文档介绍：Green Mansions
A Romance of the Tropical Forest
by W. H. Hudson
作者简介
赫德森威廉( ),
作家、博物学家,生于布宜诺斯艾利斯附近。年到英国,年
入英国籍。他的早期著作与南美的自然史有关,但最著名的作品是
《在汉普郡的日子》( )和自传体小说《很远
和很久以前》( )。他的鸟类学著作
有《伦敦的鸟》()和《博物学家手册》(
)。为了纪念他,伦敦海德公园建了一
座鸟类乐园,园中有一座由爱泼斯坦雕刻的“里马”石像里马是
《绿色公寓》中的人物。
FOREWORD
I take up pen for this foreword with the fear of one who knows that he
cannot do justice to his subject, and the trembling of one who would not,
for a good deal, set down words unpleasing to the eye of him who wrote
Green Mansions, The Purple Land, and all those other books which have
meant so much to me. For of all living authors— now that Tolstoi has gone
I could least dispense with W. H. Hudson. Why do I love his writing so? I
think because he is, of living writers that I read, the rarest spirit, and has the
clearest gift of conveying to me the nature of that spirit. Writers are to their
readers little new worlds to be explored; and each traveller in the realms of
literature must needs have a favourite hunting-ground, which, in his good
will— or perhaps merely in his egoism— he would wish others to share with
him.
The great and abiding misfortunes of most of us writers are twofold: We
are, as worlds, mon tramping-ground for our readers, rather tame
territory; and as guides and dragomans thereto we are too superficial, lack-
ing clear intimacy of expression; in fact— like guide or dragoman— we can-
not let folk into the real secrets, or show them the spirit, of the land.
Now, Hudson, whether in a pure romance like this Green Mansions, or
in that romantic piece of realism The Purple Land, or in books like Idle
Days in Patagonia, Afoot in England, The Land’s End, Adventures among
Birds, A Shepherd’s Life, and all his other nomadic records munings
with men, birds, beasts, and Nature, has a supreme gift of disclosing not
only the thing he sees but the spirit of his vision. Without apparent effort
he takes you with him into a rare, free, natural world, and always you