Mad Girl's Love Song
Sylvia Plath
"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)
疯女孩的情歌
我闭上双眼这世界就坠落消失；
我睁开双眼万物会再升起。
（我想我的痴心编织了你。）
星星在晚霞中跳着华尔兹，
而那黑暗肆意奔袭：
我闭上双眼这世界就坠落消失。
我梦着你把我迷倒在床里
你唱得我失魂， 你吻得我狂痴。
（我想我的痴心编织了你。）
神从天空跌下， 地狱的火也将息：
走出的是撒旦和天使：
我闭上双眼这世界就坠落消失。
我梦着你守着诺言和归期，
直到衰老得忘记你的名字。
（我想我的痴心编织了你。）
我本该把雷鸟来爱惜；
至少春天是它们的归期。
我闭上双眼这世界就坠落消失。
（我想我的痴心编织了你。）
“Last Letter” by Ted Hughes
What happened that night? Your final night.Double, treble
exposureOver everything. Late afternoon, Friday,My last sight of
you alive.
Burning your letter to me, in the ashtray,With that strange smile.
Had I bungled your plan?Had it surprised me sooner than you
purposed?Had I rushed it back to you too promptly?
One hour later—-you would have been goneWhere I could not
have traced you.I would have turned from your locked red
doorThat nobody would open
Still holding your letter,A thunderbolt that could not earth
itself.That would have been electric shock treatmentFor me.
Repeated over and over, all weekend,As often as I read it, or
thought of it.
That would have remade my brains, and my life.The treatment
that you planned needed some time.
I cannot imagineHow I would have got through that weekend.I
cannot imagine. Had you plotted it all?Your note reached me too
soon—-that same day,Friday afternoon, posted in the
morning.The prevalent devils expedited it.That was one more
straw of ill-luckDrawn against you by the Post-OfficeAnd added to
your load. I moved fast,Through the snow-blue, February, London
twilight.Wept with relief when you opened the door.A huddle of
riddles in solution. Precocious tearsThat failed to interpret to me,
failed to divulgeTheir real import. But what did you sayOver the
smoking shards of that letterSo carefully annihilated, so
calmly,That let me release you, and leave youTo blow its ashes
off your plan—-off the ashtrayAgainst which you would lean for
me to readThe Doctor’s phone-number.
My escapeHad become such a
hunted thingSleepless, hopeless, all its dreams exhausted,Only
wanting to be recaptured, onlyWanting to drop, out of its
vacuum.Two days of dangling nothing. Two days gratis.Two days
in no calendar, but stolenFrom no world,Beyond actuality, feeling,
or name.My love-life grabbed it. My numbed love-lifeWith its two
mad needles,Embroidering their rose, piercing and tuggingAt their
tapestry, their bloody tattooSomewhere behind my navel,Treading
that morass of emblazon,Two mad needles, criss-crossing their
stitches,Selecting among my nervesFor their colours, refashioning
meInside my own skin, each refashioning the other
With their self-caricatures,Their obsessed in and out. Two
womenEach with her needle.
That nightMy dellarobbia Susan. I
movedWith the circumspectionOf a flame in a fuse. My whole
furyWas an abandoned effort to blow upThe old globe where
shadows bent overMy telltale track of ashes. I racedFrom and
from, face backwards, a film reversed,Towards what? We went to
Rugby StWhere you and I began.
Why did we go there? Of all placesWhy did we go there?
PerversityIn the artistry of our fateAdjusted its refinements for
you, for meAnd for Susan. SolitairePlayed by the Minotaur of that
mazeEven included Helen, in the ground-floor flat.You had noted
her—-a girl for a story.You never met her. Few ever met
her,Except across the ears and raving maskOf her Alsatian. You
had not even glimpsed her.You had only recoiledWhen her
demented animal crashed its weightAgainst her door, as we
slipped through the hallway;And heard it choking on infinite
German hatred.
That Sunday night she eased her door openIts few permitted
inches.Susan greeted the black eyes, the unhappyOverweight,
lovely face, that peeped outAcross the little chain. The door
closed.We heard her consoling her jailorInside her cell, its kennel,
where, days later,She gassed her ferocious kupo, and herself.
