Plath & Co.

Annotation :

"The comets
Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.
So your gestures flake off-

Warm and human, then their pink light
Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven.
Why am I given

These lamps, these planets
Falling like blessings, like flakes

Six sided, white
On my eyes, my lips, my hair

Touching and melting.
Nowhere."

Annotation :

I feel it enter me, cold, alien, like an instrument.
And that mad, hard face at the end of it, that O-mouth
Open in its gape of perpetual grieving.
It is she that drags the blood-black sea around
Month after month, with its voices of failure.
I am helpless as the sea at the end of her string.
I am restless. Restless and useless. I, too, create corpses.

I shall move north. I shall move into a long blackness.
I see myself as a shadow, neither man nor woman,
Neither a woman, happy to be like a man, nor a man
Blunt and flat enough to feel no lack. I feel a lack.
I hold my fingers up, ten white pickets.
See, the darkness is leaking from the cracks.
I cannot contain it. I cannot contain my life.

Annotation :

All that summer sprinklers arched
over the seaside grass.
We talked of drought
while the salt-parched
field grew sweet again. To help time pass
I tried to mow the lawn
and in the morning I had my portrait done,
holding my smile in place, till it grew formal.
Once I mailed you a picture of a rabbit
and a postcard of Motif number one,
as if it were normal
to be a mother and be gone.
They hung my portrait in the chill
north light, matching
me to keep me well.
Only my mother grew ill.
She turned from me, as if death were catching,
as if death transferred,
as if my dying had eaten inside of her.
That August you were two, by I timed my days with doubt.
On the first of September she looked at me
and said I gave her cancer.
They carved her sweet hills out
and still I couldn't answer.

Annotation :

"Au centre du poème il y a un autre poème, au centre du centre il y a une absence, au centre de l’absence il y a mon ombre."

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“Please, open the curtains”

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“Grandma, tell me a story” in “The Lagoon”
“I am wanting to write a story” at the onset of “Jan Godfrey,”
“I’m never going to write another story”

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Reprend quelques éléments biographiques ; mais insiste davantage sur l'univers poétique de Plath (ses paysages et figures) en lien avec le modernisme et les aspects post-romantiques.

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La Traversée est un peu en dessous, Arbres d'hiver est vraiment cool, même si la traduction est assez inégale.