Ted Hughes, a famous poet, translator, critic, and one of the two most important poets in Britain after World War II. Hughes is the husband of American poet Plath. He wrote more than 40 works in his life, and published collections of poems such as "The Eagle in the Rain and Others: Selected Poems 1957-1994", "The Crow", and "Birthday Letters", "Forging of Poems: Hughes Writing Teaching Manual", "Winter Pollen: Hughes' Collection". From 1984 to his death, Hughes was the British poet laureate.
Hughes's private life is probably as famous as his poems, and even more attention than his poems, especially the story of his "love and killing each other" with Sylvia Plath. The two met in a party in 1956. With the presence of his current girlfriend, Hughes still couldn't suppress his inner passion and kissed Plas, and Plas bit him like a "responsive". Their love began - but the ending was tragic. Hughes's cheating brought great pain to Plas. Divorce and Plass' suicide made the whole incident a complete tragedy, and Hughes himself was also criticized for it; however, this was not the only time Hughes cheated... Later, Hughes devoted a lot of energy to writing children's poems as a compensation for the lack of family life in his early years. In January 1998, Hughes published a collection of poems "Birthday Letters" a few months before his death, recalling his shared life with Plath, expressing his sincere love for Plath, hoping to use it to bridge the scars.
Years have passed, and we cannot say whether the deep scars can be folded, but now, everything has settled, and what remains is their poem.
Hughes was interested in animals since he was a child and later became famous for his animal poetry. His writing speed is like a thunderbolt, and he always attracts muse by "dream, madness, fear, and hallucination". As the author of this article Ma Mingqian said: "(Hughes) has been immersed in the atmosphere of hunting and animals, dreams and hallucinations, unconsciousness and psychoanalysis, shaman and witchcraft, anthropology and mythology, and mysterious philosophy." Hughes, immersed in dreams and hallucinations, and has the "witch spirit of the shepherd god", is lucky in writing. After all, how many poets can get the inspirational experience like "as God-assisted"? But when this "witch spirit" falls into daily life, the strong destructive tendencies it contains also become an indelible demon in Hughes's life.
Written by | Ma Mingqian
I have no habit of writing supportive articles. I have always been afraid to write comments on new translations of poems. If I want to write, I will take some effort to read them carefully, and at least I have to read them through them. However, Ted Hughes, the author of this collection of poems "Eagle in the Rain and Others: Selected Poems 1957-1994", is an English poet I have been paying attention to for a long time, so he is very excited to start writing.
write wherever you think. Perhaps, a casual essay is more suitable for talking about Hughes's personal poems.
"Eagle in the Rain and Others", author: (English) Ted Hughes, translator: Zeng Jing, version: Guangxi People's Publishing House | Daya January 2021
01
chaotic marriage and love history
1 Before writing, I re-watched the 2003 old film "Silvia" to activate the original movie watching memory . To be honest, the film is not very good, but Gwyneth Paltrow's temperament is very close to Plath, and the appearance of Daniel Craig is also somewhat similar to Hughes. The hero and heroine are a rare poet couple in the English poetry world in the 20th century (their writing skills are not bad). The entangled past of their encounter, falling in love and killing each other is destined to be a controversial topic.
The movie "Silvia" poster
According to Hughes's own diary and poems, in 1956, he co-organized a literary magazine with five friends when he was at Cambridge University, called St. Botolph's Review (St. Botolph's Review) (St. Botolph is the Anglican Church in the suburbs of Newnum, Cambridge). At the magazine's founding party, Hughes met Plath, who was studying in Cambridge. Although Hughes' current girlfriend was also present, the two had magnet-like attraction as soon as they met. Hughes kissed Plas, and Plas "bited" him and responded.
Plus and Hughes
St.Berthough the St. Berthofer Review only took place for one issue, but Hughes and Plath gained a passionate love. Four months later, they got married and then went to the United States together. Soon, the Hughes returned to the UK and they had two children, daughter Frida and son Nicholas .
Hughes once recalled the wonderful time after his wedding:
111 In August 961, the Hughes bought a house called Court Green in North Toton Town, Devon, and posted an advertisement to sublet their small apartment in Sherket Square, Primrose Mountain, London. Hughes and Plath received the tenant who came to the door, the poet David Viver, and then invited them to visit the "Green House".We write poetry every day. That is the only thing we are interested in, and all we do is write poetry.
