The Complete Poems of Sylvia Plath (Revised Edition), by Sylvia Plath, translated by Feng Dong, Shanghai Translation Publishing House, published in September 2022, 420 pages, 88.00 yuan
"The sky leans on me, I, the standing man in everything/level" – Wuthering Heights, Plath
If poetry written from ancient times to the present day is compared to an ocean, then on her nautical charts, Plath's name may become a sign of "mystery" and "danger", and nearly sixty years after her death, the ships of literary critics, psychoanalysts, feminists and others continue to sail into her waters to explore fishing. Plath's many voices (poems, diaries, letters, novels) still carry her thoughts, and the biographies, essays, and research works surrounding her work sometimes suggest her presence, and the scope of her work has long transcended psychological, political, and cultural boundaries. Chinese world of Plath retains a vague image, biased towards poignant vulnerability, while her cruel and evil wit, namely the Plath-esque "spikes" and "poisonous juices", seems to be greatly diminished. The Complete Poems of Sylvia Plath (Revised Edition) once again puts her in front of Chinese readers, and this edition is more accurate and concise, deeply cutting into the "unique white-hot core" of her language, and improving the clarity and restoration of the Chinese translation of Plath's poems.
Sylvia Plath
Plath is an enigmatic woman. She did not occupy the stratosphere of literature like other great poets or writers, such as Virginia Woolf, Henry James, Eliot, etc.; Instead, she comes from the turbulent chaotic, wildly changing troposphere. Her poems are full of dark rifts, chaotic snares, and death and rebirth are themes she repeats many times. For example, in the purgatory-like poem "Go There," the speaker "I" drags his body through the bloody war with a cold eye, "outside the tent of endless wailing," trying to appease a historic predicament: "I will bury the wounded as a chrysalis, / I will count and bury the dead / Let their souls tumble in a drop of dew / Be incense on my way." At the same time, she tries to shake off the patriarchal myth: "I rise from the earth / This Adam's rib and suffer", and at the end, "I walk out of this skin/Out of the old bandages, tired, old face/From the black carriage of the forgotten river to you/Pure as a baby". Also in the final stanza of Madame Lazarus, "I am cloaked in red hair / Rising from ashes / Eating men like air", the poet presents the conflict between life and death in an extreme way, in contrast to the solemn and quiet style of the poetess Emily Dickinson, who also focused on the theme of death. Plath, who had faced mental breakdowns several times, was overwhelmed by the inner superpressure and broke the forbidden lock in his throat:
The night sky is nothing more than a piece of carbon paper,
Blue-black, pierced by the period of the stars
The light comes in, one peephole after another——
The bone-like light, like death, is behind all things. ("Insomnia")
Janet Malcolm, author of The Silence of Women: Plath and Hughes (1992), argues that "extremist poetry is the last bastion against pervasive cultural mediocrity." Readers of post-World War II American history will not have trouble discerning the noise that inevitably resonates in the public sphere in Plath's personal spectrum. Plath was indeed "a terrible, two-sided marker of the fifties," and her mysterious, urgent psychological characteristics became the clinical case of that complex and chaotic era, in other words, the disease of the times struck in her. The disillusionment and despair brought about by the two world wars have not yet dissipated, and sexual liberation, women's movements, civil rights movements, environmental movements, Vietnam War, and anti-war protests have caused a profound impact on the uneasy and rebellious young Americans of the fifties and sixties. Plath's personal stage simultaneously unfolds the double tragedy of historical crisis and personal misfortune, as can be seen in "Street Song":
Every nerve I destroy is at the end
All in a tone higher than the ears of passers-by,
cry its pain;
Perhaps, I am deafened by your missing death knell,
But only I can hear
The scorching scream of the sun,
The stars that have been eviscerated out
Every sink and fall,
I, who is stupider than a goose, hear it
This ruined world continues to chirp and hiss.
