Ted Hughes was a famous poet, translator, critic, and one of the two most important poets in Post-World War II Britain. Hughes is the husband of the American poetess Plath. He wrote more than 40 works in his lifetime, including "Eagles in the Rain and Others: Selected Poems 1957-1994", "The Crow", "Birthday Letters" and other poetry collections, "The Forge of Poetry: Hughes Writing Teaching Manual", "Winter Pollen: Hughes Anthology" and other anthologies. From 1984 until his death, Hughes was Britain's Poet Laureate.
Hughes's private life is probably as famous as his poems, and even more so than poetry, especially the story of his "love and killing" with Sylvia Plath. The two meet at a party in 1956, and in the presence of his current girlfriend, Hughes, still unable to suppress his inner passion, kisses Plath, who bites him in "return", and the love between the two begins – but with a tragic ending. Hughes's infidelity has caused Plath great pain, divorce, Plath's suicide has made the whole incident a complete tragedy, and Hughes himself has been blamed for this; however, this is not the only time Hughes has cheated... Later, Hughes devoted a great deal of energy to writing children's poems as a compensation for the lack of early family life. In January 1998, a few months before his death, Hughes published a collection of poems, "Birthday Letters", reminiscing about his life with Plath and expressing his sincere love for Plath, hoping to heal the wounds.
Years have passed, and we cannot say whether the deep scars can be healed, but now, all the dust has settled, and what remains is their poetry.
Hughes grew up interested in animals and later became known for his animal poetry. He writes like a thunderbolt, always attracting muses with "dreams, ecstasy, fear, and hallucinations," as ma Mingqian, the author of this article, puts it: "[Hughes] has long been immersed in the atmosphere of hunting and animals, dreams and hallucinations, unconsciousness and psychoanalysis, shamans and witchcraft, anthropology and mythology, and mystical philosophy." Immersed in dreams and hallucinations, Hughes, with his "shepherd spirit of witchcraft", was lucky in his writing, after all, how many poets can get the inspirational experience of "like divine help"? But when this "witch spirit" falls into daily life, the strong destructive tendencies it contains also become a lingering demon in Hughes's life.
Written by | Ma Mingqian
I have not been in the habit of writing apocryphal essays, and I have always been afraid to write reviews of new translations of poems, and if I want to write, I will spend some effort to read them carefully, at least once. However, Ted Hughes, the author of this collection of poems, Eagles in the Rain and Others: Selected Poems 1957-1994, is an English-language poet I have long followed, so I am interested in writing.
Write wherever you want. Perhaps, the rambling essay is more suitable for talking about Hughes and his poetry.
Eagles and Others in the Rain, by Ted Hughes, translated by Zeng Jing, edition: Guangxi People's Publishing House| Daya, January 2021
01
A tumultuous history of marriage and love
Before writing, I re-watched the old 2003 film "Sylvia" in order to activate the original movie-watching memory. To be honest, the film is not very good, but Gwyneth Paltrow's temperament is very close to Plath, and Daniel Craig's appearance is also somewhat similar to Hughes. The hero and heroine are a couple of poets rarely in the English poetry scene in the twentieth century (both are not bad at writing), and their entanglement of meeting, falling in love and killing each other is destined to be a controversial topic.
Poster for the movie Sylvia
According to Hughes' own diaries and poems, in 1956 he co-founded a literary magazine with five friends at Cambridge University called St. Botolph's Review (St. Botolph's Anglican Church on the outskirts of Newnham, Cambridge). At the magazine's inaugural party, Hughes met Plath, who was studying at Cambridge. Although Hughes's current girlfriend was also present, the two became magnet-like when they met, Hughes kissed Plath, and Plath "bit" him in return.
Plath and Hughes
After only one issue of st. Peter's Review, Hughes and Plath reaped a fiery love, and four months later they married and went to the United States together. Soon after, the Hughes returned to England, where they had two children, daughter Frida and son Nicholas.
Hughes once recalled the good times after the new marriage:
We write poems every day. That's the only thing we're interested in, and all we do is write poetry.
In August 1961, the Hughes bought a house called Court Green in North Totown, Devonshire, advertising them to sublease their small apartment in Shercht Square, Primrose Hill, London. Hughes and Plath received the tenants, the poet David Vivel, and then invited them to the "Green Mansion" as guests.
