Live Or Die: Anne Sexton 一位不幸的诗人

Live Or Die: Anne Sexton 一位不幸的诗人

 

这个周末出远门，闲来无事，喜欢去附近的旧书店走走。看到在放诗集的柜子上的Anne Sexton的“Live Or Die”，薄薄的一本。随手翻到Three Greenwindows:

Half awake in my Sunday nap

I see three green windows

in three different lights —

one west, one south, one east.

I have forgotten that old friends are dying.

I have forgotten that I grow middle aged.

At each window such rustling!

……

心里突然感觉得到一样小小的pain，一点点的怅然，一些些的Sadness。现在想起来一个准确一点的词去描述就是一篇负能量的诗。

再翻到后面的Man and Wife 更是觉得负能量满满的：

MAN AND WIFE

To speke of wo

      that is in mariage …

We are not lovers.

We do not even know each other.

We look alike

but we have nothing to say.

We are like pigeons …

that pair who came to the suburbs

by mistake,

forsaking Boston where they bumped

their small heads against a blind wall,

having worn out the fruit stalls in the North End,

the amethyst windows of Louisburg Square,

the seats on the Common

And the traffic that kept stamping

and stamping.

……

结尾处注意到写作的时间是5/1963。

翻到最末的同诗集名的Live：

Live

Live or die, but don’t poison everything…

Well, death’s been here for a long time—

it has a hell of a lot

to do with hell

and suspicion of the eye

and the religious objects

and how I mourned them

when they were made obscene

by my dwarf-heart’s doodle.

The chief ingredient

is mutilation.

And mud, day after day,

mud like a ritual,

and the baby on the platter,

cooked but still human,

cooked also with little maggots,

sewn onto it maybe by somebody’s mother,

the damn bitch!

Even so,

I kept right on going on,

a sort of human statement,

lugging myself as if

I were a sawed-off body in the trunk, the steamer trunk..

……

WXC应该很多网友都知道Anne Saxton，但我对那个时间段的作家特别的不了解，回到旅馆，上网查了一下：

Anne Sexton was born in Newton, Massachusetts and raised in Weston. The daughter of a successful businessman, Sexton’s childhood was materially comfortable but not happy. Her relationships with her parents were difficult, perhaps even abusive. Sexton’s closest confidante was her maiden great-aunt. She attended boarding school and after graduation enrolled in Garland Junior College for one year. Sexton later described Garland as a “finishing” school. At age 19, she married Alfred “Kayo” Sexton II. While Kayo was serving in Korea, Anne became a fashion model. In 1953, she gave birth to her first child and in 1955, her second. Sexton suffered from post-partum depression, and after the birth of her first daughter she suffered her first breakdown and was admitted to a neuropsychiatric hospital. Other institutionalizations followed. Sexton struggled with depression for the remainder of her life. She committed suicide at age 46.（https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/anne-sexton）

下面是一段YouTube上她的访问录影：