Happy Birthday, Sylvia!

Today is the birthday of Sylvia Plath, American writer/poet. She would have turned 78 this year. 

Quite a few friends of mine know that I am a total Sylvia Plath junkie. My obsession begun  a bit more than three years ago, about the time I entered  university. Surprize, surprize, it all started with Gilmore Girls.

Most of the things I know about American culture, I learned from Gilmore Girls, for I am such a huge junkie that I look up here every allusion that is made during the dialogues (and there are quite a few of them in every episode, believe me). Plath is mentioned several times from the very beginning, for Rory is reading the Unabridged Journals in Season 1, then she is also mentioned on several other occasions. So I looked up SP (on stupid Wikipedia, where else?), then watched that pretty poor movie that is made of her life, and grew even more interested. I read The Bell Jar and the Hungarian translation of her edited journals during the first, autumn semester at the university, and it may sound corny, ridiculous, and like an utter cliche, but I was thinking at every other page that this woman is reading my mind, writing my thoughts, my feelings, my experiences, and my fears. This woman is my soul sister. I quickly realized that I wanted to write my bachelor's thesis on her. Then during the winter exam period I should have been preparing for stupid exams, but I got Letters Home from the library, which is her correspondence with her mother, and once I started it, it was impossible for me to put down, because I adored the way she wrote, and I wanted to get to know her even more.  I kept digging myself deeper in the subject, got the originial English version of the Unabridged Journals and Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams for my birthday the following spring. Boy, the Journals were most certainly not an easy reading, it took me months to get through it, but by the end I felt that I completely understood her, as a matter of fact, I knew her better than even she herself did. Then I started looking for refence books on her, but there's hardly anything my library has, yet, the ones I could find, mostly biographies, I read. Lucky me, the university has an American Modern Poetry course that also covers SP, yet, unfortunately only one class was dedicated to her, due to lack of time. I also discovered several other great writers/poets through her, for she mentioned them in her Journals, such as Anne Sexton (lucky me, I got to know her! Another poet I cherish.), Marianne Moore, Ted Hughes, et al. I love her prose, especially The Bell Jar, I drink up every single sentence of it like it is oxygen. Her journals are also utterly close to me, for there are so many entries, thoughts, and feelings I can identify with, just like they were my very own. Although, SP is primarily a poet, I am least close to her poetry, I may not be mature enough for it yet, for I find it too abstract, too difficult to relate to at several times.

So now, here I am, years later, still a junkie, about to dig even deeper, read all her works again, for the time has come to start doing the research and writing my thesis. I wonder how our relationship will be  by spring, by the time I am done with writing.

Anyway,
Happy Birthday, Sylvia!