Hughes is immediately captivated by Viviel's wife, Assia Wevill, and the two fall in love (a detail also shown in the film Sylvia). In Hughes's later poetry collection, "Birthday Letters", there is a poem "Dreamer" that depicts the "call" of the two at that time, when Hughes was thirty-one years old and Ah Xia was thirty-four years old:
I saw that she had a dreamer in her heart
She was in love with me, and she was unconscious.
At that time, the dreamer in my heart
I've fallen in love with her, and I know it.
Her father was a Russian-Jewish doctor and her mother was German, and the family fled Nazi Germany during World War II and settled in Tel Aviv, Palestine, which was still a British Mandate. At the age of 19, she married John Steele, a British soldier, moved with her husband to London, then moved to Canada, entering the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to study literature, and divorced Steele and married her second husband, Canadian economist Richard Lipsie. In 1956, on an ocean-going ship bound for London, she met the 21-year-old poet David Vivel, who soon divorced Lipsy and married her third husband, Vivel, in 1960.
From the photos, Asha is a standard sexy beauty (as Hughes puts it, she "has a mixed-race beauty"), a talent for language, she is a popular writer in London advertising, and she has also appeared in advertising films. She was also an aspiring poet who translated and published a collection of poems by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amihai under the name of her maiden name Asha Gutmann.
Such an interloper was, of course, a serious threat to the neurotic, grumpy Plath, who was busy dealing with two young children, a shaky marriage and his own writing troubles. In addition, it is necessary to consider the physical and mental condition of Plath, who received electric shock treatment for mental illness as a teenager.
Asha Vivel
Later, Hughes met frequently with Ah Xia during a poetry lecture on the BBC's Listen and Write programme. The two secretly wrote this secretly: Ah Xia picked a handful of freshly cut grass outside the office and soaked it in perfume and sent it to Hughes, and three days later she received a reply— a blade of grass from Devon (it is indeed imaginative for literary people to fall in love). Once, when Asha's phone went straight to her home in Devon, Plath angrily unpluged the phone cord on the wall.
In September 1962, Plath burned Hughes' letters and poems, drove him out of the "Green Mansion", and incidentally informed Vivel of the unknown situation of Asha. Shortly thereafter, Plath returned to London with his two-year-old daughter, six-month-old son, and settled on Fitzroy Street, around the corner of former Schart square.
In February 1963, Plath committed suicide by inhaling too much gas in her London apartment while she was going through divorce with Hughes.
After Plath's death, Hughes let his lover Axia move into the "Green Mansion" to help take care of Plath's two children. In 1965, Asha gave birth to her daughter Shula, who had not yet dissolved her marriage to David Vivel.
Tragedy ensued.
For a long time, she was just Hughes's "housekeeper" and not his wife. Ostracized by Hughes's friends and family, and under the pressure of public opinion after Plath's death, she becomes another "Plath", constantly suspecting Hughes's infidelity. Hughes did have a new affair: first with his married friend Brenda Herdon, and then with nurse Carol Orchard, who was twenty years younger than him (Hughes married Orchard in 1970). On March 23, 1969, Ah Xia also committed suicide by gas at home, and her four-year-old daughter also became a victim.
The headline of a February 5, 2007 feature story in Maclean Magazine, Canada
The turbulent history surrounding Hughes actually took away three lives, and it was inevitable that it would cause a clamor of public opinion. Since then, several biographical works and memoirs interpreting the tragedy of the marriage between Plath and Hughes have been published. In 1984, two Israeli journalists even wrote a biography of Asha, "The Irrational Lover: The Biography of Asha Vivier," which on September 10 of that year published a book review titled "Ted Hughes, The Tyrant of the Family." Hughes was labeled "male violence," "defiant," and "tyrant," and has been criticized by feminists ever since.
Hughes chose to remain silent, trying to keep his two growing children safe from the media. In the year of Ah Xia's suicide, Hughes's mother also died, and under the influence of this, Hughes once stopped writing poetry and only wrote fairy tale poems for children.
It was not until his death in 1998 that Hughes published a collection of poems in honor of Plath, The Birthday Letter. It was a belated confession and healing, after which the attack on Hughes gradually subsided.
