Hughes Among the Superstars

...Hughes highlights certain things that enchant him and glosses others Ovid expected readers to understand, while omitting many descriptions that might seem tedious to our modish tastes...

...In her growing madness she began to turn on him, to drive him away, and he retreated into an affair with another woman...

...In the paranoid ravings of Pentheus against those who hold the god of drama and wine in greater respect than their own monarch...

...In "Horoscope" Hughes observes: You only had to look Into the nearest face of a metaphor Picked out of your wardrobe or off your plate Or out of the sun or the moon or the yew tree To see your father, your mother, or me Bringing you your whole Fate...

...In the past, his strengths frequently proved his greatest weaknesses...

...This is not prurient, salacious violence, but an appalled confrontation of atrocity committed against innocence...

...Hughes has known violence and horror in his own life...

...The reference to her poem, "The Moon and the Yew Tree," is a sharp reminder that long before her happiness with him unraveled, Plath was rejecting images of a tenderness she could not bring herself to embrace in favor of "blackness and silence...

...actions we once considered trivial become the symbolic gestures of an actor in some great drama...

...The Olympians Then spun mother and son up in a whirlwind...

...The second collection—a secret until just before its release—is, of course, Birthday Letters (Farrar Straus Giroux, 198 pp., $20.00...

...The mythic plane, so to speak, had been defrocked...

...Birthday Letters retells the story from an equally myth-ridden perspective, but with human touches...

...Her imagination certainly saw the world through mythic images...

...He is still puzzling out the steps that led to destruction, confessing that he remains obsessed with her, drinking "from your stillness that neither of us can disturb or escape...

...We know that Ovid had a difficult relationship with his emperor...

...Faithful To my country gods—I saw The sanctity of a trapline desecrated...

...But the tongue squirmed in the dust, babbling on— Shaping words that were now soundless...

...For all its Augustan stability, it was at sea in hysteria and despair, at one extreme wallowing in the bottomless appetites and sufferings of the gladiatorial arena, and at the other searching higher and higher for a spiritual transcendence—which eventually did take form, on the crucifix...

...Philomela becomes a nightingale whose ravishing notes memorialize her tragedy...

...Reading this book, it is hard not to play the detective...

...In her poems, lavishly populated with gorgons, caryatids, fates, and furies, she identifies herself with Electra—the mourning daughter, and Medea—the abandoned wife...

...Now, by transmuting Ovid into English gold, he has found the means to give them a tongue so eloquent that these old stories are his stories and ours...

...He takes up only those tales that catch his fancy, and engages with each one no further than it liberates his own creative zest...

...So these two, about to be reunited In that bloody crime and ti-agic error, Found themselves far out in space, transformed To constellations, the Great Bear and the Small, Dancing around the Pole Star together...

...In many of Ovid's tales, absolute monarchs impose arbitrary judgments on their subjects, especially those possessing some talent...

...Emotion so powerful "it combusts, or levitates, or mutates into an experience of the supernatural," he says, is the controlling metaphor behind the changes experienced by those who tangle with gods in this epic...

...You saw snare after snare...

...Their beauties demonstrate art's triumph in the face of chaos, its purpose in the face of despair...

...Again and again, Hughes goes back over some incident that seemed trivial at the time, though in retrospect must have indicated the chasm opening between them...

...He has a following, to be sure, but nothing like the crowds who snap up every book by, say, Seamus Heaney, or can recite by heart the corpus of Hughes' long-dead wife, Sylvia Plath...

...It writhed like a snake s tail freshly cut off, Striving to reach her feet in its death-struggle...

...Using the same title, Hughes offers his take on what had aroused her: A quarrel drove them into an aimless drive through the English countryside, then a walk, in the course of which she discovered a hunter's nooses and destroyed them: I was aghast...

...Yet Birthday Letters is not meant to be autobiography...

...INTERESTINGLY, the material Tales from Ovid touches on appears to have partly provided Hughes with a framework for addressing the more personal, painful matters in Birthday Letters...

...When Tereus rapes his sister-in-law, Philomela, he cuts out her tongue so she cannot tell people of his crime: The stump recoiled, silenced, Into the back of her throat...

