THREE HOSPITAL POEMS: EMPOWERED CONFESSIONAL SELVES IN ROBERT LOWELL’S „WAKING IN THE BLUE”, ANNE SEXTON’S „YOU, DOCTOR MARTIN” AND SYLVIA PLATH’S „NEVER TRY TO TRICK ME WITH A KISS”

This article examines three hospital poems by the American confessionalists Robert Lowell, Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. Writing in the mid1950s, they opted for „unacceptable” topics which were related to their personal experiences. Typically, the poetry of these poets remains as challenging for the modern reader as it was for their contemporaries. In introducing shocking events and intimate details to their work, they made an important development to portraying lived experience in fiction, which did not come without attacks for their perceived „narcissism”. In this article I argue that their bold writing about difficult subjects has created empowered poetic selves which rather than reflect any narcissism on part of the authors, predate and invite interpretations of the „other”. Their reproduction of illness (depression) is, consequently, devoid of the standard metaphors associated with the respective disease.

Espaços medonhos da poesia: os elementos da poética do horror nas obras de Anne Sexton, Philip Larkin e Severo Sarduy

Ao discutir os textos de Philip Larkin, de Anne Sexton e de Severo Sarduy, o artigo busca refletir sobre a importância da poética do espaço e das relações metonímicas para a subversão do binarismo da época estruturalista. Ao atualizar o regime das emoções negativas próprias aos contextos gótico e neogótico, e importante no âmbito vanguardista, a poesia se inscreve na resistência contra a reificação do ser humano promovida pelos discursos da opressão capitalista e de gênero. As experiências do horror do vazio e da anamorfose permitem uma reelaboração subjetiva dos dualismos especulares do narcisismo melancólico dos sistemas do poder.

Bodies and self-disclosure in American female confessional poetry

Far from being a mere thematic device, the body plays a crucial role in poetry, especially for modern women poets. The inward turn to an intimate autobiographical dimension, which is commonly seen as characteristic of female writing, usually complies with the requests of feminist theorists, urging writers to reconquer their identity through the assertion of their bodies. However, inscribing the body in verse is often problematic, since it frequently emerges from a complicated interaction between positive self-redefinition, life writing, and the confession of trauma. This is especially true for authors writing under the influence of the American confessional trend, whose biographies were often scarred by mental illness and self-destructive inclinations. This paper assesses the role of the body in the representation of the self in a selection of texts by American women poets—namely Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Elizabeth Bishop, Adrienne Rich, and Louise Glück—where the body and its disclosure act as vehicles for a heterogeneous redefinition of the female identity.

Hacia una traducción de “The Double Image” de Anne Sexton: apuntes sobre la bidireccionalidad de la maternidad

Anne Sexton (Boston, 1928-1974) es conocida por el público debido a su historial clínico y a su personalidad desgarradora en los escenarios que recitaba. Sin embargo, en este estudio nos centramos exclusivamente a las cuestiones relacionadas con la maternidad en “The Double Image” (To Bedlam and Part Way Back, 1963). La extensión del poema y su importancia en relación con el completo de su obra justifican el corpus reducido con el que pretendemos acercar dichas cuestiones. Un proceso documental de la traducción, entendida como proceso y producto, que premia el trasvase no solo del estilo y los hechos biográficos presentes en el texto, sino del contenido metafórico con una tendencia premeditada hacia la aceptabilidad, posible gracias a la transcreación (Etkind, 1982) del original en la cultura receptora.