Susan and I spent that nightIn our wedding bed. I had not seen
itSince we lay there on our wedding day.I did not take her back to
my own bed.It had occurred to me, your weekend over,You might
appear—-a surprise visitation.Did you appear, to tap at my dark
window?So I stayed with Susan, hiding from you,In our own
wedding bed—-the same from whichWithin three years she would
be taken to dieIn that same hospital where, within twelve hours,I
would find you dead.
Monday morningI drove her to work, in the City,Then parked my
van North of Euston RoadAnd returned to where my telephone
waited.What happened that night, inside your hours,Is as
unknown as if it never happened.
What accumulation of your whole life,Like effort unconscious, like
birthPushing through the membrane of each slow secondInto the
next, happenedOnly as if it could not happen,As if it was not
happening. How oftenDid the phone ring there in my empty
room,You hearing the ring in your receiver—-At both ends the
fading memoryOf a telephone ringing, in a brainAs if already
dead. I countHow often you walked to the phone-boothAt the
bottom of St George’s terrace.
You are there whenever I look, just turningOut of Fitzroy Road,
crossing overBetween the heaped up banks of dirty sugar.In your
long black coat,With your plait coiled up at the back of your
hairYou walk unable to move, or wake, and areAlready nobody
walkingWalking by the railings under Primrose HillTowards the
phone booth that can never be reached.Before midnight. After
midnight. Again.Again. Again. And, near dawn, again.
At what position of the hands on my watch-faceDid your last
attempt,Already deeply pastMy being able to hear it, shake the
pillowOf that empty bed? A last timeLightly touch at my books,
and my papers?By the time I got there my phone was asleep.
The pillow innocent. My room slept,Already filled with the snowlit
morning light.I lit my fire. I had got out my papers.And I had
started to write when the telephoneJerked awake, in a jabbering
alarm,Remembering everything. It recovered in my hand.Then a
voice like a selected weaponOr a measured injection,Coolly
delivered its four wordsDeep into my ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’
最后一封信
那晚发生了什么？ 你的最后一晚。
双重， 三重曝光了
每一件事。 周五， 近黄昏，
最后一眼活着的你。
烟灰缸里， 燃着给我的信，
伴着你诡秘的笑容。 我破坏了你的计划？
是我的惊惶来得早过你的计划？
是我太快地带着信找到你？
一小时后-你本该已去
到了我无法找到的地方。
我愿已转身离开你紧锁的
无人再开的红门。
依然攥着你的信，
像一道闪电不能落下。
那本该是我需要的电休克
治疗。
一遍遍， 整个周末，
我不停地读它， 想它。
愿那重塑我的头脑， 我的生活。
你计划的治疗还需要时间。
我无法想象
如何熬过那周末。
我无法想象。 你谋划了这一切？
你的信来得太快－就在同一天，
那个周五下午， 虽然早晨才寄出。
无处不在的魔鬼加快了投递。
那是又一束厄运的稻草
邮局载着它和你为敌。
给你更重的负担。 我迅速，
穿过二月里， 蓝雪的， 伦敦夜。