Hughes was immediately fascinated by Viver's wife Assia Wevill, and the two had an inappropriate relationship (the film "Silvia" also showed this detail). In Hughes's collection of poems in his later years, there is a poem "Dreamer" that depicted the "call" of the two at that time. Hughes was thirty-one and Axia was thirty-four:
I saw that there was a dreamer in her heart that had fallen in love with me, but she was ignorant.
At that time, the dreamer in my heart
had fallen in love with her, and I knew it very well.
Axia's father is a Russian Jewish doctor and her mother is German. Her family fled Nazi Germany during World War II and settled in Tel Aviv, which was still the British custody place at that time. At the age of 19, Axia married British soldier John Steele, and moved to London with her husband. Later, she moved to Canada and entered the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to study literature. After divorced Steele, she married her second husband, Canadian economist Richard Lipsey. In 1956, on an ocean-going ship heading to London, she met the 21-year-old poet David Viver. Axia immediately divorced Lipsey and married her third husband Viver in 1960.
Judging from the photos, Axia is a standard sexy beauty (as Hughes said, she "has a kind of mixed-race beauty"), and has a talent for language. She is a popular contributor in the London advertising industry and has also appeared in advertising videos. She is also an aspiring poet who translated and published a collection of poems by the Israeli poet Yehuda Amihai under the name of his marital surname Axia Gutman. An intruder like
is of course a serious threat to the neurotic, irritable Plas, who was busy coping with two young children, a shaky marriage and his writing troubles. In addition, Plath's physical and mental condition needs to be taken into account. She had received electric shock treatment for mental illness in her girls' age.
Axia Viver
After that Hughes met Axia frequently while giving a poetry lecture on the BBC's "Listen and Write" program. The two of them secretly communicated with each other in private: Axia picked a handful of freshly cut grass outside the office and soaked it in perfume and sent it to Hughes. Three days later, she received a reply - a blade of grass sent from Devon (literary and artistic people are indeed imaginative in dating). Once, Axia's phone call went straight to her home in Devon, and Plath angrily unplugged the phone line on the wall.
In September 11962, Plath burned Hughes's letters and manuscripts, drove him out of the "Green Mansion", and also notified Axia's situation to Viver. Shortly thereafter, Plath returned to London with her two-year-old daughter and six-month-old son, and lived on Fitzroy Street, which was on the corner of Sherckett Square.
In February 11963, Plath committed suicide by inhaling excessive gas at her London apartment. At that time, she was undergoing divorce from Hughes.
After Plas' death, Hughes asked his lover Axia to move into the "Green Mansion" to help take care of Plas' two children. In 1965, Axia gave birth to her daughter Shula, who had not yet terminated her marriage to David Viver.
Tragedies follow one after another.
For a long time, she was just Hughes's "housekeeper" and not his wife.She was rejected by Hughes's friends and family, and was shrouded in public opinion pressure after Putras' death, so she became another "Pras", always doubting Hughes's infidelity. Hughes did have a new affair: first with his married friend Brenda Heden, and then with nurse Carol Ochard, twenty years younger than him (Hughes married Orchard in 1970). On March 23, 1969, Axia also committed suicide by gas at home, and her four-year-old daughter also became a victim.
Canadian " McLean Magazine " special report on February 5, 2007
The chaotic love history surrounding Hughes actually took away three lives, which was inevitable that it caused a riot of public opinion. There have been several biographies and memoirs that interpret the tragedy of Plath and Hughes's marriage. In 1984, two Israeli journalists even wrote a biography for Axia, "The Irrational Lover: The Biography of Axia Viver". On September 10 of that year, the Guardian published a book review titled "Ted Hughes, Domestic Tyrant". Hughes was labeled as "male violence", "moral person", "tyrant", and since then he has been criticized by feminists.
Hughes chose to remain silent and strive to keep the two growing children safe from the media. The year Axia committed suicide, Hughes's mother also passed away. Affected by this, Hughes once stopped writing poetry and only created fairy tales with children as the object.
It was not until Hughes's death in 1998 that he published a collection of poems commemorating Plath, "Birthday Letters". This was a late confession and healing, and the attack on Hughes gradually weakened.