...In Hughes' version, the two young poets appear to be babes in the wood, playing out some game whose rules and aim are hidden from them...

...We catch ourselves trying to decode what really happened, who was most at fault, how much of the horror could have been prevented...

...Discussing how the smart alecky sophisticate who penned the Ars Amatoria, a flippant, cynical "grammar of love," was able to summon the psychological insight that illuminates Metamorphoses, Hughes shrewdly defines the atmosphere in the Rome of Caesar Augustus: "The obsolete paraphernalia of the old official religion were lying in heaps, like old masks in the lumber room of a theater, and new ones had not yet arrived...

...even in the arrogant foolishness of King Midas, always wishing for the wrong thing, perhaps we are meant to perceive sly caricatures of Caesar himself...

...With the noisy publication of two new books, though, Hughes' reputation among American audiences may well grow...

...But as Hughes notes in his Introduction, Ovid, "too, is an adaptor...

...This lyrical ending is a reminder that divine mercy takes account of human suffering...

...At the same time, perhaps one could say as a result, the Empire was flooded by ecstatic cults...

...Instead, they will see themselves through the eyes of others as protagonists in a brutal and stark world...

...Although Metamorphoses (in the Latin, not in Hughes' version) concludes with the transformation of Julius Caesar into a star, Augustus suspected that Ovid's loyalty was less than complete...

...One can easily see why he finds this particular poet's themes and associations compatible...

...Whether or not he has accurately tapped the essence of the Roman writer, the Laureate comes up with the most compelling explanation to date of what motivated Ovid and attracted his readers...

...The poem goes on to identify the hunter's traps, choking the terrified caught animals, with a husband's cruelty and the constrictions of amarriage gone wrong...

...Hughes clearly believes Plath projected her fixation with her father onto him...

...Thepoems, like smoking entrails, Came soft into your hands...

...The devil made her do it...

...This interpretation permits a historical reading of some of the stories...

...Hughes is most inspired by "the current of human passion" he believes to be Ovid's fascination...

...An anthropology and archeology major at Cambridge, Hughes has derived much from myth (until now, usually Celtic), and has been preoccupied with magical transfigurations...

...The magical changes of Metamorphoses are heaven's response to such misdeeds...

...In Roman mythology, the wrongs are sometimes perpetrated by gods, but the immortals themselves are subj ect to a higher law...

...He tried to reassure her ("It's only a bug, don't let it run away with you"), but acknowledges in "Fever" that "What I was really saying was: 'Stop crying wolf.../Or else I shall not know, I shall not hear/When things get really bad.' " Another tug-of-war started with one of Plath's most outraged late lyrics, "The Rabbit Catcher," beginning, "It was a place of force—/The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair...

...He considers, too, his own role in her life, the tragedy of their breakup and the breakdown that led to her death...

...But then, none in modern times has had the biographical interest of the by-now legendary HughesPlath relationship...

...Here Hughes breaks his silence about Plath, maintained ever since her suicide in 1963, by responding to accounts of their tempestuous marriage that she left in letters, in journal entries, and in poems that have become as familiar as any verse written during this century...

...While a dark, violent imagination, and rich, rather oratorical language have saved him from the worst failings of the day—one could never accuse him of boring introspection, or pallid imagery—he often slid into overwritten Gothic...

...In addition, the Laureate's description of Ovid's time evokes an ancient society disconcertingly similar to our own...

...More problematic still is the coffeeshop image that creeps into the angry speech of Pentheus, whose subjects want to take part in rites honoring Bacchus...

...Occasionally the English text is vastly expanded from the Latin, as in the description of the abduction of Proserpina from the fields of Erma by the god of the underworld, Pluto...

...Wherever the truth may lie, Those terrible, hypersensitive Fingers of your verse closed round it and Feltitalive...

...Many of her fans, even some of her biographers, have tended to see the other characters in her life, including the dead father, protective mother and poet husband, in the epic roles she assigned to them...

...Certain passages—such as the horrific ride of the boy Phaethon across the heavens, unable to control Apollo's chariot of the sun—make the ancient cosmology come alive for contemporary readers...

