“We read older novels differently from new ones—we read them to understand what we have lost and what we have gained, what the author knew and what she didn’t know that she knew, but that we now understand shaped the world we are living in. Because of Willa Cather’s intensity of observation, ‘My Antonia’ remains a revelation.”
"Whatever we had missed, we possessed together the precious, the incommunicable past."
- from MY ÁNTONIA by Willa Cather
In this symphonically powerful novel, Willa Cather created one of the most winning heroines in American fiction, a woman whose robust high spirits and calm, undemonstrative strength are emblematic of the virtues Cather most admired in her country.
"He came to be very glad that he had known her, and that she had had a hand in breaking him in to life. He has known pretty women and clever ones since then,—but never one like her, as she was in her best days. Her eyes, when they laughed for a moment into one's own, seemed to promise a wild delight that he has not found in life. 'I know where it is,' they seemed to say, 'I could show you!'"
—Willa Cather, A LOST LADY
A portrait of a woman who reflects the conventions of her age even as she defies them and whose transformations embody the decline and coarsening of the American frontier.
1940.12.18 胡適50歲生日後一天給Roberta (Robby) Lowitz*一封信.
說昨天杜威博士給他一封很好的短箋.....兩個晚上前胡適讀 Willa Cather (1873 - 1947) 的Double Birthday,( set in Pittsburgh, is part of a group referred to as the Pittsburgh stories.) ，說它是其生平讀過的最佳小說之一......."我喜Willa Cather的書. 妳知道她嗎?"......
*"Even in American cities, which seem so much alike, where people seem all to be living the same lives, striving for the same things, thinking the same thoughts, there are still individuals a little out of tune with the times - there are still survivals of a past more loosely woven, there are disconcerting beginnings of a future yet unforeseen."
胡適之先生的世界The World of Dr. Hu Shih: 胡適的愛情神話: 《星星 ...
hushihhc.blogspot.com/.../blog-post_4967.ht...Translate this pageAug 2, 2012 - 胡適與Roberta (Robby) Lowitz (後來為杜威夫人/師母胡適晚年說Robby是富家女將杜威照顧得很好......)的情緣不過我們看杜威的傳記中怎說她倆的 ...
*****
'The Selected Letters of Willa Cather'
Edited by ANDREW JEWELL and JANIS STOUT
Reviewed by TOM PERROTTA
In her letters, the novelist Willa Cather emerges as a strong and vivid presence, a woman at once surprisingly modern and touchingly - if not always sweetly - old-fashioned.
O Pioneers! is a 1913 novel by American author Willa Cather. It was written in part when Cather was living in Cherry Valley, New York, with Isabelle McClung[1] and was completed at the McClungs' home in Pittsburgh.[2]'The Selected Letters of Willa Cather'
Edited by ANDREW JEWELL and JANIS STOUT
Reviewed by TOM PERROTTA
In her letters, the novelist Willa Cather emerges as a strong and vivid presence, a woman at once surprisingly modern and touchingly - if not always sweetly - old-fashioned.
《啊，拓荒者！》資中筠 譯(《閑情記美》內收入1988/1997 二版的介紹----
The Project Gutenberg EBook of O Pioneers!, by Willa Cather ，沒收入文中說的題詞。
http://cather.unl.edu/0017.html
Willa Cather was born on this day in 1873 in Virginia, though she lived in Nebraska from age ten.
"The great fact was the land itself, which seemed to overwhelm the little beginnings of human society that struggled in its sombre wastes. It was from facing this vast hardness that the boy's mouth had become so bitter; because he felt that men were too weak to make any mark here, that the land wanted to be let alone, to preserve its own fierce strength, its peculiar, savage kind of beauty, its uninterrupted mournfulness."
--from "O Pioneers!" (1913)
No other work of fiction so vividly evokes the harsh beauty and epic sweep of the Nebraska prairies that Cather knew and loved. The heroine of O Pioneers!, Alexandra Bergson, is a young Swedish immigrant at the turn of the twentieth century who inherits her father’s wind-blasted land and, through years of hard work, turns it into a prosperous farm. Fiercely independent, Alexandra sacrifices love and companionship in her passionate devotion to the land, until tragedy strikes and brings with it the chance for a new life.
PRAIRIE SPRING
EVENING and the flat land,
Rich and sombre and always silent;
The miles of fresh-plowed soil,
Heavy and black, full of strength and harshness;
The growing wheat, the growing weeds,
The toiling horses, the tired men;
The long empty roads,
Sullen fires of sunset, fading,
The eternal, unresponsive sky.
Against all this, Youth,
Flaming like the wild roses,
Singing like the larks over the plowed fields,
Flashing like a star out of the twilight;
Youth with its insupportable sweetness,
Its fierce necessity,
Its sharp desire,
Singing and singing,
Out of the lips of silence,
Out of the earthy dusk.
1940.12.18 胡適50歲生日後一天給Roberta (Robby) Lowitz*一封信.
說昨天杜威博士給他一封很好的短箋.....兩個晚上前胡適讀 Willa Cather (1873 - 1947) 的Double Birthday,( set in Pittsburgh, is part of a group referred to as the Pittsburgh stories.) 是其生平讀過的最佳小說之一.......我喜Willa Cather的書. 妳知道她嗎?......
說昨天杜威博士給他一封很好的短箋.....兩個晚上前胡適讀 Willa Cather (1873 - 1947) 的Double Birthday,( set in Pittsburgh, is part of a group referred to as the Pittsburgh stories.) 是其生平讀過的最佳小說之一.......我喜Willa Cather的書. 妳知道她嗎?......
"Even in American cities, which seem so much alike, where people seem all to be living the same lives, striving for the same things, thinking the same thoughts, there are still individuals a little out of tune with the times - there are still survivals of a past more loosely woven, there are disconcerting beginnings of a future yet unforeseen."
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