2022年4月1日 星期五

‎Sylvia‬ Plath, The Bell Jar《瓶中美人》





"I Want, I Want" by Sylvia Plath
Open-mouthed, the baby god
Immense, bald, though baby-headed,
Cried out for the mother's dug.
The dry volcanoes cracked and split,
Sand abraded the milkless lip.
Cried then for the father's blood
Who set wasp, wolf and shark to work,
Engineered the gannet's beak.
Dry-eyed, the inveterate patriarch
Raised his men of skin and bone,
Barbs on the crown of gilded wire,
Thorns on the bloody rose-stem."
With this startling, exhilarating book of poems, which was first published in 1960, Sylvia Plath burst into literature with spectacular force. In such classics as "The Beekeeper's Daughter," "The Disquieting Muses," "I Want, I Want," and "Full Fathom Five," she writes about sows and skeletons, fathers and suicides, about the noisy imperatives of life and the chilly hunger for death. Graceful in their craftsmanship, wonderfully original in their imagery, and presenting layer after layer of meaning, the forty poems in The Colossus are early artifacts of genius that still possess the power to move, delight, and shock.




Sylvia Plath(The Bell Jar《瓶中美人》作者,英國桂冠詩人Ted Hughes之妻)

Sanity may represent our nominal ideal, but Sylvia Plath and John Nash are the box-office draws.
draw
Attract (someone) to come to a place or anevent:you really drew the crowds with your playing

台灣似乎出版過一本中英對照  ‎Sylvia‬ Plath 詩選
美國新聞記者﹑作家珍妮特"馬爾科姆(Janet Malcolm,1934-)在寫關于美國著名女詩人希爾維亞 普拉斯(Sylvia Plath﹐1932-1963)時把傳記作者比作一個"職業竊賊﹐破門而入﹐在他們認為很可能有珠寶與金錢的地方翻箱倒櫃﹐並席卷贓物凱旋而去"。




Sylvia Plath was born in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts in 1932. Although best known as a poet, she also wrote a semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, in which the main character, Esther Greenwood, a bright college student interning at a fashion magazine, suffers a mental breakdown and attempts suicide. Plath, like Esther, attended Smith College and was awarded an internship at a magazine in New York, however, it was just after this experience that Plath made her first suicide attempt and was committed to a mental institution.
On leaving the institution Plath graduated from Smith and obtained a scholarship to Cambridge University in England where she met and later married poet Ted Hughes. In 1960 Plath published her first collection of poetry, the remaining volumes of her work being published posthumously following a successful suicide attempt in 1963.

台灣將這Sylvia Plath名著The Bell Jar 翻譯成「瓶中美人」(鄭至慧譯,先覺,1999 年)
本書是50年代美國著名作家Slyvia Plath的最後一部作品在她的一生中充滿著不幸而這些
不幸不但讓她在生命中最精華的一刻死去同時也讓她所有的作品沾染了她一部份的人生而這 本書The Bell
Jar就是她以自身的大學經驗和幾樣她自身的設定而寫的自傳型小說 ...The Bell Jar



Experiments using a bell jar

It can be sealed, which allows it to be used in a classroom science
experiment involving an alarm clock and a vacuum pump. The air is
pumped out of the sealed bell jar, and the noise of the alarm clock
fades, thus proving that sound travels through vibrations in matter,
not as waves.


Sylvia Plath read by Harriet Walter

Mushrooms

Overnight, very
Whitely, discreetly,
Very quietly

Our toes, our noses
Take hold on the loam,
Acquire the air.

Nobody sees us,
Stops us, betrays us;
The small grains make room.

Soft fists insist on
Heaving the needles,
The leafy bedding,

Even the paving.
Our hammers, our rams,
Earless and eyeless,

Perfectly voiceless,
Widen the crannies,
Shoulder through holes. We

Diet on water,
On crumbs of shadow,
Bland-mannered, asking

Little or nothing.
So many of us!
So many of us!

We are shelves, we are
Tables, we are meek,
We are edible,

Nudgers and shovers
In spite of ourselves.
Our kind multiplies:

We shall by morning
Inherit the earth.
Our foot's in the door.


The American poet ‪#‎Sylvia‬ Plath was born ‪#‎onthisday‬ in 1932. Hear Harriet Walter reading her poetry. http://bit.ly/1yFaXHj
The American poet #Sylvia Plath was born #onthisday in 1932. Hear Harriet Walter reading her poetry. http://bit.ly/1yFaXHj

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