...Callisto, raped by Jove and turned into a bear by the jealous Juno, is finally reunited with her human son, Areas, just as he was about to kill her for a hunting trophy...

...No doubt many others will consider it a self-serving attempt to sway public opinion by saying, in effect, "Don't look at me...

...Looking back, every past incident seems a portent...

...or the crocodile tears shed by Tereus as he plots to wrest Philomela from her father...

...The Ovid tales have drawn from Hughes some of his best writing thus far...

...He asks himself, was she perceptive in seeing his appreciation for hunting as a kind of sadism, or was she overidentifying with the victims, the way unbalanced people do...

...The Plath we meet in its poems sounds much as she does in her own: dynamic, implacable, galvanizing everyone around her...

...The poems of Birthday Letters are the rueful observations of a man who didn't know what he was asking of the muse and has now found out, the hard way...

...Although there is something fundamentally unknowable about Sylvia Plath's personality, her ability to cast herself in Classical archetypes often makes her seem larger than life...

...The tension between these extremes, and occasionally their collision, can be felt in these tales...

...Its focus is the psychology that comes into play when the sudden death of someone we love catapults us out of our daily, aimless existence into the primitive world of mythic transformation...

...indeed, by tackling this repository of myths, Hughes is vying for a place in the company of Chaucer, Spenser and Shakespeare...

...You saw baby-eyed Strangled innocents, I saw sacred Ancient custom...

...Philomela here stands for all women raped in wartime, all children abused by trusted adults, all helpless people who have been forced to experience the unspeakable...

...Ovid and Hughes believe that divine order is violated when barbarous acts take place...

...In the account of how the King of Thrace fell in love with his sister-in-law, Philomela, he slips into a comparison derived from Northern European legend: "She looked like one of those elfin queens/You hear about/Flirting through the depths of forests...

...Ominous horoscopes warn of their coming misfortunes...

...Many of the greatest writers of our heritage have tried rendering Ovid into English...

...Pentheus' rage has disordered his language, and he accuses his people of having taken their reason and "dunked it all, like a doughnut,/ into a mugful of junk music...

...Ultimately, she depicts them as vampires who drained her life to feed theirs...

...Nothing can be too bloody, though, to convey the horror of the scene where Pentheus is dismembered by his own mother or Actaeon torn apart by his own hounds...

...For reasons that have been lost, he banished the writer from Rome in 9 CE...

...Countiy poverty raising a penny, Filling a Sunday stewpot...

...Consider our television fare, which increasingly centers on the kind of gore that once attracted Roman citizens to the arena—or else psychics, prophets, pundits, New Agers and ufologists (not to mention those "experts" on the stock market), each hawking their particular omens for the future to an anxious and credulous public...

...Some of the Laureate's friends have recently gloated that Birthday Letters refutes feminist charges that he drove Plath to destroy herself...

...The first of these volumes, Tales From Ovid (Farrar Straus Giroux, 257 pp., $25.00), recently won Britain's prestigious Whitbread prize...

...As Hughes notes, the young often want greatness, but do not realize that the fulfillment of their wish will rob them of privacy, of the opportunity to choose an ordinary quiet life...

...At other times Hughes inserts deliberate anachronisms...

...He sees himself as a lovestruck, rather passive man, intoxicated with his wife's vitality, trying almost till the end to protect her fragile vulnerability...

...It is Hughes who does not match her portrait of the "man in black with a Meinkampf look/And a love of the rack and the screw," as she bitterly described him after their marriage broke down...

...Farrar Straus Giroux's initial printing of 20,000 was sold out long before the official publication date, and a second printing of 30,000 is flying off the shelves— hardly the sort of reception accorded even the most eagerly awaited poetry book...

...On their honeymoon in Spain she caught the flu and thought she was dying...

...In these poems he has reworked 24 of the stories from Metamorphoses in a manner that hovers between translation and adaptation...

...Indeed, her late poems do conflate the two men...

...Hughes has truly become a superstar...

...Plath was haunted by omens, as her writings demonstrate...