The poet Stephane Mallarme liked to smoke – cigarettes in summer, a pipe in winter – to put “a veil between himself and the world.” Certainly anyone who has attempted to read his mature poems in the original can attest to the success of that veil; native French speakers find his syntax hard to crack, and even good translations aren’t always much help. Though he loved to write of icy, crystalline whitenesses – swans and sea-foam, spinnakers and the “terrible handkerchief you wave when saying goodbye forever” – his poems are intensely passionate. Yet the underlying passion has been strangely vitrified, as though the fierce pressure of the poems had turned breath to glass.

Contemporaries who visited him once a week during his celebrated “at homes” recalled a reserved and elegant man, vaguely “English” in demeanor and dress (he had been an English teacher for most of his life), who stood casually by the fireplace, cigarette always in hand, sending up fragrant veils of protective smoke. To the younger writers gathered there, Mallarme was an austere but kindly mentor. Andre Gide, Paul Claudel, Robert de Montesquiou (the model for Proust’s Charlus), the German poet Stefan George, and Paul Valery, Mallarme’s particular protege, were among those who came to sit at the master’s feet.

At the time few of them knew that Mallarme, when in his 20s, had gone through a devastating spiritual crisis – he mentions it in his letters – from which he emerged inwardly “annihilated.” His earlier poems had been brilliant but derivative, strongly Baudelairean in theme and form (he had once glimpsed the latter in a salon but had been too abashed to approach him). After his mysterious crisis he began to compose such poems as “Herodias” or “The Afternoon of a Faun” in a new style: dense, elliptical, glancing, and despite – or perhaps because of – the poems’ immaculate cloisonne surfaces, both moving and disturbing. His characteristic themes emerged – sterility and a dizzying sense of the void – but these were offset, made weirdly beautiful, by the jubilant precision of his language.

In 1879 a second and far more terrible blow struck. Anatole, his beloved 8-year old son, died after a long and painful illness. To say that Mallarme, his wife Maria, and his older daughter Genevieve were overwhelmed by this loss would be the cruelest of understatements. The poet was especially grief-stricken, however: He, the most articulate of men, seemed unable to find words not only to express his sorrow but to commemorate his son. We know today that he struggled painfully to accomplish this because in 1961 (63 years after Mallarme’s own death, in 1898), the French scholar Jean-Pierre Richard published the poet’s working notes under the title “Pour un tombeau d’Anatole” (“For a Tomb for Anatole”).

This is a hard book to read, especially for a parent, and it’s an even harder book to write about. Translated into English by the novelist Paul Auster, “A Tomb for Anatole” (New Directions, 202 pages, $16.95), first came out in 1983 and has been reissued this month. I remember leafing through it in a bookstore 22 years ago. My own sons were still infants. I found the little book impossible to read at the time. I had just realized, with a shock, what all fathers and mothers must come to terms with: that by becoming parents we make a tacit pact with mortality. Impossible to grasp that the gurgling or laughing or howling child you hold in your arms will one day grow old and die; unthinkable that he or she might die in childhood. All the dangers, the much-too-real as well as the merely imagined, crowd upon your imagination and threaten to paralyze you. I suppose it was cowardly of me, but I wasn’t equal to those agonizing fragments that a poet I’d always loved had labored to shape into some enduring form. I put the book back on the shelf.

There was another reason, as well. What I did read showed this prince of language stammering and fumbling to find the words for his grief, and I felt embarrassed, as though I’d stumbled into a room of private mourning. I wondered whether such unsparingly intimates notes should have been published at all. I believe now it was right to make them public. Not only do they show Mallarme the man, as uncertain and lost as any of us; they also capture the very pulse of sorrow, moment by moment, and so constitute an incomparable memorial for his lost child.

The fragments, with Mr. Auster’s excellent translation at the top and the French original at the bottom of the page, are set out like verse but have none of the suavity and burnish of Mallarme’s finished poems. Here is how they begin:

child sprung from
the two of us – showing
us our ideal, the way
– ours! Father
and mother who
sadly existing
survive him as
the two extremes
badly coupled in him
and sundered
– from whence his death – o
bliterating this little child “self”

Mr. Auster has been scrupulous in rendering all the twists of the original but no translator, however gifted, can fully convey the force of that final notation: “annu / lant ce petit ‘soi’ d’enfant.” The child as his own self, however idealized by his parents, cannot be apprehended in his death, and for this no consolation exists. The rawness of certain fragments shocks. The 39th reads in full:

you can, with your little
hands, drag me
into your grave – you
have the right –
– I
who follow you, I
let myself go –
– but if you wish, the two
of us, let us make …

Stephane Mallarme wrote a magnificent sequence he called “Homages and Tombs,” in which his celebrated sonnets for Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe appear. The opening line of his tribute to Poe reads: “Such as into himself Eternity at last transforms him.” Though no beneficent eternity would transform Anatole into the final form his father wished, the Poe sonnet, for all its greatness, seems excessively literary next to the heartbroken jottings. Anatole’s is a tomb patched together with bits of masonry and the stub-ends of cornices, with tears, the shreds of veils, and near inexpressible regrets. It is all the more monumental for that.