直到你开门时慰藉的泪水才流出。
纠结的谜题等着解决。 早来的泪水
没能让我理解， 让我解开
它们深藏的含义。 可是你的话
透过那封信燃烧的烟雾
如此小心， 冷静地消除我的顾虑，
以致我由着你， 任着你
吹散落在你的计划上的， 烟灰缸上的灰烬
而没有让你靠着我说出
医生的电话号码。
我的逃脱
已是如此的纠缠
无眠， 无望， 出现在所有的梦里。
只愿重被捕获， 只
愿跌落， 跌落出它的抽吸。
两天的无牵挂。 两天的赏赐。
从日历里抹去的两天， 被
偷走，
偷走了那个现实，感情， 和名字的世界。
我的情爱生活抓住了它。 我麻木了的情爱生活
用它两枚疯狂的针，
刺穿撕扯， 绣着它们的玫瑰，
在我肚脐后面某处， 图案里，
血色的纹身，
践踏着纹章的泥沼，
两枚疯狂的针，针迹交叉着，
依着颜色
挑选着我的神经， 在我的皮肤里
重塑我， 每人用自己的漫画
重塑另一人的作品，
他们沉迷其中。 两个女人
每人都用自己的针。
那晚
我的雕刻家苏珊。 我同行
谨慎得如同面对
保险丝上的火焰。 我所有的愤怒
是无谓的努力去炸毁
这旧世界， 在那里阴影
笼罩着泄露我的灰迹。 我飞奔
往复， 倒退着， 反过来的底片，
朝向哪里？ 我们去了如格比街
你和我开始的地方。
你为何去那？ 所有的地方里，
你为何去那？ 是我们命运
的艺术化的乖僻
为你， 为我， 也为为苏珊
精密地调整。 迷宫里的
人身牛头怪玩的纸牌谜游戏
甚至包括海伦， 在公寓的底层。
你提起过她－有故事的女孩。
你从未见过她。 几乎无人见过她。
除了她的牧羊犬的耳朵
和说胡话的面具。 你甚至没有瞥过她。
你只躲闪过
当发狂的狗用身体撞击
她的门， 当我们溜过走廊；
听到它因不停的德国腔的仇恨而哽噎。
那个周日晚上她稍稍把门开了
只几寸。
苏珊问候那黑眼睛的， 不高兴
超重的， 可爱的脸， 从链子上
窥视的脸。 门关了。
我们听到她安慰她的看门狗
在她的小房间里， 在狗的小屋里， 就在那， 几天后，
她用煤气杀死了她的凶残的狗， 和她自己。
在你和我的婚床上
苏珊和我度过了那晚。 自从结婚日我们躺在那
我还没见过那张床。
我没有带她去我的床。
我以为， 周末结束时，
你会出现－突然造访。
你来了吗， 敲了黑暗的窗吗？
我同着苏珊， 躲着你，
在我们的婚床－就是那张床，
三年后从那她被送到医院
死在那里； 就是那个医院，
十二小时后我寻到死去的你。
星期一的早晨
我送她去上班， 在市里，
然后在优斯顿路北停车
再回到我的电话等待的地方。
你最后的几个小时发生的事，
就如同从未发生过一样无法知晓。
你一生的积累，
比如无意识的努力， 比如出生时
缓慢地一秒秒的冲破每一层膜
进入到下一层， 发生过
就如同它不可能发生过，
如同不在发生。 有多少次
我的空房里电话会响，
你听着听筒里的铃声－
在两端关于电话铃声
的记忆在褪去， 在头脑里
如同它已死去。 我数着
有多少次你走到圣乔治
平台下的电话亭。
任何时候我看你都在那， 刚刚转出
菲之罗伊路， 穿过
肮脏的凹凸的路面。
穿着黑色长大衣，
你的辫子盘起在脑后
你走着没有移动， 没有醒来， 而且
无人左右
靠着扶手走在普莱罗斯山下
朝着永不会到达的电话亭。
午夜前。 午夜后。 再一次。
再一次。 再一次。 而， 拂晓， 再一次。
你最后想将我手表上的指针
停在哪里，
已远远超过了
我能听到的， 摇着空床上的
枕头？ 最后一次
轻触我的书， 和我的手稿？
我到时我的电话已入睡。
无辜的枕头。 我的房间睡着了，
已充满了映雪的晨光。
我点燃火。 取出我的手稿。
当我动笔时电话
突然响起， 急促的铃声，
想起每一件事。 我拿起听筒。
然后那声音如同精选过的武器
或计算好的注射，
冷冷的说出四个字
深深的传到我耳里：“你的妻子死了。”
Ted Hughes poem 'inspired by row with Sylvia Plath shortly before
she died'
Edward James (Ted) Hughes was born in Mytholmroyd, in the
West Riding district of Yorkshire, on August 17, 1930. His
childhood was quiet and dominately rural. When he was seven
years old his family moved to the small town of Mexborough in
South Yorkshire, and the landscape of the moors of that area
informed his poetry throughout his life.
After high school, Hughes entered the Royal Air Force and served
for two years as a ground wireless mechanic. He then moved to
Cambridge to attend Pembroke College on an academic
scholarship. While in college he published a few poems, majored
in Anthropolgy and Archaeology, and studied mythologies
extensively.
Hughes graduated from Cambridge in 1954. A few years later, in
1956, he cofounded the literary magazine St. Botolph’s Review
with a handful of other editors. At the launch party for the
magazine, he met Sylvia Plath . A few short months later, on June
16, 1956, they were married.
