nunia
[个人文集]
加入时间: 2005/11/04
文章: 2184
经验值: 5079
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作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org
神学 (阅读1855次)
－特德 休斯
没有，蛇并没有
诱使夏娃吃苹果
所有的只是
以讹传讹。
亚当吃了苹果。
夏娃吃了亚当。
然后蛇吞了夏娃。
是为幽暗的大肠。
其间，蛇在乐园，
睡一觉消化了那一餐－
陶陶然听闻
上帝怨怒的召唤。
* 墓地 (阅读1513次)
－特德 休斯
墓碑的黑色村庄。
一个傻瓜的头颅
梦想枯死
萎缩至根部。
一头羊的头骨。
在自己的椽子下
它的肉在融化。
只有苍蝇会留下这些。
一只鸟的脑壳。
壮观的地貌
消磨成破裂窗台
的缝合线。
生在尝试。
死在尝试。
石头也在尝试。
只有雨从不厌倦。
* 九月 －特德 休斯 (阅读1613次)
我们坐到很晚，看夜幕缓缓打开：
没有钟在计时。
当吻在重复并且臂弯相拥
很难说时间在哪里。
仲夏了：树叶垂下阔大而静止：
眼睛后的一颗星星，
袖口绢丝下的一汪海，在说
时间无处存在。
我们站着；树叶未曾替夏天记时。
此刻无需钟
说我们有的只是自己的所忆：
分秒和我们的脑袋一起喧响
就像无知暴徒当权时
倒霉国王和王后的脑袋；
静悄悄那些树把他们的王冠
抛入池塘。
The Laughter of Foxes: A Study of Ted Hughes
Book by Keith Sagar; Liverpool University Press, 2000. 196 pgs.
Ted Hughes is, I believe, the greatest British writer of the second half of the twentieth century, and the latest addition to the great tradition of Western Literature which includes, among many others, Homer, the Greek tragic poets, Shakespeare, Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats, Whitman, Hopkins, Yeats, Lawrence, Eliot and the post-war East European poets. In accordance with Eliot's dictum that every new great writer added to the tradition changes the tradition, Hughes has changed the way we read all these writers, not only those on whom he has actually written.
In the first chapter I try to describe the mythic nature of Hughes' imagination, and to claim great importance for the healing power of such imagination at the threshold of a new and dark millennium. This seems to me necessary because criticism, before it can undertake anything else (if there is anything else it is qualified to undertake), must first reach the point of being able to actually read the workread it, that is, not in terms of some prior expectations or critical theory, but in terms of what we can divine of the author's own inner idea of what he or she is after. Every creative writer has a unique imaginative context, a matrix of psychologically or spiritually active imagery, for example, and can write living poems only out of it. To become an adequate reader one must approach the work, in Hughes' words, ‘with the cooperative, imaginative attitude of a co-author’, enter as deeply as one can the writer's imaginative world. Otherwise it is time wasted to read that author at all. Hughes' imaginative world was deeply mythic, in the sense of both drawing on the body of myth we have inherited and spontaneously creating new myths, or new expressions of the primal myths. This is the theme of my first chapter.
Hughes began to receive in the last year of his life some long overdue recognition, in the form of glowing reviews, awards and massive sales. Nevertheless, even in the obituaries, the media kept to their own agenda, in which sex, suicide and guilt are far more interesting
than poetry, so that the general impression built up by the media over many years remained intact, that Hughes' greatest claim to fame was as the husband of Sylvia Plath. And the enormous amount of attention given to Birthday Letters showed little interest in what was at the heart of that relationship, the deep commitment of both Hughes and Plath to poetry: ‘we only did what poetry told us to do’. This is the theme of the second chapter.
Like many other poets before him, Hughes fostered the half-truth that great poems write themselves in a single draft, which cannot be bettered. Though no doubt this does occasionally happen, and certainly happened occasionally for Hughes, the great majority of his poems had to be worked at over many drafts, as his manuscripts reveal, before he discovered what wanted to get itself expressed. In the third chapter I try to show how this process worked with a fairly typical Hughes poem, ‘The Dove Came’, from Adam and the Sacred Nine.
