Lady Lazarus e altre poesie

by Sylvia Plath

A sessant'anni dalla tragica scomparsa, le poesie di Sylvia Plath, nella loro febbrile intensità, appaiono sempre più come un documento in cui il dolore trova nella forza della parola la più coinvolgente espressione. Nella versione italiana di Giovanni Giudici i versi della poetessa conservano intera la sua impronta, il tono, l'emozione interna. Come scrive Teresa Franco nella Postfazione, sottolineando il valore dell'incontro di due grandi poeti, questo lavoro di Giudici segna una svolta nella ricezione italiana di Sylvia Plath. Lo stesso traduttore, nel suo testo introduttivo, accanto all'«evidente immediatezza autobiografica» rileva come in questa poetessa agisca con sintonia impeccabile «una ferrea disciplina della parola»: doti che hanno garantito una perdurante attenzione a quella che è ormai divenuta una figura mitica e una voce inconfondibile nel panorama molteplice e internazionale della letteratura tra secondo Novecento e contemporaneità. Nell'articolarsi dell'opera della Plath, pur realizzata in tempi brevissimi (e del resto brevissima ne è stata l'esistenza, poiché si diede la morte a soli trent'anni), incontriamo l'apparire, come scrisse Robert Lowell (di cui Plath aveva seguito un corso universitario nel '59), di una voce «ora freddamente divertita, ironica, ora acida, ora sognante, fanciullesca, aggraziata», per poi divenire «aspra e stridente come il grido del vampiro». Ci troviamo di fronte a una poesia confessionale, certo, ma che di molto oltrepassa i limiti di un genere per divenire l'emblema di un disagio esistenziale, di una condizione femminile profondamente turbata, fino al risalto drammatico che ne portò l'autrice sull'orlo dell'abisso e poi all'annientamento. Una vicenda mossa da una persistente angoscia, ma che pure arriva intatta sulla pagina in virtù di un'impeccabile pronuncia, di una mirabile sensibilità nel dettaglio della scrittura, che nell'intreccio con la profondità complessa dell'esperienza vissuta fanno della poesia di Sylvia Plath un testo molto amato e un imprescindibile classico.

Genres: Poetry, Classics, Fiction, Feminism, Female Authors, School, American

161 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

Sylvia Plath was an American poet, novelist, and short story writer, widely regarded as one of the most influential and emotionally powerful authors of the 20th century. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, she demonstrated literary talent from an early age, publishing her first poem at the age of eight. Her early life was shaped by the death of her father, Otto Plath, when she was eight years old, a trauma that would profoundly influence her later work.
Plath attended Smith College, where she excelled academically but also struggled privately with depression. In 1953, she survived a suicide attempt, an experience she later fictionalized in her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar. After recovering, she earned a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Newnham College, Cambridge, in England. While there, she met and married English poet Ted Hughes in 1956. Their relationship was passionate but tumultuous, with tensions exacerbated by personal differences and Hughes's infidelities.
Throughout her life, Plath sought to balance her ambitions as a writer with the demands of marriage and motherhood. She had two children with Hughes, Frieda and Nicholas, and continued to write prolifically. In 1960, her first poetry collection, The Colossus and Other Poems, was published in the United Kingdom. Although it received modest critical attention at the time, it laid the foundation for her distinctive voice—intensely personal, often exploring themes of death, rebirth, and female identity.
Plath's marriage unraveled in 1962, leading to a period of intense emotional turmoil but also extraordinary creative output. Living with her two children in London, she wrote many of the poems that would posthumously form Ariel, the collection that would cement her literary legacy. These works, filled with striking imagery and raw emotional force, displayed her ability to turn personal suffering into powerful art. Poems like "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus" remain among her most famous, celebrated for their fierce honesty and technical brilliance.
In early 1963, following a deepening depression, Plath died by suicide at the age of 30. Her death shocked the literary world and sparked a lasting fascination with her life and work. The posthumous publication of Ariel in 1965, edited by Hughes, introduced Plath's later poetry to a wide audience and established her as a major figure in modern literature. Her novel The Bell Jar was also published under her own name shortly after her death, having initially appeared under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas."
Plath’s work is often classified within the genre of confessional poetry, a style that emphasizes personal and psychological experiences. Her fearless exploration of themes like mental illness, female oppression, and death has resonated with generations of readers and scholars. Over time, Plath has become a feminist icon, though her legacy is complex and occasionally controversial, especially in light of debates over Hughes's role in managing her literary estate and personal history.
Today, Sylvia Plath is remembered not only for her tragic personal story but also for her immense contributions to American and English literature. Her work continues to inspire writers, artists, and readers worldwide. Collections such as Ariel, Crossing the Water, and Winter Trees, as well as her journals and letters, offer deep insight into her creative mind. Sylvia Plath’s voice, marked by its intensity and emotional clarity, remains one of the most haunting and enduring in modern literature.