Unfortunately, dominoes continue to fall, and on March 24, 2009, Hughes's son Nicholas Hughes died of suicide at his home in Alaska. This is the fourth Hughes relative who died of suicide.
02
Witch Spirit who writes animals
Or clear away the gossip and take a look at Hughes, as a poet.
Hughes was born in the Pennines area of the Pennines, and later moved to the town of Mexborough, where he was essentially a mountain citizen. This is also the hometown of the Bronte sisters, and the location where the story of "Wuthering Heights" takes place. When Hughes was young, people often compared him to Heathcliff, the hero of "Wuthering Heights", "tall and strong, with a high skeleton, firm spirit and a talented face."
According to Hughes's biography "Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet", Hughes was interested in animals since he was a child: when he was three years old, he bought many animal models made of lead from the market, and often used plasticine to shape animals to build "his own zoo." His fourth birthday gift was an animal book with a thick green cover, so he began to copy animal pictures. Under his elder brother Gerald, he learned to fish, make traps and hunt with a hunting rifle. However, at the age of 15, he stopped catching animals and instead began reading and writing poetry.
Hughes' early hunting experience was very related to his poetry writing. In the future, he often linked the two to think about it. For example:
The process of creation is hunting, and the result of creation - poetry is prey.
This is hunting. Poetry is a new creature, a new specimen of life outside of yourself.
You may not think that these two interests have a lot in common: catching animals and writing poetry, but the more I trace my past, the more I am convinced that these two interests are the same.
During his two-year service in the Royal Air Force, Hughes began to read Shakespeare . He is familiar with Shakespeare's works and can read classic sentences at any time. "Midsummer Night's Dream" and several tragedies are the secret sources of Hughes' creative inspiration, and the large number of supernatural factors such as ghosts, witches, elves, omens, ecstasy, and confusion formed the original foundation of his literary literacy. The collection of art reviews written by Hughes later, "Shakespeare and the Almighty Goddess", is obvious evidence, which is an important conceptual retracement and tribute. After retiring from
, Hughes entered Pembroke College, Cambridge University to study British literature, and soon changed to anthropology and archaeology. This turn also had an important influence on Hughes's poetry creation.During his university years, he often visited the Cambridge Watkins Bookstore, which is full of "mystic books", and was full of interest in shamanism, Sufism, Tibetan Buddhism, Jewish mystical philosophy, alchemy, and mythology. He liked the book The White Goddess by the poet Robert Graves very much, and he also had a special liking for Jung's psychological analysis, claiming that "I came into contact with Jung very early and read the complete collection of Jung's translated works." These readings enriched his spiritual field.
Inspired by the first collection of poems by Yeats , "Wu Xin's Travels and Others", he also began to collect various myths and folklores widely. After Shakespeare, Yeats is the second coordinate to guide Hughes' creative thinking toward maturity. Hughes also played Oujia Board, tarot cards and soul-summoning techniques. In 1958 after marrying Plath, he gave her a deck of tarot cards. The two of them often play psychic boards and even use them to find creative inspiration and poetry images. This behavior is simply a replica of Yeats and his wife.
After graduating from Cambridge in 1954, Hughes moved to London. In the next two years, he did a lot of interesting work: working as a guard at the London Zoo (which was the choice of interest), a Rose Garden gardener, a night watchman and school teacher, reading film scripts for British film publisher and producer Rank. After falling in love with Plath and getting married, he went to the United States to teach English and creative writing at Massachusetts State University Amherst Campus in the United States.
956, Plath printed several poems by Hughes and sent them to the Hebrew Association of Young Men and Women in New York. The association hosted a debut English Poetry Competition, with the contest judges namely Oden, Stephen Spender and Marian Moore. Hughes won the award, and Moore's short comment was concise and confirmed:1957, Hughes's first collection of poems, "Eagle in the Rain", was published by Farber Publishing House where Eliot , and won the Harper Publishing Award for this collection of poems. Then in 1959, he won the Guinness Poetry Award. In the same year, the second collection of poems, Lupercal, won the Maugham Award and the Hawthorne Award. Hughes's literary fortune was very good and he successfully entered the poetry world.Hughes's talent is unquestionable. The work has a center of gravity and shines with emotion and conscience. The inspiration of poetry is awakened and the words are appropriately used.
