Ariel (lyrics)

Cover of the German-language first edition by Suhrkamp Verlag

Ariel is the title of the second published volume of poetry by the American poet Sylvia Plath and the name of the eponymous poem. Most of the poems from Ariel were written in 1962 and 1963, the last year before Plath's suicide, and were published posthumously in 1965 by her widower Ted Hughes . They are considered to be the main literary work of Sylvia Plath. The German edition, translated by Erich Fried , was published by Suhrkamp in 1974 . In 2008 the German first edition of the original version, translated by Alissa Walser , was also published by Suhrkamp.

Compilations

Cover of the German-language first edition of the original version from 2008

The collection of poems Ariel exists in several editions. The compilation originally planned by Sylvia Plath was only published in 2004 under the title Ariel: The Restored Edition . Her husband Ted Hughes published a different compilation at Faber & Faber in 1965 , to which he subsequently admitted in 1981: “The Ariel, which was finally published in 1965, was a slightly different volume than the one it had planned. He considered most of the dozen or so poems she had written in 1963, though she herself viewed these new pieces as the beginnings of a third book, realizing that they were of different inspiration. Some of the more personal, more aggressive poems of 1962 were dropped and one or two more would have been left out had they not already been published in magazines, so that they were widely known by 1965. "

A version published by Harper & Row in the United States in 1966 included three additional poems and included 43 poems. The German version, published by Suhrkamp in 1974, followed the British first edition. In parallel with this edition, Suhrkamp published a new translation in 2008 by Alissa Walser, which followed the restored original version from 2004.

It was not until 1981, when Sylvia Plath's collected poems in The Collected Poems were published , that the compilation of Ariel originally planned by the author became known to the public in an appendix . Ted Hughes, already stigmatized by many of her followers by the jealous content of Plath's last works at that time, was harshly criticized for his changes. The American literary critic Marjorie Perloff showed in her essay The Two Ariels: The (Re) Making of the Sylvia Plath Canon , published in American Poetry Review in 1984 , that the originally planned compilation would have had a clear narrative structure, that with the birth of Plath's daughter Frieda (in Morning Song ) was to begin following her desperation over her husband's infidelity before ending in a ritual death and the motif of rebirth in the bee poems. The version compiled by Ted Hughes, however, ends in a turn to death.

Sylvia Plath's daughter Frieda Hughes also emphasized in the preface to the original version that, according to Plath's plans, the volume should begin with the word “love” and end with “spring”. However, she also approved of her father's selection, which arose from his intention to make "the best possible book" out of the material left behind, in which the last works from 1963 should still be included. Her conclusion on the different versions was: "Each issue has its own meaning, even if its stories are one."

In the tabular comparison of the various editions, under “Plan” you can find Sylvia Plath's planned edition, restored in 2004, the British edition from 1965, followed by the German edition from 1974, and the US edition from 1966. The original titles, the German Title given in the translation by Erich Fried and Alissa Walser as well as the dates of origin. The poems can be sorted by mouse click on the column head according to the different editions, their titles and the date of their writing.

