Alone with Elizabeth Bishop

一眼注意到这篇文章是因为它的开场。

“When you write my epitaph,” Elizabeth Bishop famously told the poet Robert Lowell in 1974, “you must say I was the loneliest person who ever lived.”
(应该不难就不翻译了！

Elizabeth Bishop这个（又是我没听说过的）诗人，到底经历了什么呢？
不被关爱的童年，以及在当时受到排挤的女同性恋的身份，带给了她什么？
顺便，写这篇文的作者本身也是同性恋，Bishop会给作者带来怎样的思考呢？

再录一句喜欢的话。

Even if what she wrote sometimes aggrieved her, her poems, like her privacy, often had a lenitive effect on her life, helping her cope and even, perhaps, becoming brief talismans against pain.

（啊Bishop总让我想到象……）

The Kafka Papers

这篇文章介绍的是一本描述卡夫卡的手稿的去向的书。对就是那个写城堡变形记的卡夫卡。
Brod没有遵从Kafka的命令烧毁他的手稿。然后就有了后面的故事（？）

But while it is generally accepted that no one would recognize Brod’s name today were it not for Kafka, I wonder if the opposite might be true also: that Brod’s entanglement with Kafka’s estate has prevented us from considering such an interesting figure (who was, incidentally, a composer as well as writer) on his own merits.
这一段是针对有人评价作为Kafka的朋友，Brod太平庸了这种说法而提出的新的看法。你看Brod多惨啊（）

His characters don’t come as shockingly alive as Kafka’s figures do, whose every feature, from the tattered clothes they wear to the perspiration that gathers on their foreheads, invades and then permanently inhabits the reader’s consciousness.
这段是说Brod的人物没有Kafka那么有煽动性、那么深入人心（太惨了）

Yet what might be the archival scholar’s dream-come-true would, arguably, have been Kafka-Josefine’s worst nightmare: the imperfections of his work laid bare, for everyone to see, a mere mouse-click (pun intended) away.
这段在文末。Kafka的手稿最终安定下来，不知道这是不是正如作者本人所期待的那样呢？

The Fat Lady Is Singing

这篇文章写的是逐渐没落的戏剧，重点介绍了City Opera的没落。

At its best, no art form is more thrilling or seductive. But none is at greater risk of following the dinosaurs down the cold road to extinction.
在它最好的时候，没有任何一种艺术形式比它更令人兴奋、更诱人。但是现在也没有什么比它更可能沿着恐龙的冰冷的道路走向灭绝。

A Trip To Tolstoy Farm

很长的一篇文章，讲托尔斯泰的农场。
文章描述的托尔斯泰给我的感觉是，我和另一个我。他在积极的寻求对他人的贡献和相对自我的文学创作之间挣扎，最后离家出走。
而文章描述的这个农场上，生活了很多如他一样不想被找到的人。绝症，或者是无法承受的失去，或是对自己的认知，把他们带到了这里。

Tolstoy died an eccentric, impossible, self-denying, hypocritical, despised, beloved, myopic visionary — the most famous writer in the world.

Tolstoy Farm has become a refuge for people like Laura — people who want to opt out of mass civilization for one reason or another and speak of the place as a kind of holy land.

SENTIMENT WITHOUT SENTIMENTALITY

这篇文章写了Hall老年的作品和心境。
我老了会怎么样呢！

A Carnival of Losses: Notes Nearing Ninety, Donald Hall’s splendid miscellany, was published in July, just a couple of weeks after his death at age eighty-nine.

这一篇我印象最深的是这个题目了！失去的狂欢！