One Toss of the Dice ─ The Incredible Story of How a Poem Made Us Modern

It was the forerunner of our digital age, improbably a French poem about a shipwreck published in 1897 that, with its mind-bending possibilities of being read up and down, backward and forward, even sideways, launched modernism. Stéphane Mallarmé’s “One Toss of the Dice,” a daring, twenty-page epic of ruin and recovery, has for over a century tantalized everyone from physicists to composers to graphic artists. Now, renowned scholar R. Howard Bloch decodes the poem still considered among the most enigmatic ever written. Creating a shimmering portrait of Belle-Époque Paris with a cast of exotic characters—Napoleon III, the Lumiere brothers, Whistler, Rodin, Berthe Morisot, even an expatriate American dentist—that recalls Roger Shattuck’s classic The Banquet Years, Bloch positions Mallarmé as the spiritual giant of late-nineteenth-century France. Featuring a new translation of the poem by J. D. McClatchy, One Toss of the Dice reveals how a masterpiece shaped our perceptual world.