plan	GB 65	US 66	Original title	German title (Fried 1974)	German title (Walser 2008)	Date of origin
1	1	1	Morning song	Morning song	Morning song	Feb. 19, 1961
2	2	2	The Couriers	The couriers	The couriers	0Nov 4, 1962
3	-	-	The Rabbit Catcher		The rabbit catcher	May 21, 1962
4th	-	-	Thalidomide		Contergan	0Nov 8, 1962
5	4th	4th	The Applicant	The applicant	The candidate	Oct 11, 1962
6th	-	-	Parallel bars woman		Barren woman	Feb 21, 1961
7th	5	5	Lady Lazarus	Madame Lazarus	Lady Lazarus	23-29 October 1962
8th	6th	6th	Tulips	Tulips	Tulips	18 Mar 1961
9	-	-	A secret		A secret	Oct 10, 1962
10	-	-	The Jailer		The normally open	Oct 17, 1962
11	7th	7th	Cut	Cut	cut	Oct 24, 1962
12	8th	8th	Elm	elm	elm	Apr 19, 1962
13	9	9	The Night Dances	The night dances	The night is dancing	0Nov 6, 1962
14th	-	-	The detective		The detective	0Oct. 1, 1962
15th	12	12	Ariel	Ariel	Ariel	Oct. 27, 1962
16	13	13	Death & Co.	Death & Co.	Death & Co.	Nov 14, 1962
17th	-	-	Magi		The three wise men	1960
18th	-	14th	Lesbos		Lesbos	Oct 18, 1962
19th	-	-	The Other		The other	0July 2nd, 1962
20th	-	-	Stopped Dead		Sudden death	Oct 19, 1962
21st	10	10	Poppies in October	Poppies in October	Poppy in October	Oct. 27, 1962
22nd	-	-	The Courage of Shutting-Up		The courage to shut up	0Oct 2, 1962
23	14th	15th	Nick and the Candlestick	Nick and the candlestick	Nick and the candlestick	Oct 29, 1962
24	11	11	Berck plague	Berck plague	Berck plague	June 30, 1962
25th	15th	16	Gulliver	Gulliver	Gulliver	0Nov 6, 1962
26th	16	17th	Getting There	Get there	getting there	0Nov 6, 1962
27	17th	18th	Medusa	Medusa	Medusa	Oct 16, 1962
28	-	-	Purdah		Parda	Oct 29, 1962
29	18th	19th	The Moon and the Yew Tree	The moon and the yew tree	The moon and the yew tree	Oct 22, 1961
30th	19th	20th	A birthday present	A birthday present	A birthday present	0Oct 2, 1962
31	20th	22nd	Letter in November	Letter in November	Letter in November	Nov 11, 1962
32	-	-	Amnesiac		Amnesiac	Oct 21, 1962
33	21st	23	The rival	The rival	The rival	July 1961
34	22nd	24	Daddy	Papi	Daddy	Oct 12, 1962
35	23	25th	You're	You are	You are	January / February 1961
36	24	26th	Fever 103 °	39.5 ° fever	39.4 ° fever	Oct 20, 1962
37	25th	27	The Bee Meeting	The bee meeting	The bee meeting	0Oct 3, 1962
38	26th	28	The Arrival of the Bee Box	The arrival of the beehive	The arrival of the beehive	0Oct. 4, 1962
39	27	29	Stings	Stitches	Stitches	0Oct 6, 1962
-	-	30th	The Swarm			0Oct 7, 1962
40	28	31	Wintering	Overwinter	Overwinter	0Oct 9, 1962
-	3	3	Sheep in Fog	Sheep in the fog		December 2, 1962/28. January 1963
-	-	21st	Mary's song			Nov 19, 1962
-	29	32	The hanging man	The hanged man		June 27, 1960
-	30th	33	Little Fugue	Small joint		0Apr 2, 1962
-	31	34	Years	Years		Nov 16, 1962
-	32	35	The Munich Mannequins	The Munich mannequins		Jan. 28, 1963
-	33	36	totem	totem		Jan. 28, 1963
-	34	37	Paralytic	Paralytics		Jan. 29, 1963
-	35	38	Balloons	Balloons		0Feb 5, 1963
-	36	39	Poppies in July	Poppies in July		July 20, 1962
-	37	40	Kindness	Mildness		0Feb. 1, 1963
-	38	41	Contusion	bruise		0Feb. 4, 1963
-	39	42	Edge	edge		0Feb 5, 1963
-	40	43	Words	Words		0Feb. 1, 1963

Poems (selection)

According to Elisabeth Bronfen , Sylvia Plath's poetry moves in three major subject areas: In the experience of nature, the strangeness and otherness of nature can be felt. The subject of the transformation of the ego is split between the longing for extinction, transformation and renewal. The family pictures mostly revolve around the figure of the father and the trauma of early loss.

