Leitura de um trecho de 'Flower Herding Pictures On Mount Monadnock', de Galway Kinnell.
Essas são as últimas palavras registradas da Sylvia Plath, em 10 de janeiro de 1963, antes do seu suicídio:
In the forest I discover a flower.
The invisible life of the thing
Goes up in flames that are invisible
Like cellophane burning in the sunlight.
It burns up. Its drift is to be nothing.
In its covertness it has a way
Of uttering itself in place of itself,
Its blossoms claim to float in the Empyrean,
A wrathful presence on the blur of the ground.
The appeal to heaven breaks off.
The petals begin to fall, in self-forgiveness.
It is a flower. On this mountainside it is dying.
The woman is perfected.
Her dead
Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity
Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare
Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded
Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden
Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.
She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag.
----------------------------------
Limite
A mulher está perfeita.
Seu corpo
Morto enverga o sorriso de completude,
A ilusão de necessidade
Grega voga pelos veios da sua toga,
Seus pés
Nus parecem dizer:
Já caminhamos tanto, acabou.
Cada criança morta, enrodilhada, cobra branca,
Uma para cada pequena
Tigela de leite vazia.
Ela recolheu-as todas
Em seu corpo, como pétalas
Da rosa que se encerra, quando o jardim
Enrija e aromas sangram
Da fenda doce, funda, da flor noturna.
A lua não tem porque estar triste
Espectadora de touca
De osso; ela está acostumada.
Suas crateras trincam, fissura.
translated by Luiz Carlos de Brito Rezende (in FOLHETIM Poemas Traduzidos, Ed. Folha de S. Paulo, Brazil, 1987, p. 65)
Off that landspit of stony mouth-plugs,
Eyes rolled by white sticks,
Ears cupping the sea's incoherences,
You house your unnerving head--God-ball,
Lens of mercies,
Your stooges
Plying their wild cells in my keel's shadow,
Pushing by like hearts,
Red stigmata at the very center,
Riding the rip tide to the nearest point of
departure,
Dragging their Jesus hair.
Did I escape, I wonder?
My mind winds to you
Old barnacled umbilicus, Atlantic cable,
Keeping itself, it seems, in a state of miraculous
repair.
In any case, you are always there,
Tremulous breath at the end of my line,
Curve of water upleaping
To my water rod, dazzling and grateful,
Touching and sucking.
I didn't call you.
I didn't call you at all.
Nevertheless, nevertheless
You steamed to me over the sea,
Fat and red, a placenta
Paralyzing the kicking lovers.
Cobra light
Squeezing the breath from the blood bells
Of the fuchsia. I could draw no breath,
Dead and moneyless,
Overexposed, like an X-ray.
Who do you think you are?
A Communion wafer? Blubbery Mary?
I shall take no bite of your body,
Bottle in which I live,
Ghastly Vatican.
I am sick to death of hot salt.
Green as eunuchs, your wishes
Hiss at my sins.
Off, off, eely tentacle!
There is nothing between us.
-----------------------------------
Medusa
Longe dessa península de boquilhas petrificadas,
Olhos revirados por varetas brancas,
Orelhas absorvendo as incoerências marinhas,
Você abriga sua cabeça débil — bola divina,
Lente de piedades,
Seus parasitas
Abastecem suas células selvagens à sombra de minha quilha,
Empurrando como corações,
Estigmas vermelhos bem no centro,
Cavalgando a contracorrente até o ponto de partida mais próximo.
Arrastando seus cabelos de Jesus.
Escapei, me pergunto?
Minha mente sopra até você
Umbigo de velhos mariscos, cabo Atlântico,
Se mantendo, parece, em estado de milagrosa conservação.
Em todo caso, você está sempre ali,
Respiração trêmula no fim da minha linha,
Curva d'água pulando
Em meu caniço, deslumbrante e agradecida,
Tocando e sugando.
Não chamei você.
Não chamei você mesmo.
No entanto, no entanto
Você navegou em minha direção,
Obesa e vermelha, uma placenta
Paralisando amantes impetuososos.
Luz de naja
Espremendo o hálito das rubras campânulas
Da fúcsia. Sem poder respirar,
Morta e sem dinheiro,
Superexposta, como num raio x.
Quem você pensa que é?
Hóstia de comunhão? Maria Carpideira?
Não vou tirar nenhum pedaço desse seu corpo,
Garrafa aonde vivo,
Vaticano terrível.
O sal quente me mata de enjôo.
Imaturos como eunucos, seus desejos
Sibilam para meus pecados.
Fora, fora, coleante tentáculo!
You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one gray toe
Big as a Frisco seal
And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off the beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.
In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend
Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.
It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene
An engine, an engine,
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.
The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.
I have always been sacred of you,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You----
Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.
You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who
Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.
But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look
And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.
If I've killed one man, I've killed two---
The vampire who said he was you
And drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.
There's a stake in your fat black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always knew it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.
Fonte: CARVALHO, A. C. A poética do suicídio de Sylvia Plath. Ed. UFMG, 2003.
Versão psicanalítica dos poemas Daddy e Medusa, da Sylvia Plath:
These poems do not live: it's a sad diagnosis.
They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
If they missed out on walking about like people
It wasn't for any lack of mother-love.
O I cannot explain what happened to them!
They are proper in shape and number and every part.
They sit so nicely in the pickling fluid!
They smile and smile and smile at me.
And still the lungs won't fill and the heart won't start.
They are not pigs, they are not even fish,
Though they have a piggy and a fishy air --
It would be better if they were alive, and that's what they were.
But they are dead, and their mother near dead with distraction,
And they stupidly stare and do not speak of her.
No map traces the street
Where those two sleepers are.
We have lost track of it.
They lie as if under water
In a blue, unchanging light,
The French window ajar
Curtained with yellow lace.
Through the narrow crack
Odors of wet earth rise.
The snail leaves a silver track;
Dark thickets hedge the house.
We take a backward look.
Among petals pale as death
And leaves steadfast in shape
They sleep on, mouth to mouth.
A white mist is going up.
The small green nostrils breathe,
And they turn in their sleep.
Ousted from that warm bed
We are a dream they dream.
Their eyelids keep up the shade.
No harm can come to them.
We cast our skins and slide
Into another time.
"Penso que a minha poesia seja fruto da experiência de meus sentidos e da minha emoção, mas devo dizer que não posso ter simpatia por aquele 'grito do coração' (...). Creio que se deva saber controlar as experiências, até as mais terríveis, como a loucura, a tortura (...). E se deva saber manipular com uma mente lúcida que lhe dê forma (...)."
