, 1969 (French)
and Quentin Meillassoux’s The Number and the Siren, 2011/2012 (French, English)