Unfortunately, dominoes continue to fall, and on March 24, 2009, Hughes' son, Nicholas Hughes, committed suicide at his home in Alaska. This is the fourth of Hughes' loved ones to die by suicide.
02
Writing about the witch spirits of animals
Put aside the clouds of gossip and look at Hughes as a poet.
Hughes was born in the village of Maitroyd, West Yorkshire, along the Pennines, and later moved to the town of Mexborough, essentially a mountain dweller. It is also the home of the Brontë sisters, where the story of Wuthering Heights takes place. In Hughes' youth, he was often compared to Heathcliff, the male protagonist of Wuthering Heights, "tall and strong, with a tall skeleton, a determined spirit and a talented face." ”
According to Hughes' biography, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, Hughes has been interested in animals since childhood: at the age of three, he bought many lead-based animal models from the market, and often molded animals out of plasticine to build his "own zoo." His fourth birthday present was a thick green-covered animal book, so he began copying pictures of animals. Led by his brother Gerald, he learned to fish, make traps and hunt with a shotgun. However, at the age of 15 he stopped catching animals and began reading and writing poetry instead.
Hughes's early hunting experience was so much in connection with his poetry that he later thought about the two, such as:
The process of creation is hunting, and the result of creation, poetry, is prey.
It's hunting. Poetry is a new creature, a new specimen of life outside of yourself.
You may not think that these two interests have much in common: catching animals and writing poetry, but the more I look back at my past, the more convinced I am that these two interests are the same.
During his two years in the Royal Air Force, Hughes began perusing Shakespeare. He was well acquainted with Shakespeare's works, and classic phrases were readily available. "A Midsummer Night's Dream" and several tragedies are the secret source of Inspiration for Hughes's creation, in which the supernatural factors such as ghosts, witches, elves, omens, ecstasy, and confusion form the initial foundation of his literary literacy. Hughes's later collection of art criticism, Shakespeare and the Almighty, is clear evidence, and it is an important conceptual retracement and homage.
After retiring from the military, Hughes studied English literature at Pembroke College, Cambridge, and soon switched to anthropology and archaeology. This shift also had an important influence on Hughes's poetry.
During his university years, he frequented the Cambridge Watkins Bookstore, which was filled with "occult books", and was interested in shamanism, Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism, Jewish mystical philosophy, alchemy, and mythology. He was fond of the poet Robert Graves' book The White Goddess: The White Goddess of Poetic Mythology, and was fond of Jungian psychoanalysis, claiming that "I approached Jung very early and finished reading the complete Works of Jung in English." These readings enriched his spiritual realm.
Inspired by Yeats's first collection of poems, The Wanderings of Using and Beyond, he also began to collect a wide range of myths and folklore. After Shakespeare, Yeats was the second coordinate that guided Hughes's creative thinking towards maturity. Hughes also played the Oujia Board, tarot cards, and spiritism. After marrying Plath in 1958, he gave her a deck of tarot cards. The two of them often played with psychic boards, and even used them to find creative inspiration and poetic imagery, which was simply a copy of the Yeats.
After graduating from Cambridge in 1954, Hughes moved to London. Over the next two years, he did a lot of interesting work: as a caretaker at London Zoo (which was the choice of interest), as a rose gardener, as a night watchman and school teacher, and as a british film distributor and producer Ranke. After falling in love with and marrying Plath, he went to the United States with him to teach English and creative writing at the Massachusetts State University amherst campus.
In 1956, Plath printed several poems by Hughes and sent them to the Hebrew Society of Young Men and Women in New York. The association hosted the Debut English Poetry Competition, judged by Auden, Stephen Spund and Marianne Moore. Hughes won the prize, and Moore gave a brief review that was concise and certain:
Hughes' talent is unquestionable. The work has a center of gravity, glowing with emotion and conscience. The inspiration for poetry is awakened, and the words are appropriate.
In 1957, Hughes's first collection of poems, The Eagle in the Rain, was published by Eliot's Farber Press, for which he won the Harper Publishing Prize. Subsequently, in 1959, he was awarded the Guinness Book of Poetry Prize. That same year, a second collection of poems, Lupercal, won the Maugham Prize and the Hawthorn Prize. Hughes's literary fortunes were very good, and he successfully ascended to the poetry scene.
