Birthday Letters and the Sorrows of the Deer: References and Notes

1. Skea, A. ‘Birthday Letters: Poetry and Magic’, https://ann.skea.com/BLCabala.htm.

2. Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Faber, 1992 (SGCB) p.275.

3. Graves, R. The White Goddess, Faber, 1977. pp.54 and 251.

4. Reid, C.(Ed.), Letters of Ted Hughes, Faber, 2007. p.394.

5. Kumari, M. ‘Hamlet’s “stricken deer”: a pointed reference to Gli Eroici Furori and the execution of Giordano Bruno’, Academia.edu, 2017.

6. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/19817/19817–h/19817–h.htm #Third p.93. Hughes was very familiar with the work of Giordano Bruno.

7. Hughes owned copies of Frances Yates’ Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition and her Lull and Bruno, both of which describe Bruno’s writing about Actaeon. Whilst there are no volumes of in Hughes’ library now held at Emory University, there is a translation of Gli Eroici Furori in the Cambridge University library. Based on my own conversation with Hughes about Yates and Bruno, I am sure he had read Gli Eroici Furori in translation.

8. SGCB 113, 115 and 108.

9. SGCB 33.

10. Sagar, K. ‘Appendix XIV’, Poet and Critic, British Library, 2012, p.323.

11. Skea, A. ‘Ted Hughes’ Vaccanas’, Ted Hughes : Cambridge to Collected, M. Wormald, N. Roberts, T.Gifford (eds.), Palgave Macmillan, 2013. Also available at https://ann.skea.com/THVacanas.html

12. SGCB 107

13. Duczynak, I. and Polanyi, K.(eds.), The Plough and the Pen: Writing from Hungary 1930-1956, Translator: McRobbie, K., Introduction by W.H.Auden, who describes the poem as “one of the greatest poems written in my time”. The poem was not included in The Rattle Bag.

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14. Weissbort, D. Ted Hughes: Selected Translations, Faber, 2006. p.24. Ted’s translation of Juhasz’s poem is published in full; and the first lines of a translation made by David Wevill for Penguin’s Modern European Poets series in 1970, are included in an Appendix.

15. Hughes to McCaughey in Reid, C.,Letters of Ted Hughes,Faber, 2007, pp.394–5. Hughes was looking for a copy of the Carmina Gadelica: prayers, charms, incantations, blessings, literary folk–lore and songs, gathered in the Gaelic speaking regions of Scotland between 1860–1909, edited and compiled by Alexander Carmichael, Oliver & Boyd, Edinburgh, 1900.

16. The full prayer and a discussion of its origins and use can be found by searching for ‘St Patrick’s Breastplate’ on Wikipedia.

17. Hughes, T. The Critical Forum, Norwich Tapes, 1978. Transcript at https://ann.skea.com/CriticalForum.htm

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