1966.08 哭泣的栖息地：西尔维娅-普拉斯的最后一首诗

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哭泣的栖息地：西尔维娅-普拉斯的最后一首诗
近年来，西尔维娅-普拉斯比任何其他年轻的美国诗人都更受关注。彼得-戴维森在此对她的遗著《ARIEL》进行了审议，他的新诗集《城市与岛屿》将于今年秋季由Atheneum出版。

作者：彼得-戴维森
1966年8月号



作者：彼得-戴维森

诗人很少，而且几乎从来没有在世的时候，成为崇拜的对象。西尔维娅-普拉斯，30岁，1963年在伦敦去世，在她身后留下了一大堆令人恐惧的诗篇。从那时起，特别是在过去的一年里，那些在她活着的时候从未了解过她的作品的人，为她写了一首又一首的诗。正如罗伯特-洛厄尔所说，"她突然的、挑衅性的死亡 "的寓言把她看作是在残酷社会的祭坛上被焚烧，她的诗是她最后痛苦的副产品。但是过度简化她的生活，把她变成现代诗歌的詹姆斯-迪恩，也会过度简化和庸俗化她作品的发展。


西尔维娅-普拉斯是一个天赋极高但却不均衡的女人，她花了不少心思，也有不少智力资源，把自己训练成了一个诗人。大西洋报》和其他期刊发表了她20多岁时写的相当数量的早期作品，这些作品显示出不寻常的节奏感，词汇量长而准确，以及在严格控制下的巨大天赋。

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早期的诗歌，其中许多发表在名为《巨人》的诗集中（首先在伦敦出版；然后由Knopf出版缩短版，1962年，4美元），似乎没有存在的绝对必要：它们读起来像高级练习。她也写了很多散文，包括一部小说，但我读过的作品中没有一部在我看来是很出格的。西尔维娅-普拉斯的才华虽然得到了大力培养，但直到她生命的最后几个月才绽放出天才的光芒，如果我们可以把《阿里尔》（也是首次在伦敦出版；Harper & Row，4.95美元）中的诗歌的内部证据作为我们的指导，她站在生存的深渊边缘，以神圣的好奇心，稳定地、勇敢地看向最底部。她这样做并不值得个人赞美或指责；但由此产生的诗歌具有一种令人毛骨悚然的权威性，除非是通过稳定的凝视，否则是不可能实现的。仅仅靠人工就能产生这样的效果；然而这就是艺术的悖论，如果没有之前长期的、刻意的、技术性的训练，这些诗就永远不会出现。我们只能以真正的自发性来完成我们首先通过习惯学会的事情。


每一位艺术家，几乎每一个人，都会在某个时候面对生与死的严酷事实。在这种时候，没有人能够在没有某种程度的自我背叛的情况下转移视线，尽管如果他继续看下去，他可能会变成石头。最伟大的作家能够在普通生活的大画布上记录这些可怕的时刻，将死亡和毁灭的威胁调整为相关的、对比强烈的生命、希望和复兴的主题。诗人把他们的自传性危机，第一人称和第二人称以及所有这些都写下来，作为承认他们加入兄弟会的资格忏悔--一种专业的良好行为通行证，这已经成为一种时尚--或者即使不是时尚，至少也是常见的。然而，世界上所有的区别在于，这种滑稽的表演总是考虑到观众，无论是在诗中还是在其语气中都是明确的，而另一方面，像这些可怕的句子，来自《Ariel》中的几首诗。无论这些诗是写给谁的，它们都是写给除了作者以外的任何人听的。它们有一种仪式感，是厄运不可避免的前奏。

选自《拉撒路夫人》。

死亡
是一门艺术，就像其他东西一样。
我把它做得特别好。
我这样做是为了让它感觉像地狱。
我这样做是为了让它感觉真实。
我想你可以说我有一个电话......。
上帝先生，路西法先生。
请注意
小心。
从灰烬中出来
我带着我的红发崛起
我像空气一样吃人。
摘自《莱斯博斯》（一位母亲对另一位母亲的讲话）