Reviews

[Nat · Rating 3 out of 5]

A confessional poem of sorts, talking about suicide and the inconceivable pain of those who endure it. It kind of paints death as something beautiful — which isn't. But coming from the suicidal speaker's perspective, I suppose it underscores the brutal honesty of what life and death can feel like when a person is already in a state of despondency — reduced to a vestige of what they once were, and fundamentally unsure whether the person they used to be still exists.

”Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I've a call.”

3 stars

[Sneh Pradhan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well. ...

[Archer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Review
Lady Lazarus is a poem published in Plath's poetry collection Ariel, and is centered on themes of death, dehumanization, and rebirth. It clearly comes from a place of deep pain, with strong references to suicide attempts, I think. Disturbing read, but I admire the emotional honesty.

Aside
I didn't think a 'Nazi Lampshade' could be anything wholesome but I really should've thought twice googling it before sleeping.

[灰 · Rating 4 out of 5]

LET US WOMEN EAT MEN LIKE AIR

I’m just kidding ☆ ～('▽^人) … maybe.

[Arghavan-紫荆 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

[Naia Pard · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not big on poetry, but Sylvia Plath succeeds in turning even a skeptic into a zealot. I want to kneel before her words and weep.

Instagram\\my Blog\\

[Prashasti]

Disturbing, depressing & brutal, so typical of Plath's works.

[Mike Narvaez · Rating 3 out of 5]

To quote John Green, “the poem is brutal and angry, and morbid and it involves a lot of corpses”. It sounds about right. It’s a little too pessimistic for my liking and I think it elevates suicide as something beautiful when in fact it isn’t.

[Chienney · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read this 3 months ago but got so much more out of it this time. Her concept of life and ability to link ideas together, there’s just something about her being iconic and having such a distinct way of writing.

[Bruno · Rating 5 out of 5]

Per parlare di Sylvia Plath prenderò in prestito le stupende parole di Nick Mount, professore all'Università di Toronto, che nel 2009 fece una lezione su Ariel. Il video dell'intera conferenza lo trovate a questo link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yEZ6p.... Dura quasi 50 minuti ma ne è valsa la pena. Mount analizza la poesia di Sylvia Plath per poi passare a parlare della poesia lirica in generale, fornendo una toccante riflessione sul valore della poesia stessa. Qui sotto ho trascritto la parte finale della lezione:

Sylvia Plath uses a number of metaphors for herself and her art in Ariel: Lady Lazarus, she's a holocaust survivor, she's Lilith - the first mythical wife of Adam, she's a daughter with an Electra complex. Most of the metaphors that she uses to represent herself in the book suggest the idea of resurrection and anger, but the main metaphor for Plath in this book - the book's controlling metaphor is not about either of those things. It's not about resurrection, it's not about anger - it's about creativity. What I'm referring to is the title of the book itself - Ariel. Ariel is a character in Shakespeare's play The Tempest, a spirit of the air. In the play Ariel is non-gendered. Ariel was cursed by the witch Sycorax and confined in a tree on an enchanted island. Prospero shipwrecks on this island and lets Ariel out of the tree and makes Ariel his servant. Ariel is all light and air. Ariel can fly, can turn invisible at will and because of that and because of how Ariel assists Prospero, Ariel has often been understood as a symbol of creation, of creativity as opposed to Caliban as the bestial side of us. The tempest was the first play that Sylvia Plath ever saw. When she was 12 years old her mother took her and her brother to see a production of it in Boston and according to Plath's mother, Aurelia, Sylvia was absolutely captivated by the play and especially by Ariel. Plath considered several titles for the book that became Ariel. She considered calling it Daddy, The Rival and at one point The Birthday Letters, but ultimately decided to name it after what she thought it was its best poem.

Ariel was published in the London Observer but the editors of the London Observer decided that readers would have a hard time to understand what the poem was about and changed the title of the poem to The Horse, which when you read it through you realise that's what the poem's about. Plath's friends knew what it was about. She took riding lessons after she and Ted moved with the kids to Devon and the horse that she learned on was completely coincidentally called Ariel. But readers didn't know that. The London Observer was right in one sense to insist on a clear title for the poem, but in another way the Observer was very wrong to change the title because the title of this poem about riding a runaway horse is absolutely key to this book and to understanding Plath's mind in the last few months of her life. Plath clearly knew who Ariel was - a spirit of the air, not a runaway horse, so why do this? The answer - I think - is for Sylvia Plath a runaway horse was the perfect metaphor for creativity, for all that Ariel represents. Creativity but also the danger of the creative. Plath wrote Ariel on her birthday. Her first birthday without Ted since the two had met. The poem has been read as predicting her suicide, as if she's riding this horse into her own death. Yes, probably, but I don't think that’s all it's all about. I think this poem is not only about where life was taking her but also about where her art was taking her, which happened to be the same place. A place outside the everyday world, the place of the lyric world. A place she did not survive.

