The best time of day
Cool summer nights.
The windows are open.
The lights are on.
Fruit in a bowl.
Your head is on my shoulder.
These are the most enjoyable moments of the day.
Next, of course,
It's those early morning hours. And also
It's time for lunch.
As well as the afternoon, and that
Twilight.
But I love it
These summer nights.
Even more than, I suppose,
Other those hours.
The day's work is done.
No one can influence us at this time.
Or rather, forever.
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 Raymond Carver's poem "The Best Time of the Day", translated by Shu Dandan. Raymond Carver is a well-known contemporary American short story writer and poet, and the Times of London called him "Chekhov of America" after his death, an observer and expression of a rare "difficult time" in American literature.
The poem "The Best time of the day" makes us feel those quiet and gentle moments in life. But Raymond Carver, who wrote such a poem, his life was full of suffering and despair, he has been recording the cruelty that life has given him in words, and he has also tried to stay awake in the whirlpool that fate has left him. Today we will listen to the story of Raymond Carver.
Carver grew up in a small town called Yagiwa in eastern Washington. His father worked in a sawmill, drank heavily for a long time, and the family had a difficult life. At the age of eighteen, Carver was married, his wife was only seventeen years old, and she was pregnant when she married. Under the burden of his family, writing became Carver's support, and he later chose to go to university to study writing. Although his life was poor, he did not stop writing and completed his college studies on and off. Days like these dictated carver's writing direction, saying, "I can't write about things that take two or three years to complete." So I positioned myself on short stories and poetry writing so I could sit down and finish it all at once. ”
Carver and his wife had two children before they were 20 years old, and in order to support their family, Carver worked as a janitor, a delivery man, a sawmiller... Wait, during this period, the novels he wrote were also not interested. In the midst of a painful life, he began to drink heavily, so much so that he kept battling alcohol and was in and out of the rehab center several times. Friends agreed that he would one day die of alcoholism. Carver wrote in his novels about the life of an alcoholic, a divorced, an unhappy person, "I've given up completely." At one point he said, "I'm looking forward to dying." ”
Later, the appearance of the poet Tess ended Carver's predicament. They met at a writer's event, and since then Carver has had good luck, and he has finally quit drinking and "chose to live". In the late 1970s, Carver reached the pinnacle of his literature. Tess was always with Carver, writing together, discussing each other's work, and the two achieved each other's achievements, but it was not until Carver's death that the two registered their marriages.
Kafka said: "You can't cope with life when you are alive, so you should use one hand to block out the despair that hangs over your fate, and at the same time, use the other hand to write down everything you see in the ruins." Raymond Carver is like this, he integrates his life into the words of his pen, so he pays attention to the fragmented life of the little people at the bottom, and also writes about the difficulties of the losers, and writes about the numbness and dazedness of all kinds of people. However, no matter how embarrassing and impermanent life is, there is a slight fire in his heart, that is, the light that illuminates the world, so we can feel the warmth of his pen.
Poetry is life, "grass hall reading poetry", there is temperature, there is texture. Raymond Carver's poem "The Best time of the Day" and the poet's story are here today, thanks for the attention, we will see you in the next issue.
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