Hey! I recently received a gift from Anna, the mastermind behind the long-standing Tumblr  Loving Sylvia Plath ! She was generous enough to send me two needed editions of The Bell Jar in translation. The first one is A Redoma de Vidro , Portguese edition, from 2015.  The second book is Szklany klosz , a Polish edition printed in 2019. The parcel was accompanied with four selections of vegan German chocolate. I cannot read either Portuguese or Polish, but I can eat chocolate like an Olympic gold medalist.  My current shelf of Bell Jar translations... Note I've included the French Œuvres and Italian Opere as they include the novel. That's 33 total, though some are duplicated. The books looks great up there on the shelf; the chocolate is long gone. Thank you, Anna!

If you know anything about me, it is that I enjoy foreign editions of Sylvia Plath's novel The Bell Jar . So recently I saw for sale a copy of the novel in Russian, a language I previously did not have, for a reasonable price. You may be able to see some tape and label on the spine. This is an ex-library copy of the novel, withdrawn from circulation from the Boston Public Library. This particular edition dates from 2000. Having a Russian edition makes me really happy given Esther Greenwood's envy of the Russian interpreter who knew so many idioms and her foray with Constantine. This cover has been added to the Translations book cover page of A celebration, this is . Here are the rest of my Bell Jars . All links accessed 18 January 2019.

Have you done a post about translations of Plath? How many are there? Everyone says that if you don’t know, no one knows. https://t.co/v5Zc27TfhN — Carl Rollyson (@crollyson) December 17, 2019 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 re...

One of the reviews of the first Faber edition of The Bell Jar , the first edition to appear in print with Sylvia Plath's name as author, was by Valerie Pitt, in The Sunday Telegraph , 25 September 1966. Pitt's review, titled "Isolated Case," praises the novel story as being told with "controlling definiteness" and "disciplined clarity," remarking that these are also qualities of Plath's poetry. Very true. Pitt's review ends, "It is a book to make one regret, increasingly, the early death not only of so brilliant a writer but of so uncommon a personality." Valerie Pitt evidently was a reader of Plath's poetry at the time of the review, commenting that "Not surprisingly, the publishers have have followed the success of Sylvia Plath's 'Ariel'" by issuing her novel under her own name. It is Pitt's comment about Plath being so "uncommon a personality" that strikes me as interesting. It is pos...

Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams , like almost every other book by (or about) Sylvia Plath, has an interesting publishing history. It first appeared in 1977 in England, published by Faber in that shockingly orange dust wrapper . It was re-issued in paperback with additional material from the Sylvia Plath Materials held at Lilly Library at Indiana University, Bloomington, in 1979*. On January 2, 1979, Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams first appeared in the US, published by Harper & Row. Did you know that Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams was published in Sweden before it was published in the United States? Noveller och annan prosa was published by Trevi (Stockholm) in 1978. The translations were completed by Margareta Tegnemark. The Harper and Faber contents still do differ, with the Faber edition including two earlier stories Plath wrote in 1949, "The Green Rock" and "A Day in June". On the heels of the US publication was the Japanese translation Jo...

Earlier this month I received an email from Fan Jinghua that I thought could be a wonderful guest post for this blog. You should know Fan's name and work for he contributed the wonderful essay "Sylvia Plath's Visual Poetics" to Kathleen Connors and Sally Bayley's Eye Rhymes: Sylvia Plath's Art of the Visual . Fan also maintains the blog Poetry Chinese . Fan's blog regularly publishes his own translations of Plath's poems into Chinese. From Fan: I was planning to read a paper on Plath's reception (and mis-reading) in China, and this is a book cover I would like to illustrate. The poetry book is entitled Haizi (and) Luo Yihe Work, which was published in 1991 in Nanjing. Haizi was a graduate from Peking University, a poet, born on March 26, 1964, and committed suicide on the same day at his 25 birthday in 1989 by lying on a railroad. His suicide is the most celebrated suicide and he is now a poet martyr. He had nothing to do Plath, but when this ...

Sylvia Plath entered - and tied for first place - the Kathryn Irene Glascock Poetry Contest in April 1955 . Her poems were judged by Marianne Moore, John Ciardi, and Wallace Fowlie. Of all the contestants that year, Lynne Lawner appears to be the only other other poet who has made a name for herself. Later, Plath was herself a judge of the Glascock in 1959 ! The translated title of Plath's novel The Bell Jar into German ( Die Glasglocke ), Norwegian ( Glasklokken ), and Swedish ( Glaskupan ) all sound and look like Glascock. Nothing important there, I don't think, just something perhaps interesting.

Please help me out... Would readers be interested in a list of books about Sylvia Plath which were never in English, like Marianne Egeland's Sylvia Plath? Or, would you be interested in a list of books that were in English but translated into a foreign language, such as Janet Malcolm's The Silent Women , translated to German Die schweigende Frau : die Biographien der Sylvia Plath . Or both?

One thing the Sylvia Plath 75th Year Symposium taught me is just how far and wide Plath studies extend across this planet. My blog here, with its lists of books by and about Plath grossly under-represents this fact. Therefore, I will start a Plath in translation list, as well as a list of Non-English books about Plath. Please be patient as the list may be slow to develop at first.