How do modern people face the world after Auschwitz and Hiroshima? Many people take avoidance and paralyzing themselves, but Plath prefers to confront these crises of civilization, especially in the last years of her short life. She began writing a collection of poems, Ariel, often immersed in a strange mixture of war, religion, and consumerism, and her later poems often featured bombs and death camps. In 1962, she wrote to her mother: "For God's sake, stop being so afraid of anything, mother... Stop trying to get me to write about decent and brave people – read Women's Family Magazine! My poems freak you out, it's so bad that you're always afraid to read or see the cruelest things in the world – like Hiroshima, the Inquisition, or the Belsen concentration camp. ”
Sylvia Plath
Of Plath's masterpiece Daddy, George Steiner calls it the "Guernica" of modern poetry: it is "one of the very few poems in any language I know that comes close to ultimate horror." Can the poet's personal catastrophe, which has received mixed reviews from Anglo-American critics, and who did not personally experience the Holocaust, find a corresponding expression in the ashes of Auschwitz? In his essay "The Tireless Horseshoe: On Plathine," Heaney commented: "A poem like 'Daddy,' however brilliant the skill it displays, no matter how violent and vengeful, deserves to be understood or forgiven for her parents or marriage—it remains entangled in her own biography, and its indulgent rampage through the tragic history of others clearly overdraws our sympathy." However, Plath wrote such poems without asking for sympathy, and her high-pitched contempt and deep apprehension would not succumb to "understanding or forgiveness." She writes about the most traumatic moments, in the scenes of war and suffering evoked in her poetic lines, she allows herself to be in communion with those who have been tortured and slaughtered, and her poems are rebellions against atrocities and oblivion. In Leone, she draws on the legendary island nation of Leone, which was swallowed by the sea overnight, to write about the historical dimension of oblivion, and to indict God, the forgotten father: "No one thought that they had been forgotten, / The great God / lazily closed one eye, let them / Slip off the cliffs of England and sink into long history!" ”
It is true that poetry is not a code store for events, but the art of subjectivity. Confessional poets since Lowell have incorporated their real lives into poetry, shedding their pretenses and confronting with their naked selves a world without shelter and redemption after the failure of tradition and faith. However, such a "face" is often futile here at Plath, because the "horrors of everyday life" cannot be disguised with a "colorful cloak of fiction" (see The Bathtub Story). As a writer, wife, daughter, and mother, Plath lives in multiple roles, picking fragments from random, redundant, and real-life life as a basis for her artistic themes. Dan Chiasson wrote in The Last Letter from Plath:
Most of Plath's letters are day-to-day records of rent, leases, meals, diaper changes, bike rides, and bills. All these onerous prerequisites for writing, motherhood, and wife were solved by herself. Plath did not have the contemplative leisure of male writers, her muses were economical, frugal, and hourly.
Plath maintains an eye for the details of everyday life, and her choice of material tends to be personal and non-mainstream. Dinner in London with Eliot and Sir Stephen Spender, listening to Lowell lecture at Boston University or drinking with Anne Sexton at the Ritz Bar in Back Bay – none of this became material for her poetry. Instead, she chose what was superficially prosaic: a groundhog, a sheep in the fog, a bicycle, a small piece of cloth and transformed it:
This is love? This from the dazzling flying
The red substance coming out of the steel needle?
It will sew small skirts, small coats.