Plath encouraged Hughes to submit his first manuscript, The
Hawk in the Rain, to The Poetry Center's First Publication book
contest. The judges— Marianne Moore , W. H. Auden , and
Stephen Spender —awarded the manuscript first prize, and it was
published in England and America in 1957, to much critical praise.
Hughes lived in Massachusetts with Plath and taught at University
of Massachusetts, Amherst. They returned to England in 1959,
and their first child, Freida, was born the following year. Their
second child, Nicholas, was born two years later.
In 1962, Hughes left Plath for Assia Gutmann Wevill. Less than a
year later, Plath committed suicide. Hughes did not write again for
years, as he focused all of his energy on editing and promoting
Plath’s poems. He was also roundly lambasted by the public, who
saw him as responsible for his wife’s suicide. Controversy
surrounded his editorial choices regarding Plath’s poems and
journals.
In 1965, Wevill gave birth to their only child, Shura. Four years
later, like Plath, she also commited suicide, killing Shura as well.
The following year, in 1970, Hughes married Carol Orchard, with
whom he remained married until his death.
Hughes’s lengthy career included over a dozen books of poetry,
translations, non-fiction and children’s books, such as the famous
The Iron Man (1968). His books of poems include: Wolfwatching
(1990), Flowers and Insects (1986), Selected Poems 1957–1981
(1982), Moortown (1980), Cave Birds (1979), Crow (1971), and
Lupercal (1960). His final collection, The Birthday Letters (Farrar,
Straus & Giroux, 1998), published the year of his death,
documented his relationship with Plath.
Hughes's work is marked by a mythical framework, using the lyric
and dramatic monologue to illustrate intense subject matter.
Animals appear frequently throughout his work as deity,
metaphor, persona, and icon. Perhaps the most famous of his
subjects is "Crow," an amalgam of god, bird and man, whose
existence seems pivotal to the knowledge of good and evil.
Hughes won many of Europe’s highest literary honors, and was
appointed Poet Laureate of England in 1984, a post he held until
his death. He passed away in October 28, 1998, in Devonshire,
England, from cancer.
Selected Bibliography
Poetry
The Hawk in the Rain (1957)
Pike (1959)
Lupercal (1960)
Crow (1971)
Cave Birds (1979)
Moortown (1980)
Selected Poems 1957-1981 (1982)
Flowers and Insects (1986)
Wolfwatching (1990)
The Birthday Letters (1998)
Biography says poem about night poet’s first wife killed herself
drew on row the couple had about her leaving him
Ted Hughes’s poem Last Letter describes what happened during
the three days leading up to Plath’s suicide in February 1963.
Nadia Khomami
@nadiakhomami
Sunday 27 September 2015 06.24 EDT
Last modified on Tuesday 29 September 2015 06.28 EDT
The poem written by Ted Hughes about the night his first wife, the
poet Sylvia Plath, died was inspired by a row the couple had
about her leaving the country, according to a biography. The
poem, entitled Last Letter, was unearthed by Melvyn Bragg for the
first time in 2010 and describes what happened during the three
days leading up to Plath’s suicide in February 1963.
Last Letter begins with the line: “What happened that night? Your
final night?” and ends with the moment Hughes is informed of
Plath’s death: “Then a voice like a selected weapon or a
measured injection, coolly delivered its four words deep into my
ear: ‘Your wife is dead.’”
According to a biography of Hughes by Sir Jonathan Bate,
provost of Worcester College, Oxford, who had “full access, unlike
earlier biographers” to the poet’s archives in the US, as well as to
material held by the British Library, the poem was inspired by an
argument Hughes and Plath had on the weekend of her suicide.
As reported by the Sunday Times , Bate writes that on the Friday
morning of that weekend, Plath sent an “enigmatic parting letter”
to Hughes announcing that she planned to leave the country and
never see him again.
Jonathan Bate says Plath sent an ‘enigmatic parting letter’ to
Hughes saying she planned to leave the country and never see
him again.
She had assumed that the letter would not reach her estranged
husband until Saturday but owing to a speedy second post it
arrived that afternoon. With the letter in hand, an anxious Hughes
rushed to Plath’s home in Primrose Hill, north London, where an
argument ensued. Plath reportedly grabbed the letter from
Hughes and burned it.