"Lupercal"
967 published the collection of poems "Wodwo", which originated from the long medieval love legendary poem " Sir Gawain and the Green Knight". In 1971, he wrote the poetic drama "Orghast" while traveling to Iran. The collections of poems published thereafter include Crow (1970), Season Songs (1976), Gaudete (1977), Moortown (1979), Remains of Elmet (1979), and River (1983).He also wrote a lot of comments and essays, and also collaborated with British playwright Peter Brooke to translate and adapt Senega 's "Oedipus", German playwright Vedigent's "Awakening Spring", Lorga's "Blood Wedding", Racine 's "Fedra", Euripides' "Arcesteris", and Aeschylus's "Orestea".
974, Hughes won the Queen's Poetry Award and was awarded the Imperial Medal of Honor (OBE) in 1977. In 1984, he served as the poet laureate after John Begman . He received almost all the awards and highest recognition that he could receive as a British poet.In my opinion, the title and content of the second collection of poems, Lupercal, reveal Hughes's poetic style and secular destiny. The Shepherd Festival was originally an ancient festival that celebrated the Roman animal husbandry god "Lupokus" (also strongly influenced by the Greek mythology "Pan"), but later evolved into Valentine's Day. Hughes is famous for his expertise in writing animal poems and has been immersed in the atmosphere of hunting and animals, dreams and hallucinations, unconsciousness and psychoanalysis, shamanism and witchcraft, anthropology and mythology, and mysterious philosophy. His writing can be regarded as the resurrection of the "shepherd's witch spirit" in modern society.
When we understand Hughes's love history, we will find that in real life he is also an unconsciously destructive "Shepherd God Pan" (in Greek mythology, the "Pan" of half a human and half a sheep is a symbol of creativity, music, poetry, dreams, horror and sex, and "Pan" often hides in the forest and courtesys the Nymph fairies). As a metaphor, this can also be used to interpret his private life and the fate of several women around him.
03
Compensation and Response
Hughes published nearly fifty collections of poems, essays and stories in his lifetime, about half of which are children's literature works. Since 1961, I have published the children's poetry collection "Meet My Family"! After 》, he wrote more than 20 collections of children's poems, scripts, and story books, such as "The Unruly Monster Nice", "Moon-Whale and Other Moon Poems", "Song of the Season", "Under the Polar Star", and "What is the Truth? 》, "Cat and Cuckoo", "Mermaid's Handbag", etc., many have become classics. In 1999, Warner Bros. adapted and filmed the animated film " Iron Giant " based on his children's science fiction novel "Iron Man". He also co-edited two popular children's poems "Clicking Bag" and "School School Bag" with the poet Heine . He has served as a judge in the Daily Observation Children's Literature Competition and a judge in the W.H. Smith National Literature Competition for more than 20 consecutive years.
Hugs' enthusiasm for children's literature is a kind of compensation for the lack of family life in his early years. This young "pastoral god Pan" finally returned to a peaceful fraternity. This made me feel a lot of respect and goodwill towards him.
In January 11998, Hughes published the collection of poems "Birthday Letters" a few months before his death. This is a collection of 88 poems he has written over the past 30 years. It is a poetic memoir and a book that bridges scars. Many poems recall the shared life with Plath and confessed his deep love for Plath. The details are precise and vivid, and full of anxiety and sincere emotions. As soon as it was published, it became the front page news of major newspapers in London and received numerous praises.
However, while compensating, Hughes also issued a shocking accusation in the "Birthday Letter", launching a strong counterattack against the social opinion that had long besieged him. For example, a poem titled "Dogs Eat Your Mother" describes the media newspapers, gossipers, and feminists who have been tirelessly gaying over the years as wild dogs, hunting dogs and hyenas that bit the remains of the dead (animal poems are Hughes's unique self-defense weapon), and the poem is almost cursed.
"Birthday Letter"
04
Interaction with contemporary poets
953, Auden was invited by the literary critic Elizabeth Drew to visit Smith College, and held a recitation in Drew's living room. At this time, Plath, who was studying at the school, was on the scene. She described Oden with a "line cloth voice, and a brilliant and clean expression". She also wrote the following feelings in her diary that night:Oh God, if this is life, a quick look in a slightest understanding of the situation, smelling the smell of beer and cheese sandwiches, noble eyes, and confident thoughts, please brighten my eyes and escape from the troubles of academic study...
