Skip to main content

Revamped Sylvia Plath Info Translations Bibliography


Oh 17 December 2019, the topic came up on Twitter about how many languages Sylvia Plath has been translated into. I had not spent much time staying on top of these important works as I should have in the last decade, but the tweets got me motivated to revamp the Translations bibliography over on A celebration, this is.

As with the initial presentation, the information was taken from WorldCat so if there are any issues with it, then please excuse them. I did the best I could with formatting, translating the titles and what not. In the process I decided to tweak the standard format for the entries.

All of the works by Plath start with the title of the book and are listed first. Books about Plath are listed alphabetically by author following these. I did not think it was necessary to repeat "Plath, Sylvia" several hundred times. The title is followed by the English work it most closely aligns to, if it could be determined. When I could identify the translator(s) they are listed next, followed last by city, publisher, and year.

In addition to this bibliography, there is a page on my website for the covers of foreign titles. Since around the first of the year and then throughout the winter I added more than 100 book covers to the gallery. Long overdue. I hope that enjoy seeing these interesting covers.

There are 42 different languages represented in the bibliography with more than 520 titles listed. Wow! They are in order by year (or, they should be). The languages with the most titles are Italian, Spanish, French, and German. I said in my tweet it could be north of 50 and it still might be because I did not include translations of Plath's works that appeared in periodicals. If you know of a book not listed, in any language or in any edition, please let me know so I can add it. Thank you.

I am deeply grateful to Marie in Russia who, in March, sent me citations and information on book covers of Plath's Russian translations. Thank you Marie!

All links accessed 20 January 2020.

Popular posts from this blog

Famous Quotes of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath inspires us all in various and wonderful ways. She is in many respects a form of comfort to us, which is something that Esther Greenwood expresses in The Bell Jar , about a bath: "There must be quite a few things a hot bath won't cure, but I don't know many of them. Whenever I'm sad I'm going to die, or so nervous I can't sleep, or in love with somebody I won't be seeing for a week, I slump down just so far and then I say: 'I'll go take a hot bath.'" We read and remember Sylvia Plath for many reasons, many of them deeply personal and private. But we commemorate her, too, in very public ways, as Anna of the long-standing Tumblr Loving Sylvia Plath , has been tracking, in the form of tattoos. (Anna's on Instagram with it too, as SylviaPlathInk .) The above bath quote is among Sylvia Plath's most famous. It often appears here and there and it is stripped of its context. But I think most people will know it is from her nove...

Sylvia Plath's Gravestone Vandalized

The following news story appeared online this morning: HEPTONSTALL, ENGLAND (APFS) - The small village of Heptonstall is once again in the news because of the grave site of American poet Sylvia Plath. The headstone controversy rose to a fever pitch in 1989 when Plath's grave was left unmarked for a long period of time after vandals repeatedly chiseled her married surname Hughes off the stone marker. Author Nick Hornby commented, "I like Plath, but the controversy reaching its fever pitch in the 80s had nothing to do with my book title choice." Today, however, it was discovered that the grave was defaced but in quite an unlikely fashion. This time, Plath's headstone has had slashed-off her maiden name "Plath," so the stone now reads "Sylvia Hughes." A statement posted on Twitter from @masculinistsfortedhughes (Masculinists for Ted Hughes) has claimed responsibility saying that, "We did this because as Ted Hughes' first wife, Sylvia de...

Sylvia Plath and McLean Hospital

In August when I was in the final preparations for the tour of Sylvia Plath The Bell Jar sites, I found that I had long been mistaken about a couple of things. This is my coming clean. It was my intention in this blog post to discuss just McLean, but I found myself deeply immersed in other aspects of Plath's recovery. The other thing I was mistaken about will be discussed in a separate blog post. I suppose I need to state from the outset that I am drawing conclusions from Plath's actual experiences from what she wrote in The Bell Jar and vice versa, taking information from the novel that is presently unconfirmed or murky and applying it to Plath's biography. There is enough in The Bell Jar , I think, based on real life to make these decisions. At the same time, I like to think that I know enough to distinguish where things are authentic and where details were clearly made up, slightly fudged, or out of chronological order. McLean Hospital was Plath's third and last...