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Winter morning
When I wake up this morning,
The window glass has been frosted,
And I was hot in a dream.
The stove was from a piece of wood it had admired
Pour out the warmth all night.
Poetry is life, welcome to the "Caotang Reading Poetry" jointly launched by Cover News, Chengdu Radio and Television Station and Caotang Poetry Magazine, I am the reader juanzi. What you just heard was Olaf H. Hauge's poem "Winter Morning", translated by Dong Jiping. Olaf M. H. Hauge is a famous contemporary Norwegian poet. He lived a simple life and was deeply influenced and inspired by ancient Chinese poets. Since the early 1960s, Hauge has published more than ten volumes of poetry, including The Gift. In addition, he is a well-known translator.
Haug was born in the small town of Ukeville in the western Norwegian fjords. As a child, he was full of literature, but because of his unsatisfactory grades in mathematics, he was unable to enter a higher education institution. He stayed in his hometown, guarding a small farm left by his parents, planting fruit trees and gardening for his neighbors. Hauge worked on the land all day, living a simple and simple life, sometimes even quite difficult. Moreover, he never left the land of his hometown in his lifetime. But Hauge studied English, French, German and other Chinese, became a brilliant translator, he saw the world through poetry, and also translated the works of many Western poets, such as Yeats, Paul Celan, Hölderlin and others, into Norwegian.
Hauge was not only nourished by Western classical and modern literature, he also dabbled in a number of Chinese and Japanese poetry. In 1931, Hauge found the Tao Te Ching from nowhere, and after reading it, he wrote three quotations from the Tao Te Ching in a pamphlet called The WeedIng Manual. From then on, Hauge began to be captivated by Chinese philosophy and classical poetry. For a long time, however, Hauge had no chance to really come into contact with classical Chinese poetry. In 1962, Hauge received the first widely distributed English-language chinese poetry collection, Penguin Edition of Selected Chinese Poems. Hauge said in his diary that he had been immersed in the poem for an entire summer that year. Perhaps, it was in this book that he met the soul of china, Tao Yuanming. Living in seclusion, poverty, and poet status – in a way, Hauge is very similar to the ancient Chinese pastoral poet Tao Yuanming. In the poem "Asking the Wind", Hauge wrote: If one day / Tao Qian came to see me, I would / show him my cherry and apple trees.
When Hauge met the works of Chinese philosophers and poets, he never wanted to come out of their world again. Influenced by traditional Chinese culture, his poetry also reveals a classical poetic rhyme in simplicity. He embodies a simple life in a profound philosophy, "stylistically echoing in a wonderful way with classical Chinese poetry."
Hauge's health is not very good, and as he ages, his health deteriorates. Repeated episodes of mental illness haunted him, and he was even admitted to a mental hospital several times. When the poet is admitted to a mental hospital, he cannot write, but after his consciousness is restored, he will write the poems that he imagined when he was in a state of madness. One of the poems also imagined himself hovering in front of China's door, but in fact, Hauge never left his hometown in his life, let alone had the opportunity to go to China. On an ordinary afternoon in 1994, 86-year-old Olaf M. H. Haug sat quietly in a chair in his home and left this world.
Poetry is life, "grass hall reading poetry", there is temperature, there is texture. Ralph M. H. Hauge's poem "Winter Morning" and the poet's story are shared here today, thank you for your attention, we will see you in the next issue.