Oden can be said to have accidentally opened the path of Plath's poet.
Hughes and Oden also have intersections. He once said in an interview with Paris Review:
I met Oden more than the nature of saying hello. It was at a poetry festival in 1966. Our conversation was very brief. He said, "What do you think of David Jones' Anathemata?" I replied, "This is a masterpiece of genius," he said, "right." that's all. Another occasion was after the 1966 London South Bank International Poetry Festival Gala, where he was attacking Neruda. I listened to him and slandered him. ...At sometime in my early twenties, I almost swallowed Oden, or tried to swallow it. At that time, his existence was felt everywhere in the great climate. I have always admired some of his works. I admire his Goethe's side, all his remarks are full of dazzling natural brilliance.But I never felt any true poetic relationship with him. I don't think he is a poet who can inspire me to dig out my own things.
Hughes and Elliott are more inclined to each other. On May 4, 1960, after accepting the invitation, he and Plath went to Elliot's house for dinner, accompanied by Stephen Spender. Hughes later wrote a review collection "Dancer of God: To T.S. Elliott", saying that Elliot was an important pioneer of his poetic concept. He has a high opinion of Elliot:
In my opinion, he is a very great poet. One of the few.
has special feelings and recognition for the poet W. S. Merwin, Hughes:
Merwin and I have always been close. I met him in the late fifties through Jack Swinney, who runs the Ramon Poetry Library at Harvard. They had a house in London, and when Sylvia and I returned there in late 1959, they helped us a lot in reality and in many other ways. Dido Murwin found us an apartment, then half-decorated it, and then cooked something for Sylvia after our daughter was born. That was the highest point of my friendship with Mowen. He was an important writer to me at that time.
Hughes has dated the poet Heaney and Ao Frey Hill, who died in 2016. He worked with Heine, editing poetry readings for young people. Hughes gave Heine a lot of encouragement, but it is said that after reading Heine's poems earlier, he suggested that Heine switch to "eel fishing". Heaney has always defended Hughes, and sometimes even defended Hughes's behavior.
On October 28, 1998 Ted Hughes died at the age of 68 after 18 months of cancer. On May 13 of the following year, a memorial service was held at Westminster Abbey in London, and Heaney wrote the commemorative essay "The Great Man, The Great Poet", hailed Hughes as "a genius on the other side", "the spiritual guardian of the land and the English", and "as immortal as Cadmond, the first British poet of the Whitby Monastery in the seventh century." While evaluating his literary contributions, Heaney also mentioned the mental trauma caused to Hughes by his personal life: the unfortunate events of personal and historical left scars on him. He faced the awakening of fate with his prophet, and he would inevitably suffer some kind of torture.
Regarding how to deal with setbacks, Hughes himself said in his letter to his friend:
All I tried to do is take off my clothes, become a child, and trek through it.
An almost destroyed "modern shepherd god" is like the spiritual beast he repeatedly writes about in his poems, and he is tenaciously resisting the storm of fate until his death.
05
translated into history backtrack
Hugs' poem was introduced to China very late.
983, the eighth issue of " Foreign Literature " magazine published four Hughes poems "Doess", "New Year's Passion", "March, Unusual Morning" and "Memory" translated by the University of Cambridge. This is the first translation of Hughes' poems in China. However, what was translated was his later poems, not his representative works. 987, "Selected Foreign Poems in the 1980s" edited by Liu Zhanqiu included "The Crow Flying Down" translated by Mr. Yuan Kejia; in April, "Selected Poems of British and Americans in the 20th Century" selected five poems "Kafka", "Snow Lotus", "Theology", "How Water Starts Playing" and "Leaves"; "Selected Foreign Poems of the 20th Century" translated by Wang Yangle and "March, Unusual Morning" translated by Zhengheng.In April 11988, Wu Di compiled "Wild Swan - 100 Selected Foreign Lyric Poems in the 20th Century" selected Hughes's four poems "Owls in the Branches", "Thistle", "Baepipes" and "Child-like Pranks"; in September, "Selected Poems" edited by Mr. Wang Zuoliang
selected eight poems translated by Mr. Yuan Kejia, namely "Horse Herd", "Wind", "Eagle in the Inhabited", "Her Husband", "Dance of the Rat", "Thistle", "The First Lesson of the Crow", and "The Last Stand of the Crow", which was the most widely circulated translation before. These eight poems are also the earliest Hughes poems I have personally read, and they left a deep impression at that time.After that, Taiwanese poet Chen Li translated 21 poems from Hughes, and other translators such as Tu An, Wei Bai and Bai Yuanbao also translated them.
