Le Hasard n'abolira jamais un Coup de Dés
Bennequin Jérémie ,  Le Hasard n'abolira jamais un Coup de Dés (Paris: Éditions de la Librairie Yvon Lambert, 2014).
Bennequin Jérémie ,  Le Hasard n'abolira jamais un Coup de Dés (Paris: Éditions de la Librairie Yvon Lambert, 2014).
Jérémie Bennequin
Le Hasard n'abolira jamais un Coup de Dés
Paris: Éditions de la Librairie Yvon Lambert, 2014
330 x 250 mm, 32
Printed on Olin regular paper, thread binding
10 numbered I to X on Vellum, 90 numbered 1 to 90 on Olin regular paper

"It is indeed possible to read Un Coup de Dés in one direction then in the other, backwards… A stroke of poetic genius to which the work of Jérémie Bennequin testifies, where each line is found strangely reversed in the pages, inviting the reader to turn the book over to gain possession of an unprecedented meaning, a fundamental gesture through which the artist himself discovered the extraordinary mallarméènne reversibility, by inadvertently consulting one day upside down, the famous iconoclastic reappropriation of Marcel Broodthaers (book cult shot in 1969 in Antwerp). Hence the black rectangles within which the fragments of the poem now reappear and, on the cover, the subtitle “OMAGE.”

Éditions de la Librairie Yvon Lambert

 

"The parts enclosed in square brackets correspond to the phonetic transcription of the verses of the Poem by Stéphane Mallarmé (original edition of La Nouvelle Revue Française dated July 10, 1914) thus grouped end to end, such as in the Préface to the iconoclastic book by Marcel Broodthaers ( printed in 1969 in Antwerp) with the difference that the order of the fragments is reversed here. This introduction establishes a link between the essentially sonorous dimension of the poetic score according to Mallarmé and the world of visual abstraction in Broodthaers while resolving the rare grammatical contradictions which may appear when reading Un Coup de Dés jamais n'abolira le Hasard in reverse. The main innovation of this new "état" ("state") of the work therefore consists in the fact that there exists a reversibility of meaning - revealed, one day, by the fortuitous reversal of Broodthaers' "approximate" image and probably premeditated by Mallarmé - hence the reading, which is always done on both pages at the same time, simply taking into account the ordinary descent of the lines, thus operates perfectly backwards."

Author's note below the preface.

The preface features a phonetic transcription of the Mallarmé poem, in reverse order. Line-breaks are indicated by /

The main body of the book features all lines in order of appearance as drafted by Mallarmé; within each line, the text is placed inverse (in white) an black bars rotated by 180 degrees and are readable upside down. 

According the the imprint, the book was printed on July 10, 1914, exactly 100 years after the printing of Mallarmé's NRF edition.