It will obscure a dynasty. ("The Look")
Can consumption and nourishment be done at the same time? What makes Plath? What destroyed her? One thing is certain, day after day, Plath is on the battlefield between his inner self and everyday life. In just a few years, she went from a rebellious college student with well-groomed shiny blonde hair and a soft round face to a highly intrigued, confused, mentally unstable female poetess, and finally exhausted. On Christmas Eve 1962, the poet and critic Alvarez saw Plath for the last time, no longer fresh and elegant, but with a loose bun, "her pale face and haggard figure taking on a strange sense of desolation, like a priestess hollowed out by a ritual of worship"; As she passed in front of Alvarez, her hair "emitted a strong smell, sharp as an animal smell." In despair, Plath wrote: "The horizon surrounds me like a bundle of wood, / The inclination is messy, always unstable." / Burn a match, they may warm me", however, a series of difficulties awaited her, the failure to reconcile with her husband Hughes, the bitter cold in London, the freezing water pipes, the unanswered phone calls, the sick child and her own high fever, and she was crushed. Shortly before committing suicide, Plath appeared in front of her neighbor, the painter Thomas, and she was so distressed:
Her eyes were red and swollen, tears were streaming down her face, her voice trembled, and she cried, "I'm dying... Who will take care of my child? "I don't quite know what to do. I reached out and took her arm: "You'd better come in and sit down, I'll get you something to drink." ”
Plath and husband Hughes
Perhaps she didn't really want to leave this world, and after moving into her new home (which had been Yeats's former home), she wrote to her mother: "My bedroom is also a study—it faces the rising sun. But not long after, on February 4, 1963, she sent her last surviving letter to her close friend and psychiatrist Ruth Boschel: "I am terrified now, my madness, my paralysis, my fear, and my worst imaginations have returned—cowardly retreat, a mental hospital, a lobotomy." On the morning of Feb. 11, Plath placed milk and bread next to the two children, sealed their room with towels and tape, turned on the oven gas in the kitchen, and put his head in the oven.
No one knows if Plath will finally find rest. Did Plath's misfortune stem from her Oedipus complex, a deviant love for her father who was lost in childhood, so much so that her destruction was almost doomed: "They buried you when I was ten." / I wanted to die when I was twenty / Return, return, return to you. / I think even the bones will do", or the husband's affair and abandonment? Or is there some deeper cause that led to her tragedy? Hughes has been extremely reticent about his private life with Plath, has not written a memoir or given an interview, and all of his articles about Plath have always talked about her work, touching on her life only when it is related to it. He once said: "My silence seems to confirm those speculations and accusations... In short, I would rather be silent than allow myself to be dragged into a bullring, teased, stabbed, seduced, spitting out every detail of my life with Sylvia. Hughes spent the rest of his life tormented by Plath's avid fans who wanted him to hold him responsible for Plath's suicide, for the way he destroyed her two diaries and edited and published her work. The dead Plath still haunts him and becomes an incurable after-effect for him. Since the seventies, Hughes has been writing to the late Plath. This spiritual exchange that lasted twenty-five years across life and death was like a private conversation, and for many years, no one knew about these poems of pain and guilt. In 1998, Hughes published his last book of poems, Birthday Letters, before his death, and Plath's nightmares can be seen in a poem titled "Life in a Dream":
It's as if you're from every night's sleep
Descend into your father's grave
You don't seem to dare to look at it or dare to think about it the next morning
What do you see. When you remember
Your dream is a sea full of corpses.
Atrocities in death camps, massive amputations.
Your sleep seems to be a bloody shrine.
And the most sacred relic among them
It's your father's gangrene, severed leg.
No wonder you're afraid to sleep.
No wonder you wake up and say, "No dreams." ”
What was that night's service like?
Worship services, you are
That Esoteric priestess?
Those poems are the pieces you salvaged from them?
Hughes's "Last Letter" is not included in "Birthday Letter," in which he repeatedly asks, "What happened that night?" Your last night? Poet Ann Duffy commented on the poem: "The poem feels like gazing at the sun that is about to go out, reaching deeper and darker than all the poems he has written." ”
Plath and Hughes
Perhaps time will heal all wounds, but poetry keeps some wounds open, constantly examining them, making the scabs stiff and even bleeding repeatedly. The love-hate fog between Plath and Hughes has not cleared over time, and the legend of Plath still influences our imagination. It can be said that Plath is a woman who has really lived, and the so-called "real life" means that such a life can withstand scrutiny and give life the brightness and fullness it deserves. How did this fresh and plump American girl with dark lipstick mature quickly in Europe and eventually become an Antigone exuding a tragic brilliance? How does she evoke from the abyss of her own pain all the poetic personalities of the queen, the priestess, the magician's girl, the red-haired woman, the woman in white, the woman in love, Mother Earth, the goddess of the moon? This is still a mystery in the history of literature, and it is also the core of the reader's nervous emotions, which requires the reader to find the answer in his own reading of her.