Lupercal
In 1967, he published the poetry collection Wodwo, based on the medieval love legend Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In 1971, while traveling to Iran, he wrote the poem Orghast. Later collections of poems include Crow (1970), Season Songs (1976), Gaudete (1977), Moortown (1979), Remains of Elmet (1979), and River (1983).
He also wrote numerous reviews and essays, and collaborated with the British playwright Peter Brooke on the translations of Seneca's Oedipus, German playwright Vidykind's The Awakening Of Spring, Lorca's The Wedding of Blood, Racine's Federa, Euripides's Alkistis, and Aeschylus's Orestea.
Hughes received the Queen's Prize for Poetry in 1974 and the Imperial Medal of Honor (OBE) in 1977. In 1984, he succeeded John Bergermann as Poet Laureate. He received almost all the awards and the highest recognition he could receive as an English poet.
It seems to me that the title and content of the second collection of poems, Lupercal, reveal both Hughes's poetic style and worldly destiny. Originally an ancient festival celebrating the Roman pastoral god "Lupocus" (also strongly influenced by the Greek myth of "Pan"), the Feast of the Shepherds, later evolved into Valentine's Day. Hughes is known for his ability to write animal poetry, and has long been immersed in hunting and animals, dreams and illusions, unconscious and psychoanalysis, shamans and witchcraft, anthropology and mythology, and mystical philosophy, and his writing can be seen as the resurrection of the "spirit of the shepherd spirit" in modern society.
When we understand Hughes's love history, we will find that he is also an unconsciously destructive "shepherd Pan" in real life (in Greek mythology, the half-human, half-sheep "Pan" is a symbol of creativity, music, poetry, dreams, horror and sex, and "Pan" often hides in the forest to court the Nyingv fairies). As a metaphor, this can also be used to decipher his private life and the fate of the women around him.
03
Compensation and strikeback
Hughes published nearly fifty collections of poems, essays, and stories during his lifetime, about half of which were children's literature. Since 1961, he published a collection of children's poems, Meet My Family! He wrote more than 20 children's poems, plays, and stories, such as "Monsters without Rules Nice", "Moon-Whale and Other Moon Poems", "Song of the Seasons", "Under the North Star", "What is the Truth?" "Cats and Cuckoos", "Mermaid's Handbag" and so on, many of which have become classics. In 1999, Warner Bros. based on his children's science fiction novel Iron Man, the animated film Iron Giant. He also co-edited two best-selling children's poetry anthologies with the poet Heaney, The Clicking Bag and The School Bag. He has been a judge of the Daily Watch Children's Literature Competition and the W.H. Smith National Literary Competition for more than twenty consecutive years.
Hughes's passion for children's literature was a compensation for the lack of family life in his early years, and the young "shepherd Pan" finally returned to peaceful fraternity. This made me feel a lot of respect and good feelings for him.
In January 1998, Hughes published a collection of poems, Birthday Letters, a few months before his death. This is the collection of 88 poems he has written over the past 30 years, a poetic memoir, and a book to heal the wounds. Many of the poems recall his life with Plath and confess his deep love for Plath, with precise and vivid details and full of anxious and sincere emotions. As soon as it was published, it became the front page news of major London newspapers and received numerous praises.
However, while compensating, Hughes also issued a shocking accusation in the "Birthday Letter", which launched a powerful counterattack against the social opinion that had besieged him for a long time. For example, a poem titled "Dogs Eat Your Mother" describes the media newspapers, gossipers, and feminists who have been chewing their tongues tirelessly for years as wild dogs, hounds, and hyenas that bite the bodies of the dead (animal poetry is Hughes's unique weapon of self-defense), and the poem is almost cursed.
《I-Nichishin-shin-
04
Interaction with contemporaries
In 1953, Auden was invited by the literary critic Elizabeth Drew to visit Smith College and held a reading in Drew's living room, where Plath, who was attending the school, was there. She described Auden as having a "sackcloth-like voice and a crisp and clean expression", and wrote the following sentiments in her diary that night:
Oh God, if this is life, a rush in the middle of a half-understanding, a smell of beer and cheese sandwiches, noble eyes, confident thoughts, please let me see brightly, escape the pain of schoolwork...