The lyric poem tries to stop time, but we live in time. Time is utterly inescapable, so if we're not in time, where are we? [...] The lyric is the entrance to another world, it's a world that we simply cannot inhabit for long if we're going to hold on to our sanity, because it's a world outside of time and that is the reason why lyric poems tend to be short. Edgar Allan Poe said no more than a 100 lines, because you simply cannot stay there for long. You can't concentrate with that kind of intensity for long. And it is perhaps the reason why lyric poets tend themselves to madness. There are so many of them. You could compile an equally long list of casualties from the other half of the lyric tradition, and that is the musical side - Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Tim Buckley, Nick Drake, Kurt Cobain, Elliott Smith. When a rock star dies we tend to blame the death on the lifestyle of popular music itself. But maybe their form of the lyric is as much to blame. There's no shortage of hard living among poets. For whatever reason, we want to explore this other world, this world of the lyric. More often we want to spend other people to explore it for us. We send artists because we simply cannot go there ourselves. It is too scary and most of us lack the tools to describe whatever it is we may find there. The irony for me here is not that so many of these artists end up self-destructing. The irony is that they're destroyed by the very thing that we want them to do, by the very performance that they're expected to give. Ted Hughes says for himself and Sylvia in The Birthday Letters that "we did what poetry told us to do". [...] We need artists to sacrifice for us, to go to places where we are simply not prepared or capable to go ourselves.

Last September there was another artistic suicide - the American novelist and essayist David Foster Wallace.
[...] When he died the blogs and the papers were all talking again about the apparent link between creativity and suicide. One of the commentators on this had a different take than most:

"In the end, rather than simply proving the madness of poets...it seems to me that the suicide of David Foster Wallace, and the association of literary supremacy and mental illness more generally, provides an occasion to rethink the meaning of mental illness itself. For the world would not be richer had Hemingway and Woolf and Dickinson been "cured" of their supposed ailments. If literary genius and mental illness have grown synonymous, perhaps it is our own diagnostic terminology which is in need of a cure".
Ira Wells, "The Literary Suicide," National Post, 25 Sep. 2008.

Since the psychiatric age every major psychoanalitic critic known to me except one has said that all artists are sick. Freud started it. For Freud art is a symptom of its authors' mental problems. For Freud all of Shakespeare's is about Shakespeare's daddy. [...] The one exception was Carl Jung. Jung said that the work of art is not a disease, which may be one of the reason why nobody reads Carl Jung any more. What Ira Wells is saying is that if great art really is sick, if this thing that gives so many so much is a disease, then maybe what we need to do is to redefine 'disease', redefine 'illness' itself. Maybe what drives some artists mad to the point of suicide is not the world of art at all. It's the real world. The world that defines their world as sick. I want to end by suggesting something more positive, a more positive reason for art than madness and suicide. Sylvia Plath wrote her best poems at the worst moments of her life and that should tell us something. What that should tell us is that you can do without poetry - until you fall in love, until somebody you love dies, until something goes horribly horribly wrong, or much less often horribly right. And then, when that happens, poetry becomes not just important but absolutely essential. William Carlos Williams wrote that "Men die every day for what they miss in poetry". The American poet Thomas Lynch says: “People are born, and reborn, every day, who owe their very beings to poems”.
[https://bellejarblog.files.wordpress....] Those are two kids right there - Frieda and Nicholas Plath - who quite literally owe their lives to poetry. They were conceived because Sylvia Plath memorised one of Ted Hughes' poems and quoted it to him at a party. Ask yourselves: how many of you would not be sitting here right now without poetry? What poem did your mother write to your father? What poem did your father write to your mother? What songs were playing on the soundtrack to your conception?

[maya ۶ৎ⋆. · Rating 5 out of 5]

dying
is an art, like everything else.
i do it exceptionally well.
────୨ৎ────
out of the ash
i rise with my red hair
and i eat men like air.

[Zainab · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.