Ironically, the two works that received most of the belated acclaim, Birthday Letters and Tales from Ovid, are not part of the main body of Hughes' achievement, since, splendid as they are of their kind, neither allowed Hughes the total imaginative freedom his greatest work needed, each being Hughes' treatment of already existing material, whether Ovid's tales or the already well-documented factual record of his relationship with Sylvia Plath. In both works the plot was predetermined.
And by identifying the characters in Birthday Letters specifically as Hughes and Plath, the poems inevitably cast the reader in the role of voyeur, however deeply our sympathies might be engaged. Birthday Letters sold ten times more copies than any other Hughes book in its first year, not because it is ten times better as poetry but because there are ten times as many voyeurs as poetry-lovers among book-buyers, and a hundred times as many among newspaper editors.
Though Hughes, having begun by despising the confessional mode in poetry, came to see it as of great value, particularly as autotherapy, the claim that Birthday Letters is the summit of his achievement is as absurd as it would be to claim that the sonnets (revelatory as they are) are the pinnacle of Shakespeare's. As Hughes said in the Paris Review interview in 1995:
Once you've contracted to write only the truth about yourself – as in some respected kinds of modern verse, or as in Shakespeare's sonnets–then you can too easily limit yourself to what you imagine are the truths of the ego that claims your conscious biography. Your own equivalent of what Shakespeare got into his plays is simply foregone. (69–70)
Though there are wonderful poems from both before and after, the body of work on which Hughes' reputation should stand (his equivalent of what Shakespeare got into his plays) is almost everything he wrote in the seventies and very early eighties–the poems collected in Season Songs (1974), Cave Birds (1975), Gaudete (1977), Remains of Elmet (1979), Moortown (1979) and River (1983). These books contain the inestimable healing gifts which are Hughes' legacy to us all.
In a 1996 interview (Negev) Hughes said:
Every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of the artist. When a person is hurt, his immune system comes into operation and the self-healing process takes place, mental and physical. Art is a psychological component of the auto-immune system that gives expression to the healing process. That is why great works of art make us feel good.
There are artists who concentrate on expressing the damage, the blood, the mangled bones, the explosion of pain, in order to rouse and shock the reader. And there are those who hardly mention the circumstances of the wound, they are concerned with the cure.
There are also artists who begin in the first group and painfully, marvellously, drag themselves into the second (though perhaps to discover, at the end, that some damage is incurable). In doing so they are enacting, in their work, the classic quest myth. What Hughes said of Plath's work is equally true of his own: ‘The poems are chapters in a mythology where the plot, seen as a whole and in retrospect, is strong and clear’ (Faas 180). Nearly every poem from The Hawk in the Rain to River is a station on the spiritual and poetic journey by which Hughes, with many set-backs, many cul-de-sacs, arrived at last
full circle from a world made of blood back to that same world now seen, as a result of the journey with all its transfiguring pain, to be a world made of light. This is the theme of the fourth chapter. The journey ends with River. Though there are fine poems from the remaining years, they are few in comparison with the outpouring of the seventies, and to one side of the driving quest. After River Hughes lapsed largely into prose and translations, putting his own imagination at the service of the imaginations of others–of Aeschylus and Euripides, Ovid, Shakespeare, Racine, Coleridge, Pushkin, Wedekind, Lorca, Eliot, Keith Douglas, William Golding, Leonard Baskin and Marin Sorescu. Birthday Letters also stands apart. Hughes came to feel that they were the poems he should perhaps have written, or tried to write, in the three-year silence after 1963. That they took over 30 years to force themselves into utterance is its own tragedy.
The Life and Songs of the Crow would undoubtedly have been one of Hughes' greatest works had that vast project not been aborted in 1969 following the second paralysing ‘explosion of pain’ in Hughes' life. Crow itself is a gathering of what could be salvaged from the debris. These fragments from the first two-thirds of the story have been widely misinterpreted because readers lacked the necessary context of Crow's quest, the ‘epic folk-tale’ in which Crow was to have been transformed. Hughes came to regret not having provided this essential framework in some form, and always gave chunks of it whenever he read Crow poems. But he declined to publish this material until he gave me permission to do so in this book.
作者：nunia 在 寒山小径 发贴, 来自 http://www.hjclub.org |
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