'Ovid, Plath, Baskin, Hughes'

Ranger, Holly

Abstract

Many critical treatments of the poetic interaction of Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes have overlooked Hughes's 1997 translation of 24 episodes from Ovid's Metamorphoses, Tales from Ovid. This paper argues that the connections between Hughes, Plath, and Ovid that erupt in Hughes’s final two collections of poetry are similarly complex and longstanding. I begin by considering Hughes’s 1988 essay ‘Sylvia Plath: The Evolution of “Sheep in Fog”’, in which he becomes the first critic of Plath’s work to note her engagement with Ovidian figures. Building on Hughes’s argument that the mythic figures of Phaeton and Icarus provide the interpretative key for understanding Plath’s Ariel poems, I provide further examples of Ovidian figures in Plath’s poetry. To focalise the allusive nexus between Ovid, Plath, and Hughes, I compare Plath’s poem ‘Sculptor’ (1958) – dedicated to Leonard Baskin and in which Baskin is cast as Ovid’s Pygmalion – to the tale of Pygmalion as translated by Hughes in Tales from Ovid. I present some further evidence for Plath’s presence (or conspicuous absence) in Tales from Ovid, before discussing some implications of Hughes’s (re)arrangement of the translations. Finally, I suggest that while Birthday Letters represents an explicit engagement with Plath, Tales from Ovid presents an implicit dialogue with Plath’s work and her own Ovidian allusion.

Citation

Ranger, H. (2019). 'Ovid, Plath, Baskin, Hughes'. Ted Hughes Society Journal, 7(2), 7-24

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Dec 9, 2018
• Online Publication Date: Jan 17, 2019
• Publication Date: Jan 17, 2019
• Deposit Date: Dec 10, 2018
• Publicly Available Date: Jan 18, 2019
• Journal: Ted Hughes Society Journal
• Print ISSN: 2051-7270
• Publisher: Ted Hughes Society
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 7-24
• Public URL: https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1400883
• Publisher URL: https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5693c7287086d7242736f5d5/t/5c40860570a6adde64a0f229/1547732504262/The+Ted+Hughes+Society+Journal+VII.2.pdf
• Related Public URLs: http://thetedhughessociety.org/the-ted-hughes-society-journal-open-access/