[ru ¡! ❞ · Rating 5 out of 5]

《Herr God, Herr Lucifer   
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair   
And I eat men like air.》

[Amela Sandra · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sylvia Plath is a poetic genius.
The poem Lady Lazarus is emotionally gripping with a freezing cold touch.
She feels a sense of responsibility for the Holocaust since her father was a former Nazi.
The words she uses express a deep guilt which tears apart her heart and mind.
It is very deep. It's one of my favorite poems because the level of guilt she feels for something she had no part in proves the emotionally instability a woman can entrap herself into.

[Frida Namibia · Rating 5 out of 5]

Feminism! Suicide! Death!
Find power in oppression!
I loved it!!

[Giuli Lec · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bellissimo e straziante

[lobelyys]

this wasn’t written for me, i don’t have an opinion because i don’t get it

[˚ ౨ৎ⋆｡˚ ⋆ دانه · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beware
‏Beware
‏Out of the ash
‏I rise with my red hair   
‏And I eat men like air.
‏احذروا
‏احذروا
‏من بين الرماد
‏سأنهض بشَعريَ الأحمر
‏وألتهم الرجال كالهواء.

[geikew · Rating 5 out of 5]

dying is like an art

[Samma · Rating 5 out of 5]

This isn’t even a real book, it’s just a poem but I read it on the train today and it’s really affected me 💔💔💔💔 I’ve been thinking about it for a while now

[kt m]

At first I was confused why Plath would mention a “Nazi lampshade” and “Jew linen” particularly because she was not Jewish (I know she has connections to the Holocaust though) but upon further research I learned that a few Nazi’s made lampshades with their victims' skin. Absolutely crazy and not sure I would have heard about such unless I read this poem, so there’s that!

I read a review saying that this glorifies suicide attempts and as someone who has done a lot of suicide prevention work and has experience with the topic, I don’t think I agree with that sentiment! “Dying is an art, like everything else. I do it exceptionally well.” is quite the quote but I don’t think it encourages suicide. Hopefully most do not read it this way even though as we know, Plath did die of suicide.

Favorite lines:

“Them unwrap me hand and foot——
The big strip tease.
Gentlemen, ladies
These are my hands
My knees.” (context: imagery about everyone watching her after she has died)

“​​For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge
For the hearing of my heart——
And there is a charge, a very large charge
For a word or a touch
Or a bit of blood

“I am your valuable”

[trovateOrtensia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Canto di Maria

L'agnello domenicale sfrigola nel suo grasso.
Il grasso
immola la sua opacità.

Una finestra, oro santo.
Il fuoco la fa preziosa,
lo stesso fuoco

che strugge sugna d'eretici
e stermina gli ebrei.
Planano i loro spessi mantelli

sulla cicatrice della Polonia, bruciata
Germania.
Loro non muoiono.

Incalzano grigi uccellavi il mio cuore,
bocca-cenere, cenere di occhio.
Si posano. Sull'alto

precipizio
che un solo uomo svuotò in spazio
i forni ardevano come cieli, incandescenti.

E' un cuore
l'olocausto a cui vado,
o figlio aureo che il mondo ucciderà e mangerà.

[Iophil · Rating 4 out of 5]

POPPIES IN JULY

Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?

You flicker. I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames. Nothing burns.

And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes that I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I clould bleed, or sleep! -
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.

But colourless. Colourless.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sylvia Plath is to me what Voldemort did to Professor Quirrell but in a good way (hopefully)



“And I a smiling woman.
I am only thirty.
And like the cat I have nine times to die.

This is Number Three.
What a trash
To annihilate each decade.”


“Dying
Is an art, like everything else.
I do it exceptionally well.

I do it so it feels like hell.
I do it so it feels real.
I guess you could say I’ve a call.”


“Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.”

[Artemisia · Rating 4 out of 5]

da tulipani

Io non volevo fiori, volevo solamente giacere a palme riverse ed essere tutta vuota
come si è liberi, liberi da non credersi. La pace è così grande che abbaglia, e non chiede nulla, un’etichetta col nome, pochi aggeggi. E’ il finale a cui approdano i morti; me li figuro - inghiottirselo come un’ostia da comunione.

[Aditya Mallya · Rating 4 out of 5]

A complex and menacing poem - presumably about suicide, but at the very least about aging and death.

[m. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Boy oh boy this gets better and better with every re-read.

[edie]

for all the analysis i’m doing in this poem i think i get to count it towards my goodreads goal.

[spalanai ⛤ · Rating 5 out of 5]

Herr God, Herr Lucifer
Beware
Beware.

Out of the ash
I rise with my red hair
And I eat men like air.

♀✧ ೃ༄ *ੈ ✩ ➸

[Jadaaaa · Rating 5 out of 5]

My forever poem. I die by this poem. I am this poem. Sylvia is real asf