Ariel

In Ariel , the title poem, the ride on a horse transforms the rider. In the physical exertion and abandonment of all social identity (“dead hands, dead obligations”) the rider loses her name and becomes Lady Godiva , merging with the horse (“how we become one”) and nature (“one with the drive ") And transforms into a pure, matter-free flight towards tomorrow:

"And I
am the arrow,
the rope that flies"

The Moon and the Yew Tree

The nature of The Moon and the Yew Tree (Fried: The moon and the yew tree , Walser: The moon and the yew tree ) changes from a nocturnal landscape, which is only breathed into life by a viewer, into an impersonal, alien world. If the lyrical self feels at the beginning as the creator of its perception (“as if I were God”), the reliability of its senses soon turns out to be deceptive (“I just can't see where it's going”). The yew tree, reminiscent of the silhouette of a person, directs the gaze to the moon, which is also personified (“He has his own face”). This becomes a strange counterpart. The viewer still expects a human kindness from nature (“How I would like to believe in tenderness”) and imagines the moon - female in English - as mother. The lyrical self, which previously believed itself to be the creator, takes on a humble attitude (“I have fallen so far”). But the moon does not obey religious expectations ("She is not dear to Mary"), the world turns out to be blind to the viewer, he does not reach it with his vision:

“The moon doesn't see any of this. He is naked and wild.
And the message of the yew tree is blackness - blackness and silence. "

Fever 103 °

In Fever 103 ° (Fried: 39.5 ° Fever , Walser: 39.4 ° Fever ) the glow of a fever for a sick person is used to purify the ego from all sins and social bonds. Inner enlightenment leads to a godlike state:

“I'm too pure for you, for anyone.
Your body
hurts me as the world hurts God. "

At the same time, the dangerous radiation makes it possible to take vengeance (“Choke the old, the meek”) and threaten the husband to penetrate him like “Hiroshima ashes” in the event of his infidelity. At the end, the feverish woman sheds her worn out identities and ascends like the Assumption of Mary :

“I think I take off
I think I
rise - drops of lead flutter, and I, dearest, a
pure acetylene
virgin”.

Lady Lazarus

In Lady Lazarus (Fried: Madame Lazarus ) a female Lazarus rises from the dead. His miracle becomes a public performance, his suicide a staging, his artistic calling:

“Dying
is an art like everything else.
I'm particularly good at it. "

But the consideration is not free, it costs “really high fees”. Lady Lazarus changes from the victim ("I am your work / your object of value") to the perpetrator, the vengeance takes on the masters who believe to rule her:

"Danger.
From this ashes I rise
with red hair
And eat men completely. "

Daddy

Daddy (Fried: Papi , he called the poem “untranslatable”) becomes a daughter's account of her father. Sylvia Plath explained: “This is a poem spoken by a girl with an Elektra complex . Her father died thinking he was God. ”But the father is also a Nazi and the mother is of Jewish descent. Both stand opposite each other in the daughter's imagination: "She has to play through the terrible little allegory again before she is free from it".

“Daddy, I had to kill you.
But before I got around to it, you died "

After the daughter has missed the replacement from her godlike father, she creates him again for a subsequent patricide. She interprets him to be a Nazi henchman ("A man in black with a Mein-Kampf-Face "), the one-time adoration is understood as the humiliation of the victim ("Pro fascist a woman who adores him / the boot in the face") ). It is no longer the death of the father that leads to a break in communication, but his German language, which takes on the sound of the deportation trains . Only after a vampire expulsion (“There is a stake in your fat heart”) does the daughter finally break free of the past: “Daddy, you bastard, now I've had enough.”

History of origin

Although some older poems were included in both Sylvia Plath's planned compilation of Ariel and in the edition by Ted Hughes, Hughes saw Elm, written in mid-April 1962, as the "first true Ariel poem", in which Plath added to her own voice last poems found. The majority of the poems planned for Ariel were written in the extremely productive October 1962. Sylvia Plath's private life was dominated at this time by her separation from Ted Hughes, which found its verbal expression in poems like The Rival , The Jailer or Purdah , which were hardly veiled against hers Husband and his lover were judged. Other events from Plath's private life were also processed in literary terms: summer rides on a horse named Ariel led to the title poem, her beekeeping to the bee poems from The Bee Meeting to Wintering , a car accident in September 1962 turned into a death experience in Lady Lazarus .