Auden can be said to have inadvertently opened The Path of Plath's Poet.
Hughes also intersected with Auden, who said in an interview with the Paris Review:
I've only seen Auden more than a greeting on two occasions. It was at a poetry festival in 1966. Our conversation was very brief. He said, "What do you think of David Jones's Anathemata? I replied, "It's a work of genius, a masterpiece." He said, "Correct." That's it. Another occasion was after the 1966 Evening of the International Poetry Festival on London's SouthBank, when he was attacking Neruda. I listened to him denigrate him. ...... Sometime in my early twenties, I almost swallowed Auden, or tried to swallow. His presence was felt everywhere in the climate at that time. He has some works that I have always admired very much. I admire his Goethe side, where all his remarks are filled with a dazzling natural brilliance. But I never felt any real poetic affinity with him. I don't think he's a poet who inspires me to dig my own thing.
Hughes and Elliot are more on the same page. On May 4, 1960, after accepting an invitation, he and Plath went to Eliot's house for dinner, accompanied by Stephen Spund. Hughes later wrote to Eliot a collection of commentaries, Dancers of the Gods: To T.S. Eliot, calling Elliot an important initiator of his poetic ideas. He had a high opinion of Elliot:
In my opinion, he was a very great poet. One of the very few.
To the poet W. S. Merwin), Hughes, with special affection and recognition:
Mervyn and I have always been close. I met him in the late fifties through Jack Svenney, who was managing Harvard's Ramon Poetry Library. They had a house in London, and when Sylvia and I came back there in late 1959, they helped us a lot in real life and in many other ways. Dido Mervyn found us an apartment, then half-renovated it and cooked something for Sylvia to eat after our daughter was born. That was the high point of my friendship with Mervyn. He was an important writer for me at the time.
Hughes has relationships with poet Heaney and Frey Hill, who died in 2016. He worked with Heaney and compiled poetry readings for teenagers. Hughes gave Heaney a lot of encouragement, but it is said that after reading Heaney's poems earlier, he suggested that Heaney switch to "eel fishing." Heaney has always defended Hughes, sometimes even justifying his actions.
On October 28, 1998, Ted Hughes died at the age of 68 after 18 months of cancer. On 13 May of the following year, a memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey in London, where Heaney wrote a memorial essay, "The Great Man, the Great Poet," praising Hughes as "the genius of the other shore," "the spiritual guardian of the land and the English language," and "as immortal as The First English Poet, Cadmund, at the Seventh-Century Whitby Monastery." While highly praising his literary contributions, Heaney also mentions the trauma that his personal life has inflicted on Hughes:
Personal and historical misfortunes left him scarred. He led the prophet to the awakening of fate, and he was bound to suffer some kind of torture.
As for how to deal with setbacks, Hughes himself wrote this in a letter to a friend:
All I tried to do was strip naked, become naked, and trudge through it.
A nearly destroyed "modern shepherd", just like the spirit beast he repeatedly writes about in his poems, is tenaciously resisting the storm of fate until death.
05
Translation into history back in time
Hughes's poems were introduced to China very late.
In 1983, the eighth issue of foreign literature magazine published four Hughes poems translated by Zhengheng of Cambridge University, "Dedication", "New Year's Passion", "March, Unusual Morning", and "Memory", which was the first translation of Hughes's poem in China. However, the translation is his later poems, not masterpieces.
In March 1987, Liu Zhanqiu's "Selected Foreign Poems of the 1980s" was selected by Mr. Yuan Kejia's translation of "The Crow Flies Down"; in April, the "Selected Poems of The Twentieth Century Anglo-American Comfort" selected five poems "Kafka", "Snow Lotus", "Theology", "How Water Began to Play" and "Leaves"; the "Selected Foreign Poems of the 20th Century" by Sichuan Literature and Art Publishing House selected Wang Yangle's translation of "The Fox of Thought" and Zheng Heng's translation of "March, Unusual Morning".
