Sylvia Plath, poem "Mirror" - read by Erminia Passannanti (Italian poet)



Sylvia Plath's poem "Mirror", read by Italian poet, 
Erminia Passannanti during a poetry reading in Oxford, 1999.

Mirror

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful ‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.


Sylvia Plath

Born in 1932 to middle class parents in Jamaica Plain, Massachusetts, Sylvia Plath published her first poem at the age of eight. A sensitive person who tended to be a bit of a perfectionist she was what many would consider a model daughter and student - popular, a straight A student, always winning the best prizes. She won a scholarship to Smith College in 1950 and even then she had an enviable list of publications. While at Smith she wrote over four hundred poems.

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BIOGRAPHY Erminia Passannanti was educated in Foreign Languages and Literatures (Italian, English, and French) at the University of Salerno (Italy). In 1988, she obtained a First-Class Honours Degree (Cum Magna Laude:100/110 e Lode) from the Faculty of Letters and Philosophy. In 2004, she obtained her first Ph.D. in Italian literature at University College London with a doctoral thesis on the work of Italian poet, literary translator and essayist, Franco Fortini, involving   XXth Century Cultural History, History of Ideas, Poetry and Literary Criticism and Translation Theory.   In 2014 she was granted a second Ph.D. in Social Sciences and Media Communication (Brunel University, England) with a thesis on Italian cinema and religious censorship. In 2000. she won the Italian state competition ("Concorso a cattedra") to become a full school professor. Her research ranges from philosophy of literature, history of ideas, translation studies and film criticism. He ac...
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