In 1879, French poet Stéphane Mallarmé's eight-year-old son Anatole died after a lengthy illness now diagnosed as pediatric rheumatism.

Mallarmé had previously written a "tomb" ("tombeau") poem after the death of Edgar Allan Poe, and would later write tombeaux for Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine.

[2] The finished material was published as Pour un tombeau d'Anatole in 1961 through Éditions du Seuil, with an introduction by Jean-Pierre Richard.

[2] An English translation by the American author Paul Auster was published in the Summer 1980 issue of The Paris Review, and in book form in 1983, with the title A Tomb for Anatole.

The translation is careful but confident, finding the right balance between faithfulness to the French and sustaining a creative thrust in English.