Summary:
Essay about the mode of translation of pain in Sylvia Plath's poetry from English into another language. How to make this supreme poetry hurt in another language? Is it possible to translate her work and have her unique embodiment of pain be equally powerful....in any language?
The pain the poet experiences during and prior to the creative process results in blood flood, which is the release and birth of words, the relentless stream of poetry. The poet bleeds the poems. They will not keep still inside. Out they run and run...
Plath frequently relates and compares the blood and thrill of birth of poetry to childbirth: the child forces its way out in the world, screams for delivery, just as words will keep torturing the poet and will not leave her calm unless they gush forward and amalgamate in poems. The redness of blood also stands for the eruption of emotion and vigor, induced by a fire in which the poet burns and turns into ashes so as to be revived like Lady Lazarus into this new phoenix - the poems, the new.....
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