In April 1988, Wu Di's compilation of "Wild Swans - 100 Selected Foreign Lyric Poems of the 20th Century" selected and translated four poems of Hughes, "Owl Perched on the Branches", "Thistle", "Bagpipe Song", and "Childlike Prank"; in September, the "Selected English Poems" edited by Mr. Wang Zuoliang selected eight translations by Mr. Yuan Kejia, namely "The Horse Herd", "The Wind", "The Perched Eagle", "Her Husband", "The Dance of the Rats", "Thistle", "The First Lesson of the Crow", and "The Last Stronghold of the Crow", which was the most widely circulated translation before. These eight poems were also the earliest Hughes poems I personally read, and they left a deep impression at the time.
Since then, the Taiwanese poet Chen Li has translated 21 poems of Hughes, and other translators such as Tu An, Wei Bai and Bai Yuanbao have also translated them.
The translation of "Eagles in the Rain and Others: 1957-1994" in his hand is the first comprehensive translation of Hughes's poems in China, which is certainly worth celebrating.
06
Comparison of translations of the same poem
Here, Hughes's masterpiece The Thought-Fox is taken as an example, and a brief comparison between Yuan Kejia's translation and Zeng Jing's translation is briefly compared. I had also carefully read Crow's Last Stand and Horses , but I had to abandon them.
Regarding the title of the poem, both Yuan and Zeng translated it as "The Fox of Thought". The poem is divided into six sections, arranged in sections between the original text and the two translations for ease of reading.
The original text of the first verse:
I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
Comments: The structure of the first sentence is not complicated, and there are no strange words. Relatively speaking, Yuan Yi's expression of the transition sentence is clearer, and the timbre restoration is better. It is not appropriate to translate the "except" of the transition relationship into the "accompaniment" of the parallel relationship; in addition, the translation of my fingers move into "my finger rubbing" also deviates from the original text, which is not as accurate as "my finger moves".
The original text of the second section:
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Comments: The first line of Yuan translation is divided into two paragraphs, and the effect is better. Lines two through four are a whole sentence, something in the second line is connected to the width darkness at the end of the third line, and more near though deeper is a modification of something. This paragraph of Yuan translation and Zeng translation is slightly too blunt and not fluent enough. If it were to be adjusted, it might be translated as follows: Hidden in the shadows / Something is getting closer / Is walking into this loneliness.
The original text of the third section:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Comments: In the first line of this section, Dark snow has been translated as "snow in the dark night", which is more accurate than Yuan's translation into "black snow", but this metaphor is used to describe the calmness and lightness of the fox's nose when it touches branches and leaves. In the last two lines, a movement refers to an action, and the now that appears four times in a row has a continuous superposition effect on the recitation, and Yuan translation uses four "one click" as a restoration, which is very good. In this regard, the gap between the translations is relatively large, and "intermittently" has appeared in the original poem without adding embellishments and changes.
Sections IV and V:
Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Comments: These two verses have a concatenated meaning relationship. There is a hidden subject It in the first line of the fourth verse, and the Yuan translation has the appearance of "it", while the Zeng translation does not appear; however, neat here means "neat", and the Yuan translation understands it as "clear", deviating from the original text. Lag by means to walk slowly, Yuan translated as "drag past", once translated as "falling", are not accurate enough. In addition, the last two sentences of the fourth verse and the fifth verse are connected, and here it is written that the illusion of the fox deforming into the poet's body is the poetic eye part of the whole poem, but neither the Yuan translation nor the Zeng translation conveys this very well. The point is that bold to come across clearings is to decorate the front a body. If adjusted, these two verses may be translated as follows:
It stays in the snow in the woods
Neat footprints, a lame shadow
Carefully walk through the tree stumps,
Got into someone who boldly crossed the open field
Of the body, one
Wide, deep green eyes,
Brilliantly, with full concentration
Started its own work.
The original text of the sixth section:
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox,
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
Comments: In the last section, Yuan translation and Zeng translation are good. However, the first line of the translation of "fox hot smell" feels a little strange; the first line of Yuan's translation can also be more concise, which can be adjusted to "until it suddenly emits a hot and pungent fox smell". Regarding the tail line, Yuan Yi added the action of "writing" that did not appear in the original text, and it seems that it can be adjusted to "and the handwriting appears on the paper" is more appropriate.