On October 18, Sylvia Plath wrote in a letter about her working conditions as a single mother, “that I get up every morning at 4 am and write until the children wake up”. In contrast to the impulsive outburst that is often suspected in the poems, there are numerous revisions of each individual poem. The drafts of 67 poems from this period fill a total of seven files almost 8 centimeters thick in the Smith College archive . Sylvia Plath often used the backs of earlier works as writing paper, although thematic influences of the backs on the poems can be demonstrated, for example from the revision of her novel Die Glasglocke auf Elm or from Hughes' play The Awakening auf Berck-Plage . Compared to Plath's earlier poems, her new works were characterized by greater freedom of form and by Plath's newly discovered technique of vocalization. In an interview she described: "The clarity these new poems may have comes from the fact that I say them to myself, aloud."

Sylvia Plath was able to assess for herself how far she advanced the new poems as a poet. On October 16, she wrote to her mother: “[…] I am a brilliant writer; i have it in me. I am now writing the best poems of my life; They'll make a name for me. ”When she put the poetry collection together in mid-November, she first called it: The Rival and Other Poems , later A Birthday Present , The Rabbit Catcher and Daddy , before giving it the final name Ariel . Regarding the opinion of her critic friend Al Alvarez that the book of poetry should "win the Pulitzer Prize ", she stated in a letter of December 14, 1962: "Of course it will not." In fact, Ted Hughes' version of Ariel should not win the Pulitzer Prize. Prize, but in 1982 Plath's lyrical oeuvre The Collected Poems , which also contained the poems originally deleted by Hughes.

reception

In the foreword to the American edition of Ariel , the poet Robert Lowell set the tone, which later ran through many reviews. He called Sylvia Plath one of the “great classical heroines” and continued: “These poems play Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder. [...] Everything in these poems is personal, confessional, felt, but with a feeling of controlled hallucination, the autobiography of a fever. " George Steiner took the autobiographical context further:" These poems take enormous risks [...]. They are a bitter triumph, proof of poetry 's ability to give reality the greater persistence of imagination. [Sylvia Plath] could not return from them. ”Al Alvarez also alluded to the poet's suicide :“ In a strange way the poems read as if they had been written posthumously. Not only did it take great intelligence and insight to work on this material, it also required some form of bravery. Poetry of this level is a grueling art. "

Irving Howe raised a moral objection to Ariel : “These are poems that were written from an extreme state, a state of consciousness in which the speaker, in the practical sense Sylvia Plath herself, has left the perception of the audience behind, and herself worries about no one else - even not even knowing their presence - than about herself. She writes with a hallucinatory, isolated fervor. [...] There is something deeply monolithic, fixed in the voice that emerges in these poems, an unmodulated and anti-social voice. "In particular, Howe criticized the" inadmissible Holocaust comparison "in Plath's poem Daddy as" something monstrous, completely inappropriate, when confused feelings about his father are consciously compared with the historical fate of European Jews ”. Even though Howe did not see greatness in the poems, he still concluded that they were remarkable because they introduced a new element of experience into poetry and thus advanced literary modernism a little.

The critical reception of Plath's last poems was mostly positive to enthusiastic. In The Times Literary Supplement was Ariel as "one of the most beautiful collections of poems that have been published for a long time" means. The Critical Quarterly judged Sylvia Plath's last poems: "They belong to the handful of writings from which future generations will try to get to know and name us." Peter Dale, editor of the poetry magazine Agenda , was convinced: "[The poems] will be read forever ”. Ariel's commercial success was also unexpectedly great. In the first two decades after publication, the total circulation was already half a million copies. Ariel became one of the best-selling poetry collections of the 20th century. The German edition had sold 27,000 copies by 2008. Werner Vordtriede judged the translation by Erich Fried to be "a discrete reading aid and often convincing in its style", but when translated literally, "rhythm, wit and concise elegance are easily lost".

