Forty-two years ago today Sylvia Plath committed suicide in her small London flat. What does that have to do with this Web log? Not much, except that Plath’s German-American roots have never been fully analyzed – very surprising, since the Plath industry is going strong in the US and the UK, with new books coming out each month, and the release of a Hollywood movie about her life. Plath’s father – Otto Plath, a German – was a professor of chemistry and German at Boston University ; her mother’s parents were both Austrian. Sylvia must have heard German spoken at home as a young girl, although in college she studied French instead of German. Her knowledge of the German language was probably imperfect, although she did translate at least one poem of Rilke’s – The Prophet ( I have not been able to find it). In the last few months of her life she became obsessed with her father’s German roots, as well as with Nazis and the Holocaust. This obsession comes to the surface in some of her most memorable poems: Daddy, Lady Lazarus, The Munich Mannequins.
In any event, this would be a very fertile topic for further literary investigation.
There is surprisingly little German language material available by or about Plath online. Anja Beckmann in Leipzig maintains a Web site that has all the relevant links. Nearly every poem by Plath can be found online in English, but I could only find five in German – translations by Johannes Beilharz of poems from Crossing the Water. Here is one:
Mänade
Einst war ich gewöhnlich:
saß bei meines Vaters Bohnenbaum,
aß die Finger der Weisheit.
Die Vögel gaben Milch.
Bei Donner versteckte ich mich unter einem flachen Stein.
Die Mutter der Münder liebte
mich nicht.
Der alte Mann schrumpfte zu einer Puppe zusammen.
O ich bin zu groß, um rückwärts zu gehen:
Vogelmilch ist Federn,
die Bohnenblätter sind stumm wie Hände.
Dieser Monat taugt zu fast gar
nichts.
Die Toten reifen in den Traubenblättern.
Eine rote Zunge ist unter uns.
Mutter, halt dich von meinem Scheunenhof fern,
ich werde jemand anders.
Hundskopf, Verschlinger:
füttere mich mit den Beeren des Dunkels.
Die Lider schließen sich nicht. Die Zeit
entwickelt vom großen Nabel der Sonne
ihr endloses Glitzern.
Das alles muß ich schlucken.
Meine Dame, wer sind diese
anderen im Mondbottich –
schlaftrunken, ihre Glieder uneins?
In diesem Licht ist das Blut schwarz.
Sag mir meinen Namen.Maenad
Once I was ordinary:
Sat by my father’s bean tree
Eating the fingers of
wisdom.
The birds made milk.
When it thundered I hid under a flat
stone.The mother of mouths didn’t love me.
The old man shrank to a doll.
O I
am too big to go backward:
Birdmilk is feathers,
The bean leaves are dumb
as hands.This month is fit for little.
The dead ripen in the grapeleaves.
A red
tongue is among us.
Mother, keep out of my barnyard,
I am becoming
another.Dog-head, devourer:
Feed me the berries of dark.
The lids won’t shut.
Time
Unwinds from the great umbilicus of the sun
Its endless glitter.I must swallow it all.
Lady, who are these others in the moon’s vat —
Sleepdrunk, their limbs
at odds?
In this light the blood is black.
Tell me my name.
