Ça-ne-fait-rien !

Along with withholding (or allegedly destroying) one of Plath's journals after her death in 1963, Plath's husband, the late English poet laureate Ted Hughes, brought out a version of her second and final book of poems, Ariel, that differed from the manuscript she left on her desk. That edition?for which Hughes dropped 12 poems, added 12 composed a few months later, shifted the poems"ordering and included an introduction by Robert Lowell?has become a classic. The present edition restores the 12 missing poems, drops the 12 added ones, and prints the manuscript in Plath's own order, followed by a facsimile of the typescript Plath left, along with a foreword by Plath and Hughes's daughter Frieda Hughes (Wooroloo), several hand- and typewritten drafts of the book's title poem and notes by David Semanki. The original manuscript's contents have been widely known since Hughes published them in the 1981 Collected Poems, but there is an undeniable thrill to reading Plath's book as she left it?the lacerating"The Rabbit Catcher,"left out of the Ted Hughes edition, comes third here, with its rhyme of"force"with"gorse,"the flowers of which"had an efficiency, a great beauty,/ And were extravagant, like torture."As to whether this version is a better book, only time will tell. For now, despite Frieda Hughes's repeated references to her father's respect for Plath's work, tally another shot in the Plath wars.Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. "

Ce que je redoute le plus, je crois, c'est la mort de l'imagination. Quand le ciel, dehors, se contente d'être rose, et les toits des maisons noirs, cet esprit photographique qui, paradoxalement, dit la vérité, mais la vérité vaine, sur le monde". Sylvia Plath a vingt-quatre ans lorsqu'elle évoque cette hantise dans un journal dont les pages sont l'écho de ses aspirations contradictoires, tantôt idéales, tantôt futiles. Ce livre propose également neuf nouvelles autobiographiques, qui complètent l'oeuvre en prose de la poétesse américaine mystérieuse et fragile.

Ce recueil réunit la quasi-totalité de l'oeuvre de nouvelliste de Sylvia Plath, qui lui importait plus que tout autre forme littéraire. Dans l'Amérique crispée des années cinquante, l'auteur exprime sa révolte, sa détresse, ses élans poétiques, dans une langue qui révèle une tension insoutenable ainsi que les affres d'une féminité douloureuse.