This volume translated by Zeng Jing, "Eagle in the Rain and Others: 1957-1994" is the first comprehensive translation of Hughes' poem in China, which is of course worth celebrating.
06
translation of the same poem comparison
Here, Hughes's representative work The Thought-Fox is used as an example to make a brief comparison of Yuan Kejia's translation and Zeng Jing's translation. I had read the two songs Crow's Last Stand and horses ("Horse Herd") carefully, but due to the space, I had to give up.
Regarding the title of the poem, both Yuan Yi and Zeng Yi translated it into "The Fox of Thought". The whole poem is divided into six sections. For the convenience of reading, the original text and the two translations are arranged in paragraphs.
The original text of the first section:
I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.
Comments: The sentence structure of the first section of is not complicated, and there are no uncommon words. Relatively speaking, Yuan Yi's expression of the turning sentences is clearer and the tone is better restored. Zeng translated the "except" of the turning relationship into the "accompaniment" of the parallel relationship, which is inappropriate; in addition, translating my fingers move into "My finger rubs" also deviates from the original text, which is not as accurate as "My fingers move".
Section 2 Original text:
Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:
Comments: The first line of Yuan translation is divided into two sections, which has better effect. Lines 2 to 4 are a whole sentence. Something in the second line connects the within darkness at the end of the third line, and more near though deeper modify something. This passage of Yuan Yi and Zeng Yi are both a little stiff and not smooth enough. If adjusted, it may be translated as follows: hidden deep in the darkness/something is getting closer/walking into this loneliness.
Section 3 original text:
Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now
Comments: Dark in the first line of this section Snow has been translated as "snow in the dark night", which is more precise than Yuan's translation into "black snow". However, this metaphor is used to describe the calmness and slight movements of a fox when his nose touches branches and leaves. It is inappropriate to cut off cold and delicately. In the next two lines, a movement refers to a movement, and now appears four times in a row, and there is a continuous superposition effect in recitation. Yuan Yi used four "shots" to restore it, and performed very well. In this regard, the gap between Zeng’s translation is relatively large, and the “intermittent” of the original poem has added ornaments and modifications.
Section 4 and 5 Original text:
Sets neighbor prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come
Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deeping greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business
Comments: The two sections of have a meaningful relationship. There is a hidden subject It in the first line of Section 4. Yuan translated “it” appears, but the previous translation did not appear; however, neat means “neat” here, which Yuan translated as “clear”, which deviates from the original text. Lag by means slowly walking by. Yuan translated it as "drag over" and once translated it as "fall", which is not accurate enough. In addition, the last two sentences of the fourth verse and the fifth verse are connected. Here, the illusion of the fox transforming into the poet's body is written. It is the eye part of the poem, but neither Yuan's or Zeng's translation conveys this very well. The key is that bold to come across clearings is to modify the previous a body.If adjusted, these two sections may be translated as follows:
It leaves
neat footprints on the snow in the woods, a lame shadow
carefully walked past the stump,
drilled into the body of someone who boldly passed through the open land, a deep green eye that was wide and wide, and
started its own work brilliantly and concentratingly.
Section 6 Original text:
Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox,
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.
Comments: In the last section of , both Yuan Yi and Zeng Yi are good. However, the "Fox Hot Smell" translated in the first line feels a bit strange; the first line of Yuan's translation can also be more concise, and can be adjusted to "until it suddenly emits a fishy, hot and pungent fox smell." Regarding the last line, Yuan Yi has added the action of "writing" that did not appear in the original text, which seems to be adjusted to "and there are handwritings on the paper" more appropriate.