The Fox of Thought is the opening of Hughes's animal poem, and just as Coleridge wrote Kublai Khan after waking up from a nap, it also comes from a real dream. In 1993, Hughes recounted the dream in detail in the article "The Burning Fox". It was a winter night in 1953, when Hughes was still studying English at Cambridge University and was struggling with a weekly essay assignment. At about two o'clock in the evening, he had a dream after going to bed. He dreamed that he was still sitting at his desk, that the door was open, and that a burning fox had entered the room from the stove. Hughes' recollection is so clear:
Its eyes were filled with astonishing intense pain. It got closer and closer until it stood beside me. I can now see clearly that its hands are human-like. It spread its palms, which were burning and bleeding like the rest of its body. It spread its palms flat on the blank part of the piece of paper on my desk. At this point, it says, 'Don't write —you're destroying us.' When it lifted its palm, I saw a bloody handprint left on the white paper, like a specimen looking at the palm. The handprints on this paper are well-defined, clearly palmed, wet, and glittering with blood.
The memory of the dream was so strong that two years later Hughes wrote The Fox of Thought. His lecture on the BBC's Listen and Write programme was later compiled into a book, The Forge of Poetry, which talks about the creative feeling:
This is a real fox. Whenever I read the poem, I see it moving, I see it spread out its claws, I see its shadow moving on the uneven snow. The words in the poem show me this, bringing it closer and closer.
The Forge of Poetry
After "The Fox of Thought", Hughes repeatedly wrote about animals, such as "Eagle in the Rain", "Eagle Perched on the Branches", "Jaguar", "Second Eye Jaguar", "Pig Perspective", "Wolf Howl", "Lark" and "Song of the Rat", and the birds, beasts, insects and fish have become his poems in large quantities, and the number is very amazing. In 1970, Hughes wrote a collection of poems "The Crow" with the crow as the protagonist. He became the best animal poet in English poetry after Blake and Lawrence.
07
Translator's counterpoint
Dreams, ecstasy, fear, hallucinations, such creative experiences are indeed similar to the shaman's witch possession. Hughes's lifelong dream has a great relationship with poetry creation! In a 1970 interview about the writing of the "Crow" poetry collection, he also mentioned that many poems appear automatically, and the writing process is very fast, like an "electric shock". At first glance, this may sound similar to the completely random "automatic writing" of Surrealism, but the two are obviously different, because each of Hughes's creations has a deep experience of dreams and a long-term brewing rumination.
I said in another previous book review, "Wonderful Rise - A Brief Review", that literary translation is similar to the lens of a language device, the ability to understand the original text is the transparency of the mirror body, and the ability to communicate in the mother tongue is the convex curvature of the mirror surface, the more transparent the mirror body (not detached from the original meaning), the smaller the convex curvature (not deviating from the original author's style), the higher the degree of reduction of the translation. Translators not only need to have a keen understanding of the original text, but also have excellent native language skills to approach and convey the language style, subtle mood and overall atmosphere of the original work.
To translate the poems of a shamanic poet like Hughes, across the obstacles of linguistic Babita, it is especially necessary to have a full understanding of the poet's ideological background, creative generation methods and linguistic characteristics. Hughes's poetry of the Witch Spirit also looks for a corresponding wizard in the Chinese context—a translator who immerses himself in it.
The reason why Mr. Yuan Kejia gave me a strong impression on the Hughes translation in the 1980s was mainly because of the impact of language. From the comparison of the previous translation, it can be seen that he must have undergone a long period of deliberation.
In the "Afterword" to Eagles in the Rain and Others: Selected Poems 1957-1994, the translator Zeng Jing humbled himself before translating the collection of poems, "did not have a comprehensive understanding of Ted Hughes and his poetry, let alone a deep understanding", and it took about a year and a half to complete the first translation, and then spent nearly three months proofreading and polishing. I think that if there is more adequate preparation and longer polishing and revision, the performance of this translated poetry collection will be even better.
The translation is not a solidified existence, but a dynamic process of continuous improvement. I look forward to future revisions of this translation.
Note: Part of this article refers to Ling Zhe's "Ted Hughes Poetics Research".
Written by 丨Ma Mingqian
Editor 丨 Zhang Jin, Xiao Shuyan
Proofreading 丨 Zhang Yanjun
Source: Beijing News