The new edition of the original version by Suhrkamp Verlag was generally welcomed in the German-language feature pages. Marius Meller said it was logical that Alissa Walser had retransmitted the entire volume, as individual poems would not have fitted into Fried's idiosyncratic style. For Tobias Döring, the comparison of the translations enabled "the inestimable advantage [...] to consciously understand the process of weighing and nuancing the lyrical language." Werner von Koppenfels even saw Alissa Walser "in lively competition with Erich Fried's older version." Walser "a smoother colloquiality is taking hold", he emphasized in return, "how much skilled Fried knows how to deal with sound and rhythm." For Heinz Schlaffer , "Walser couldn't get rid of Fried, precisely because she meticulously tried to find the solutions that Fried found." to bypass. "Since she succeeds in some things better, some worse, he drew the conclusion:" So it's good that there are both volumes. "

literature

Text output

• Sylvia Plath: Ariel. Translated by Erich Fried. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1990, ISBN 3-518-01380-7 .
• Sylvia Plath: Ariel. Translated by Alissa Walser. Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2008, ISBN 3-518-42023-2 .
• Sylvia Plath: Ariel. The Restored Edition. A Facsimile of Plath's Manuscript. Edited by Frieda Hughes and David Semanki. Faber & Faber, London 2004, ISBN 0-571-23609-X (English).

Secondary literature

• Elisabeth Bronfen : Sylvia Plath. Frankfurter Verlagsanstalt, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-627-00016-1 .
• Lynda K. Bundtzen: The Other Ariel. Sutton, Stroud 2005, ISBN 0-7509-4123-5 (English).
• Susan R. Van Dyne: Revising Life: Sylvia Plath's Ariel Poems. The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1993, ISBN 0-8078-4487-X (English).