“This was their final face-to-face which Ted turned into Last
Letter,” Bate said. “This explains that poem.”
Bate also said that on the following day, Saturday, Plath rang
Hughes only to find his lover, Susan Alliston, answering the
phone. When Alliston passed the receiver to Hughes, he
reportedly told Plath to “take it easy, Sylvie” – as is documented in
a previously unseen diary belonging to Alliston.
Bate writes that Hughes was actually in bed with Alliston on the
night of Plath’s death on Sunday evening. The poet had taken his
lover to the Bloomsbury flat where he and Plath first made love
seven years earlier and where they also spent their wedding
night. On Monday, he found out about his wife’s death.
That incident and Hughes’s subsequent feelings of guilt are said
to have been central to the rest of his life. “However hard he
attempted to get away from it, he never could,” Bate writes.
The biographer spoke for the first time to several women with
whom Hughes had relationships, including his first serious
girlfriend, Shirley, whom the poet met at Cambridge. The book
also contains information about Hughes’s relationship with Assia
Wevill, who killed herself in 1969, leaving a note that stated the
couple could not live together “because of the memory of Sylvia”.
Five years after Plath’s death, it is said that Hughes had become
embroiled in a love tangle between Wevill, a trainee nurse named
Carol Orchard, whom he later married, and another woman
named Brenda Hedden.
Hughes is said to have called the women A, B, and C. In a
previously unseen journal, he wrote: “3 beautiful women – all in
love, and a separate life of joy visible with each, all possessed but
own soul lost.” In a separate poem, he added: “Which bed? Which
bride? Which breast’s comfort.”
“In other words, Ted could not decide,” Bate said.
Bate was unable to continue his planned “literary life” of Hughes
with the full cooperation of his estate after Hughes’s widow, Carol,
withdrew her support for the book. The unauthorised biography is
published next week by William Collins.
His father drove his mother to kill herself. So what does the suicide of Ted Hughes' son tell us about his
poisonous legacy?
By GEOFFREY LEVY FOR MAILONLINE
UPDATED: 04:33 EST, 24 March 2009
•
View comments
For her it was a gas oven, for him a rope. First the mother and then, 46 years later, the son. The tragic
suicide of poet Sylvia Plath's son Nicholas adds a sombre twist to the turbulent drama surrounding the
destructive love life of his father, the late poet laureate Ted Hughes.
Nicholas Hughes, 47, hanged himself at his home in Alaska where he lived alone. It followed years in
which he is said to have battled depression.
His mother's death when she was just 30 was different. Hers was the the final act of despair after Ted
Hughes abandoned her for another woman. When suicide crosses a generation, however, it always
raises questions about the existence of a 'suicide gene'.
Many researchers do believe there is a chemical mutation that encourages self-destruction and that it can
be passed down.
Sylvia Plath with baby Nicholas. Like his mother, he has killed himself
And yet this explanation seems far too convenient for those admiring apologists who see Yorkshire-born
Ted Hughes as a romantic adventurer who just happened to be unlucky with his women.
In reality he was a selfish and ruthless man who was a savage lover and a domestic tyrant.
The fact is, not only did his first wife Sylvia kill herself, but six years later so did the woman for whom he
left her, together with their delightful four-year-old daughter.
If there is, as some suggest, a curse on this far-flung family rather than some genetic complication, has it
not been placed on them by Hughes himself?
Consider what Nicholas must have gone through losing not just one mother during his early childhood,
but effectively two. No wonder he suffered from depression, while his writer and poet elder sister Frieda,
49, has suffered from depression, ME and anorexia.
Nicholas was not married and had no children, though there were girlfriends. For some years he had
been professor of ocean sciences at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, but recently he'd thrown up his
distinguished academic life and turned instead to making pottery at home.
He was a quiet and reflective figure, pleasant and modest. And yet, who knows what dark memories were
always with him, including that momentous morning while in his teens, when his famous, even idolised
father, later to become a member of the Order of Merit, revealed to him and his sister that their mother
had killed herself?
Sylvia Plath's death is one that has been microscopically examined in literature, in poetry, and even in film
in 2004 when Gwyneth Paltrow and Daniel Craig starred in Sylvia.
