“I was back in a dark wood”: Don Paterson’s “The Forest of the Suicides”

Abstract

only pure suicide is self-strangulation; everything requires the world as an accomplice.(Don Paterson, Book of Shadows 76)In hell even the trees are not blameless. Particularly the trees.(Don Paterson, Book of Shadows 133)Don Paterson's The Forest of the Suicides was published in 2003 in Landing Light, collection of 38 poems that, besides this of Dante's Inferno xiii, includes five more re-writings after classics by Cavafy and Rilke. poem has been hailed as an example of creative translation, a process which opens up classic texts and reveals new meanings for contemporary readers (Stafford 234) and, as such, includes several variations. most startling of these is the substitution of the thirteenth-century Pier della Vigna with the twentiethcentury Sylvia Plath: starting from this consideration, this article illustrates how The Forest of the Suicides functions simultaneously as an interpretation of Dante's canto and as means to retell Plath's suicide through the lens provided by Dante. I will argue that rewriting Dante's text while imitating Plath's style allows Paterson to comment on an event-Plath's suicide-that is usually regarded as gossip and sensationalism. My claim is that creative translation sheds light on the specificities of the source and creates new meanings in the context of the target language.In what follows, I will therefore summarize Paterson's thoughts on translation and re-writing, and point out how this poetics is reflected in The Forest of the Suicides. poem reproduces the plot line and subject matter of Dante's text, translating its images and rhetorical devices; these deviations, on one level, alter the meaning of the source, while on another they are instrumental in reproducing the interdependence of sound and content, as well as the intertextuality at the core of Dante's text and the ambivalent attitude of author and pilgrim. adoption of Plath's voice allows Paterson to challenge traditional notions of authorships within and beyond the source text.Paterson's Conception of the Poetic VersionIn the essay The Lyric Principle, Paterson reflects on recurrent feeling shared by poets, the suspicion that our best lines [have] already been written by someone else (8). Elaborating on statement by Renato Poggioli, who comments on how poets choose to translate mainly because of elective affinities with other artists, Paterson adds that poets do so because the process opens a path to new way of writing poem. He continues by stating that somehow, by assuming this voice in the target language, you'll lose or modify the voice you've mistakenly come to think as your own (Interview with Marco Fazzini). These thoughts are important for contextualizing poem like The Forest of the Suicides in which Paterson adopts not one, but two voices-since he is simultaneously translating Dante and imitating Plath's style. In pub He reading of the poem at an event organized by the Edinburgh University Literature Society in 2012, Paterson in fact emphasized his affinity with Plath and expressed his admiration for her art, going as as calling her genius, far superior poet to her husband Ted Hughes (Don Paterson 'Forest of Suicides').1However, Paterson does not see himself as translator and declares himself to be skeptical about the possibility of translating po- etry. In an interview with Atilla Dosa, he points out that [t]he surface is the one that is impossible to translate, because those things of which you're most proud as poets depend wholly on idiomatic circumstances, tiny acoustic resonances, tiny shades of meaning and associations, that can have no direct equivalent in the host language (Interview with Attila Dosa).2 He refers to The Forest of the Suicides, just as he does to his re-writing of other classics, as poetic version, and distinguishes this version from translation by arguing that the latter tries to remain true to the original words and their relations [. …