"The Fox of Thought" is the opening work of Hughes's animal poem. Just like Coleridge wakes up from a nap and writes "Kublai Khan", it also comes from a real dream. In 1993, Hughes followed this dream in detail in his article "The Burning Fox". It was a winter night in 1953, when Hughes was still studying English at Cambridge University and was struggling to cope with one weekly essay assignment. At about two o'clock in the evening, he went to bed and had a dream. He dreamed that he was still sitting at the desk, the door opened, and a burning fox walked into the room from the stove. Hughes's memories are so clear:
Its eyes are filled with amazingly intense pain. It got closer and closer until it stood beside me. I now see clearly its hands are like humans. It spread its palms, which were burning and bleeding like the rest of the body. It spread its palms flat on the blank part of the paper on my desk. At this time, it said, ‘Don’t write – you are destroying us. ’When it raised its palm, I saw a bloody handprint left on the white paper, like a palmistry specimen. The handprints on this paper are clear in lines, the palm lines are clear, wet, and there is blood.
The memory of dreams is so strong that two years later, Hughes wrote "The Fox of Thought" based on this. His lecture on the BBC "Listen and Write" program was later compiled into the book "Forging of Poetry", which talked about his creative feelings:
This is a real fox. Whenever I read this poem, I see it moving, I see it spread its claws, I see its shadow moving on the uneven snow surface. The words in the poem show me these things, bringing them closer and closer.
"Forging of Poetry"
After "The Fox of Thought", Hughes repeatedly wrote about animals, such as "The Eagle in the Rain", "The Eagle in the Branch", "The Jaguar", "The Second Eye of the Jaguar", "The Perspective of Pig", "Wolf Howling", " Skylark " and "Song of the Rat". Birds, beasts, insects, fish and other animals have become a large number of poems in his works, and the number is amazing. In 1970, Hughes even wrote the collection of poems "Crow" with the crow as the protagonist. He became the most outstanding animal poetry poet in the British poetry world after Black and Laurence
.07
Translator's counterpart method
Dream, madness, fear, hallucination, such creative experience is indeed similar to the possession of the shaman's witch spirit. Hughes's dreams in his life have a great relationship with poetry creation! In an interview in 1970, he talked about the writing of the collection of poems "The Crow", and also mentioned that many poems appear automatically and the writing process is very rapid, like an "electric shock". At first it sounds like this is similar to the surrealistic completely random "automatic writing", but the two are actually obviously different, because each of Hughes's creations has an in-depth experience of dreams and a long-term brewing rumination.
I said in another previous book review, "The Wonderful Ascent - A Brief Review", that literary translation is similar to a lens of a language device, and the ability to understand the original text is the transparency of the mirror body, while the ability to convey the native language is the convex curvature of the mirror. The more transparent the mirror body (not deviates from the original meaning), the smaller the convex curvature (not deviates from the original author's style), the higher the degree of restoration of the translation. The translator not only needs to understand the original text keenly, but also needs to use his excellent native language ability to imitate and convey the language style, subtle emotions and overall atmosphere of the original work.
To translate the poems of a poet with a shamanic temperament like Hughes, it will overcome the many obstacles of language Babita, and in particular, it is necessary to have a relatively full understanding of the poet's ideological background, creative generation methods and language characteristics. Hughes's poem about the witch spirit is also looking for the corresponding wizard in the Chinese context - a translator who is immersed in it with all his heart.
The reason why Mr. Yuan Kejia gave me a strong impression of Hughes' translation in the 1980s was mainly because of the impact of language. From the previous translation comparison section, we can see that he must have gone through a long period of consideration at that time.
In this "Postscript to Translation" of "Eagle in the Rain and Others: Selected Poems 1957-1994", the translator Zeng Jingziqian "had not had a comprehensive understanding of Ted Hughes and his poems, let alone a deep understanding of them." He spent about a year and a half to complete the initial translation, and then spent nearly three months to proofread and polish it. I think if there is more complete preliminary preparation and longer polishing and revision, the performance of this translated poem will definitely be even better.
translation is not a solidified existence, but a dynamic process of continuous improvement. I look forward to future revisions to this translation.
Note: Some of the contents of this article refer to "Research on Ted Hughes Poetics" written by Ling Zhe.
Written by | Ma Mingqian
Edited by | Zhang Jin, Xiao Shuyan
Proofreading 丨 Zhang Yanjun
Source: Beijing News