Individual evidence

1. ↑ “The Ariel eventually published in 1965 was a somewhat different volume from the one she had planned. It incorporated most of the dozen or so poems she had gone on to write in 1963, though she herself, recognizing the different inspiration of these new pieces, regarded them as the beginnings of a third book. It omitted some of the more personally aggressive poems from 1962, and might have omitted one or two more if she had not already published them herself in magazines — so that by 1965 they were widely known. ” In: Sylvia Plath: The Collected Poems . Harper Perennial, New York 1981, ISBN 0-06-090900-5 , p. 15.
2. ↑ A reprint of the article can be found in: Neil Fraistat (Ed.): Poems in Their Place: The Intertextuality and Order of Poetic Collections. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill 1986, ISBN 0-8078-1695-7 , pp. 308-333.
3. ↑ See Haymann: Sylvia Plath. Love dream and death . Heyne, Munich 1992, ISBN 3-453-05756-2 , pp. 290-291.
4. ↑ Plath: Ariel (2008), pp. 10, 12, 18.
5. ↑ According to: Perloff: The Two Ariels: The (Re) Making of the Sylvia Plath Canon .
6. ↑ The poem was in the original table of contents between Stings and Wintering , but not in the manuscript compiled by Sylvia Plath. It was therefore not included in the restored version. See foreword by Frieda Hughes on the restored version.
7. ↑ Bronfen: Sylvia Plath , pp. 114–115.
8. ↑ Plath: Ariel (2008) , pp. 79-81.
9. ↑ See Bronfen: Sylvia Plath , p. 158.
10. ↑ Plath: Ariel (2008) , pp. 147-149.
11. ↑ See Bronfen: Sylvia Plath , pp. 126–129.
12. ↑ Plath: Ariel (2008), pp. 179-183.
13. ↑ See Bronfen: Sylvia Plath , pp. 157–158.
14. ↑ Plath: Ariel (2008), pp. 41-47.
15. ↑ See Bronfen: Sylvia Plath , pp. 158-160.
16. ^ Plath: Ariel (1974), p. 176.
17. ↑ Quoted from: Bronfen: Sylvia Plath , p. 143.
18. ↑ Plath: Ariel (2008), pp. 169-175.
19. ↑ See Bronfen: Sylvia Plath , pp. 143-146.
20. ^ Ted Hughes: On Sylvia Plath . In: Raritan , Vol. 14, No. 2, Fall, 1994, pp. 1-10.
21. ↑ Linda Wagner-Martin: Sylvia Plath. A biography . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-518-38486-4 , p. 267.
22. ^ Wagner-Martin: Sylvia Plath , p. 271.
23. ^ Sylvia Plath: Letters Home 1950–1963 . Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1992, ISBN 3-596-11358-X , p. 504.
24. ^ Tracy Brain: The Other Sylvia Plath . Longman, Edinburgh 2001, ISBN 0-582-32730-X , p. 22.
25. ↑ See Brain: The Other Sylvia Plath , pp. 105–111.
26. ↑ See Jack Folsom: Death and Rebirth in Sylvia Plath's "Berck-Plage" .
27. ^ Bronfen: Sylvia Plath , p. 116.
28. ↑ Plath: Letters Home , p. 501.
29. ^ Wagner-Martin: Sylvia Plath , p. 288.
30. ↑ Plath: Letters home , p. 526.
31. ↑ “[one of these] great classical heroines. [...] These poems are playing Russian roulette with six cartridges in the cylinder. [...] Everything in these poems is personal, confessional, felt, but the manner of feeling is controlled hallucination, the autobiography of a fever. ”Quoted from: Brain: The Other Sylvia Plath , pp. 5–6.
32. ^ "These poems take tremendous risks [...]. They are a please triumph, proof of the capacity of poetry to give to reality the greater permanence of the imagined. She could not return from them. "Quoted from: Brain: The Other Sylvia Plath , p. 5.
33. ^ "In a curious way, the poems read as though they were written posthumously. It needed not only great intelligence and insight to handle the material, it also took a kind of bravery. Poetry of this order is a murderous art. "Quoted from: Brain: The Other Sylvia Plath , p. 5.
34. ↑ "They are poems written out of an extreme condition, a state of being in which the speaker, for all practical purposes Sylvia Plath herself, has abandonned the sense of audience and cares nothing about - indeed is hardly aware of - the presence of anyone but herself. She writes with a hallucinatory, self-contained fervor. […] There is something utterly monolithic, fixated about the voice that emerges in these poems, a voice unmodulated and asocial. ”In: Irving Howe: The Plath Celebration: A Partial Dissent . In: Edward Butscher (Ed.): Sylvia Plath. The Woman and the Work . Dodd, Mead & Company, New York 1985, ISBN 0-396-08732-9 , p. 233.
35. ^ "Illegitimate comparison with the Holocaust [...] something monstrous, utterly disproportionate, when tangled emotions about one's father are deliberately compared with the historical fate of the European Jews" In: Howe: The Plath Celebration: A Partial Dissent , p. 230, 232-233.
36. ↑ [...] "The poems Sylvia Plath wrote in this state of being are not 'great' poems, but one can hardly doubt that they are remarkable. For they do bring into poetry an element of experience, that, as far as I know, is new, and thereby they advance the thrust of literery modernism by another inch or so. "In: Howe: The Plath Celebration: A Partial Dissent , Pp. 230, 233-234.
37. ^ "[...] one of the most marvelous volumes of poetry published for a very long time." Unsigned Review Along the Edge In: Linda Wagner-Martin (Ed.): Sylvia Plath. The Critical Heritage . Routledge, London 1997, ISBN 0-415-15942-3 , p. 60.
38. ^ "They are among the handful of writings by which future generations will seek to know us and give us a name." Quoted from the American edition of Ariel .
39. ^ "They will be read forever". Peter Dale: Oh Honey Bees Come Build. In: Linda Wagner-Martin (Ed.): Sylvia Plath. The Critical Heritage. P. 68.
40. ↑ Janet Badia: The "Priestess" and Her "Cult" . In: Anita Helle (Ed.): The Unraveling Archive. Essays on Sylvia Plath . The University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor 2007, ISBN 0-472-06927-6 , p. 162.
41. ^ Announcement by Suhrkamp Verlag for the new edition of Ariel .
42. ↑ Werner Vordtriede : The way of death . In: Die Zeit , No. 44/1974.
43. ↑ Marius Meller: Rousing poetry by a tragic poet . In: Deutschlandradio Kultur from February 26, 2009.
44. ↑ Tobias Döring: The bees take it as it comes . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , January 24, 2009.
45. ↑ Werner von Koppenfels : The stake in the heart . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung , January 10, 2009.
46. ↑ Heinz Schlaffer : I'm particularly good at dying . In: Süddeutsche Zeitung of January 16, 2009.