The English poet Ted Hughes was Sylvia's husband from 1956 till her death in 1963, they lived together until autumn 1962. Shortly before his death he published a collection of poems remembering his first wife and their life together, Birthday Letters , published by Faber and Faber in England, by Farrar Straus & Giroux in the U.S. It contains 88 poems that cover his life with and without Sylvia, all poems were written after her death, some were already published elsewhere as early as the 1980s but went largely unnoticed.
This collection has meanwhile become one of Hughes' most famous and best loved books.
Ted Hughes died of cancer on 28th October 1998 at age 68.
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from The City
Your poems are like a dark city centre.
Your novel, your stories, your journals, your letters, are suburbs
Of this big city.
The hotels are lit like office blocks all night
With scholars, priests, pilgrims. It's at night
Sometimes I drive through. I just find
Myself driving through, going slow, simply
Roaming in my own darkness, pondering
What you did. Nearly always
I glimpse you - at some crossing,
Staring upwards, lost, sixty year old.
...
by Ted Hughes,
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from The Rag Rug
Somebody had made one. You admired it.
So you began to make your rag rug.
You needed to do it. Played on by lightnings
You needed an earth. Maybe. Or needed
To pull something out of yourself-
Some tapeworm of the psyche. I was simply
Happy to watch your scissors being fearless
...
Whenever you worked at your carpet I felt happy.
Then I could read Conrad's novels to you.
I could cradle your freed mind in my voice,
Chapter by chapter, sentence by sentence,
Word by word: "Heart of Darkness,"
...
I dreamed of our house
Before we ever found it. A great snake
Lifted its head from a well in the middle of the house
Exactly where the well is, beneath its slab,
In the middle of the house.
A golden serpent, thick as a child's body,
Eased from the opened well. And poured out
Through the back door, a length that seemed unending-
...
by Ted Hughes,
- posted on 03/26/2009
Ted Hughes的植物诗写得很好,笔头既硬又灵:
Thistles
Against the rubber tongues of cows and the hoeing hands of men
Thistles spike the summer air
And crackle open under a blue-black pressure.
Every one a revengeful burst
Of resurrection, a grasped fistful
Of splintered weapons and Icelandic frost thrust up
From the underground stain of a decayed Viking.
They are like pale hair and the gutturals of dialects.
Every one manages a plume of blood.
Then they grow grey like men.
Mown down, it is a feud. Their sons appear
Stiff with weapons, fighting back over the same ground.
- Re: Birthday Letters By Ted Hughesposted on 03/26/2009
我有他们的书,翻了一下,就放下了。我有点迷信。我喜欢看happy ending. - Re: Birthday Letters By Ted Hughesposted on 03/27/2009
Ted的诗都很好。不过,任何人和他粘上,只有死路一条。
Eric Chong说,Ted Hughes本身就是一出莎士比亚的戏剧,每场幕谢时,台上总要躺一个尸体。 - posted on 03/27/2009
July wrote:
Ted的诗都很好。不过,任何人和他粘上,只有死路一条。
Eric Chong说,Ted Hughes本身就是一出莎士比亚的戏剧,每场幕谢时,台上总要躺一个尸体。
嗯,有点。那一条线还有人才发现海子有精神问题。
The poet as a young rat.
In the austere and agonizing "The Rat's Dance," Hughes expresses his poetic reaction to Plath's suicide and his own Job-like disaster. He had imagined himself as a hawk, tearing his way through life, but now sees himself as the prey. He is the rat, unthinking, screeching (variants of this word are repeated four times), inextricably caught in the iron jaws of a trap. He rejects the soothing Christian response to human suffering: that God wills and man must endure this earthly trial. But after long suffering, the rat stops screeching and becomes silent:
The rat understands suddenly.
It bows and is still,
With a little beseeching of blood on its nose-end.
Bleeding out its life, the Hughes-rat, realizing that it's doomed and dead, stoically accepts its tragic fate.
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