你说你不能忍受她。
那杂种是个女孩。
你把你的管子吹得像个坏收音机
清除了声音和历史，静态的
新事物的噪音。
你说我应该淹死这些小猫。他们的气味！
你说我应该淹死我的女孩。
如果她在两岁时生气，她会在十岁时割断自己的喉咙。
婴儿笑了，胖蜗牛。
从橙色油毡的抛光菱形中出来。
你可以吃了他。他是个男孩。
你说你的丈夫就是对你不好。
摘自《死神与公司》。

我没有动静。
霜打成花
露水成了星星。
死亡的钟声。
死亡的钟声。
有些人已经完蛋了。
从 "榆树 "开始

她说，我知道底部。我知道它与我伟大的自来水根。
这是你所害怕的。
我不害怕它。我已经去过那里. . .
我居住在一个哭声中。
夜晚，它扑向外面
用它的钩子，寻找可以爱的东西。
摘自 "申请者"

首先，你是我们的那种人吗？
你是否戴着
玻璃眼、假牙或拐杖。
支架或钩子。
橡胶乳房或橡胶裤裆。
缝合以显示缺失的东西？没有，没有？那么
我们怎么能给你一个东西呢？
一个活生生的娃娃，到处都是。
它可以缝纫，它可以做饭。
会说话，会说话，会说话。
它能工作，没有任何问题。
你有个洞，它是个膏药。
你有一只眼睛，它是一个图像。
我的孩子，这是你最后的手段。
你会不会嫁给它，嫁给它，嫁给它。
欣赏这样的诗，就是站在诗人的身边，被冻僵了，却无力在她跌倒时伸出手来。虽然这些诗有幽默感（"我想你可以说我有一个电话"），但这是绞刑架式的幽默。它们几乎没有包含在大多数诗歌中的俏皮话。它们紧张的、令人窒息的节奏充分证明了它们是死心塌地地写的，是为了抵御充其量只是一时的困惑。当你 "被哭声包围 "时，还能做什么呢？除了把你所看到的，你所想到的，毫无顾忌地写下来，什么也不做。这就是这些诗所做的。这是诗在这种情况下所能做的一切。

阿里尔》中的诗是失败的诗，除了一种意义上的失败：它们根本就存在。如果说这里体现的经验是独一无二的，那就太荒谬了；但如果说仅凭经验就能写出这些诗，除了真正的诗人之外，任何人都能写出这些诗，那也是一种谎言。它们是诗歌的胜利，事实上，在它们是作者的失败之时，它们就是诗歌的胜利。

用一种艺术的所有装置和技术为你独自面对的可怕的灾难做准备，就是为艺术牺牲了比生活所能免除的更多的受害者。人们甚至可以推断，从这些诗歌中的一些严峻的喜悦中，在写作的那一刻，西尔维娅-普拉斯的生活正在急切地消耗它所有的精心准备。蜡烛烧尽了，我们除了火焰，什么也没有留下。

彼得-戴维森于1974年至2004年担任《大西洋》杂志的诗歌编辑。



Inhabited by a Cry: The Last Poetry of Sylvia Plath
Sylvia Plath has been lhe subject of more attention than any other young American poet in recent years. Her posthumous book, ARIEL, is here considered by Peter Davison, whose new collection of poems, THE CITY AND THE ISLAND, will be published by Atheneum this autumn.

By Peter Davison
AUGUST 1966 ISSUE
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by PETER DAVISON

ONLY rarely, and almost never when still alive, does a poet become the object of a cult. Sylvia Plath, age thirty, died in London in 1963, leaving behind her a sheaf of terrifying poems. Since then, and especially in the past year, poem after poem has been written to her memory by people who never knew her work while she was alive. The fable of “her abrupt, defiant death,” as Robert Lowell puts it, sees her as immolated on the altar of a cruel society, her poems the outraged byproduct of her last agony. But to oversimplify her life, making her into the James Dean of modern poetry, would also be to oversimplify and vulgarize the development of her work.


Sylvia Plath was a greatly but unevenly gifted woman who took the trouble, and had the intellectual resources, to train herself for a decade as a poet. The Atlantic and other periodicals published a fair amount of her early work, written in her twenties, and it showed an unusual sense of rhythm, a vocabulary that had a long, accurate reach, and a protean talent kept under severe control.

