“Words” by Sylvia Plath – one of her final poems…

Sylvia Plath wrote “Words” – a remarkable piece – ten days before her death. The poem appeared in the first edition of Ariel, although Plath never included it in any of the collection’s drafted versions. This wasn’t because she believed the poem to be weak or dissimilar to the other works in terms of theme or tone. She hadn’t revised her working ms in the three months prior to her death. Had she not taken her own life when she did, Plath may have included most of those final poems in the finished version of Ariel, but that’s something we’ll never know. Another possible view – “Words” and a few of her other final works would have been the start of another volume.

The poem is not part of Ariel, The Restored Edition (Harper, 2005), which includes a facsimile of her manuscript, reinstating Plath’s original selections and order.

“Words”

Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the center like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road —–

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.
 
 
 
 

***

 
 
 
 

An old pond… the turning point … [Translations]

 
 

According to The Roaring Stream: A New Zen Reader (Nelson Foster and Jack Shoemaker, eds.), the turning point “both in poetry and Zen came” with Matsuo Bashō’s famous poem of a pond, a frog, and sound – cir. 1686.

 
 
Furuike ya
kawazu tobikomu
mizu no oto                            [Japanese version of the poem, Harold Wright, “The Art
                                                     of Translation,” Kyoto Journal, 1995]

 
~
 

Here are a dozen translations:

     The old pond—
a frog jumps in,
     sound of water.               [Robert Hass, 1994]

 
At the ancient pond
a frog plunges into
the sound of water               [Sam Hamill, 2000 | from The Sound of Water: Haiku by
                                          Bashō, Buson, Issa, and Other Poets, Hamill, trans.]

 

For me Hamill’s translation is perfect. The connection is made between the frog and sound – as opposed to frog and water. The water or pond, according to Hamill’s translation, is the necessary point of meeting, but is secondary to frog’s plunge into [emphasis, mine] the sound. The same notion is found in the poetry of Yosa Buson, again translated by Hamill:

     In a bitter wind
     a solitary monk bends
     to words cut in stone

Buson is capturing the motion as the monk bends toward the words. Here, the stone is secondary. The monk, no doubt, is reading as he moves with, and not against, the wind. Both poems create a strange but wonderful dynamic – a juxtaposition that is both real and unreal – and ever moving. For Bashō, as filtered by Hamill, the sound is the reality; for Buson, the motion that occurs between the wind and the stone is the reality – words entering the mind.

 
Back to Bashō’s frog and pond…

Old pond—frogs jumped in—the sound of water.               [Lafcadio Hearn, 1898]

 
An old-time pond, from off whose shadowed depth
Is heard the splash where some lithe frog leaps in.               [Clara Walsh, 1910]

 
An old pond —
The sound
Of a diving frog.               [Kenneth Rexroth, 1964]

 
     The still old pond
and as a frog leaps in it
     the sound of a splash.               [Earl Miner, 1979]

 
The old pond—a frog jumps in, kerplunk!               [Allen Ginsberg, 1979]

 
Listen! a frog
     Jumping into the stillness
          Of an ancient pond!               [Dorothy Britton, 1980]

 
Old pond
leap — splash
a frog.               [Lucien Stryk, 1985]

 
Hear the lively song
of the frog in
BrrrBrrrBrrptyBrrrBrrrrrrrrrrIp
Plash!               [Clare Nikt, ?]

 
pond
          frog
                    plop     [James Kirkup, 1995 | This translation was included in Hiroaki
                                   Sato’s book, One Hundred Frogs.]

 
          an old pond
      a frog jumps into
     the sound of water               [Jane Reichhold, 2010 | Her translation is similar to
                                               Hamill’s in approach and is located in her essay “A
                                               Discussion about the ‘Old pond’ Haiku by Basho”.]
 
 
 
 

***

 
 
 
 

These days are Pink Floyd days…

I’ve been listening to the remastered Pink Floyd recordings from Animals…

[Pink Floyd, live, 1977, Chicago, Illinois]

 
Especially enjoying “Dogs” … music by David Gilmour, lyrics by Roger Waters

– from “Dogs”

And everything’s done under the sun
And you believe at heart, everyone’s a killer

Who was born in a house full of pain
Who was trained not to spit in the fan
Who was told what to do by the man
Who was broken by trained personnel

Who was fitted with collar and chain
Who was given a pat on the back
Who was breaking away from the pack
Who was only a stranger at home

Who was ground down in the end
Who was found dead on the phone
Who was dragged down by the stone
 
 

 
 
 
 
***
 
 
 
 

Pather Panchali, directed by Satyajit Ray …

Pather Panchali, directed by Satyajit Ray in 1955 – music by Ravi Shankar, is a beautiful and gripping story in film. A visual poem – a slow and deep look at a small world. A marvelous, must-see work.

James Wright, “Living by the Red River” …

 
 
 
 
 
James Wright
 
 
 
 
 
 
“Living by the Red River”
 
 
 
 
Blood flows in me, by what does it have to do
With the rain that is falling?
In me, scarlet-jacketed armies march into the rain
Across dark fields. My blood lies still,
Indifferent to cannons on the ships of imperialists
Drifting offshore.
Sometimes I have to sleep
In dangerous places, on cliffs underground,
Walls that still hold the whole prints
Of ancient ferns.
 
 
 
 
***
 
 
 
 

Lehua M. Taitano, “One Kind of Hunger” …

Lehua M. Taitano

 
“One Kind of Hunger”

 
The Seneca carry stories in satchels.

They are made of  pounded corn and a grandmother’s throat.

The right boy will approach the dampness of a forest with a sling, a modest twining wreath for the bodies of  birds. A liquid eye.

When ruffed from leaves, the breath of  flight is dissolute.

What else, the moment of  weightlessness before a great plunge?

In a lost place, a stone will find the boy.

Give me your birds, she will say, and I will tell you a story.

A stone, too, admits hunger.

The boy is willing. Loses all his beaks.

What necklace will his grandmother make now.

The sun has given the stone a mouth. With it, she sings of what has been lost.

She sings and sings and sings.

The boy listens, forgets, remembers. Becomes distracted.

The necklace will be heavy, impossible to wear.
 
 
 
 
***
 
 
 
 

Seamus Heaney, “Follower” …

 
 
Seamus Heaney

 
 
 
“Follower”

 
 
 
My father worked with a horse-plough,
His shoulders globed like a full sail strung
Between the shafts and the furrow.
The horse strained at his clicking tongue.

An expert. He would set the wing
And fit the bright steel-pointed sock.
The sod rolled over without breaking.
At the headrig, with a single pluck

Of reins, the sweating team turned round
And back into the land. His eye
Narrowed and angled at the ground,
Mapping the furrow exactly.

I stumbled in his hob-nailed wake,
Fell sometimes on the polished sod;
Sometimes he rode me on his back
Dipping and rising to his plod.

I wanted to grow up and plough,
To close one eye, stiffen my arm.
All I ever did was follow
In his broad shadow round the farm.

I was a nuisance, tripping, falling,
Yapping always. But today
It is my father who keeps stumbling
Behind me, and will not go away.
 
 
 
 
***
 
 
 
&nbps;