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The early poems, many of them published in a collection called The Colossus (published first in London; then in a shortened version by Knopf, 1962, $4.00), seemed to have no absolute necessity for being: they read like advanced exercises. She wrote a lot of prose as well, including a novel, but none that I have read seemed to me much out of the ordinary. Sylvia Plath’s talent, though intensely cultivated, did not bloom into genius until the last months of her life, when, if we may take the internal evidence of the poems in Ariel (also published first in London; Harper & Row, $4.95) as our guide, she stood at the edge of the abyss of existence and looked, steadily, courageously, with holy curiosity, to the very bottom. It is not a matter for personal praise or personal blame that she did so; but the resultant poetry has a bone-chilling authority that could not have been achieved except by steady staring. No artifice alone could have conjured up such effects; yet such is the paradox of art, these poems would never have come into being without the long, deliberate, technical training that had preceded them. We can only perform with true spontaneity what we have first learned to do by habit.


Every artist, and almost everyone else, at one time or another fetches up against the stark facts of life and death. No one can avert his gaze at such a time without some degree of self-betrayal, even though he may be turned to stone if he continues looking. The greatest writers have been able to record these terrible moments against the larger canvas of ordinary life, adjusting the threatened catastrophes of death and destruction among related and contrasting themes of life and hope and renewal. It has become fashionable — or if not fashionable, at least common — for poets to set down their autobiographical crises, first person and second person and all, as a qualifying confession to admit them to the fraternity — a kind of professional good-conduct pass. All the difference in the world, however, lies between such antics, performed always with an audience in mind, whether explicitly in the poem or implicitly in its tone, and, on the other hand, such terrifying lines as these, from several of the poems in Ariel. No matter to whom these may be addressed, they are written for nobody’s ears except the writer’s. They have a ritual ring, the inevitable preface to doom.

From “Lady Lazarus”

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.
I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call . . .
Herr God, Herr Lucifer,
Beware
Beware.
Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.
From “Lesbos” (one mother speaks to another)

You say you can’t stand her,
The bastard’s a girl.
You who have blown your tubes tike a bad radio
Clear of voices and history, the staticky
Noise of the new.
You say I should drown the kittens. Their smell!
You say I should drown my girl.
She’ll cut her throat at ten if she’s mad at two.
The baby smiles, fat snail,
From the polished lozenges of orange linoleum.
You could eat him. He’s a boy.
You say your husband is just no good to you.
From “Death & Co.”

I do not stir.
The frost makes a flower
The dew makes a star,
The dead bell,
The dead bell.
Somebody’s done for.
From “Elm”

I know the bottom, she says. I know it with my great tap root:
It is what you fear.
I do not fear it: I have been there . . .
I am inhabited by a cry.
Nightly it flaps out
Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
From “ The Applicant”

First, are you our sort of person?
Do you wear
A glass eye, false teeth or a crutch.
A brace or a hook,
Rubber breasts or a rubber crotch,
Stitches to show something’s missing? No, no? Then
How can we give yon a thing? . . .
A living doll, everywhere you look.
It can sew, it can cook,
It can talk, talk, talk.
It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
You have a hole, it’s a poultice.
You have an eye, it’s an image.
My boy, it’s your last resort.
Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
To be given over to poems like these is to stand at the poet’s side frozen, but powerless to reach a hand out as she falls. Though the poems have humor in them (“I guess you could say I’ve a call”), it is gallows humor. They carry little of the playfulness that is contained in most poetry. Their hectic, breathless rhythms give plenty of evidence that they were written in dead earnest, as stays against confusion that were at best only momentary. What else is there to do when you are “inhabited by a cry”? Nothing but to set down what you see, what strikes you, without compunction or consideration. That is what these poems have done. It is all poetry can do in the situation.

The poems in Ariel are poems of defeat except in one sense: that they exist at all. It would be preposterous to suggest that the experience embodied here is unique; but it would be a lie to suggest that experience alone could have written these poems, that they could have been written by anyone but a true poet. They are a triumph for poetry, in fact, at the moment that they are a defeat for their author.

To have prepared, with all the devices and techniques of an art, for the awful catastrophe which you alone were fitted to face is to have sacrificed for art more victims than life can dispense with. One even infers, from the grim joy of some of these poems, that at the moment of writing, Sylvia Plath’s life was eagerly consuming all its careful preparations. The candle is burnt out, and we have nothing left but the flame.

Peter Davison was The Atlantic's poetry editor from 1974 to 2004.