نصفه رهاش کردم.☺️

Su šia knyga buvo labai nuobodu. Egzistenciniai klausimai "kas aš", "kokia prasmė" persvėrė istoriją, kurios neužščiuopiau. Neva autobiografija, neva romanas, daug karo, aviacijos ir žmonių hierarchijos. Skaitant mintys nuklysdavo į darbus, laisvalaikį, išeidavau iš knygos, o gal niekada joje ir nebuvau. Stabtelėdavau tik tose vietose, kuriose Egziuperi pasitelkdavo lyriką ir metaforas, jos buvo gražios.

فعلا به دلیل ترجمه سنگین کتاب خیلی کند پیش میرم .... به حدی که بعضی جاها منظور نویسنده رو متوجه نمیشم و اینکه باید چند بار بخونم

16 تیر 1395
بالاخره تونستم این کتاب را تمام کنم
از بخش 7 کتاب( که دست و پنجه نرم کردن نویسنده برای زنده موندنه) تونستم باهاش ارتباط برقرار کنم و برای همین فکر میکنم یک بار دیگه باید برگردم و کتاب را مجددا از ابتدا بخونم ..

دوسنت اگزوپری تو این کتاب نقش همان شازده کوچولو را بازی میکند ( و شاید شازده کوچولو از خودش متولد شده و همون موتسارتی است که نمیخواد در بچه ای بمیرد و از بین برود ) و سعی میکند نگاه کنجکاوی به پدیده های دور و برش داشته باشه
نویسنده در عین اینکه در تلاشه تا با زمین و پدیده های طبیعی اخت بگیره و کمی با انها خلوت کنه از انسان غافل نیست و انتهای کتاب را خیلی زیبا تمام میکند ...
" ... وقتی به دنبال تحولی، جهشی در باغی ، گل سرخ نوظهوری پدید اید باغبانها همه به جنب و جوش می ایند. ان را جدا میکنند و کشت میدهند و زمینه را برای رشد سریع ان مهیا میکنند. اما برای انسان ها باغبانی نیست. "

" مرا دردی عذاب میدهد که با انفاق به مستمندان و اطعام مساکین دوا نمیشود . سوز دل من نه از این قوز و گره های پیکر این کارگران و نه از زشتی این محنت بلکه از انست که در هر یک از این انسان ها موتسارت است که کشته میشود .
تنها نفس خداوند است که اگر بر گِل دمیده شود انسان می افریند. "

Nếu bạn sẵn sàng chấp nhận một thách thức thì hẵng đọc cuốn này! Bản dịch của Nguyễn Thành Long có vẻ bám rất sát câu chữ trong bản gốc và bởi vậy khá khó tiếp cận. Tôi nhớ đã thử gắng đọc vài ba lần bản dịch này do nxb Tác Phẩm mới ấn hành mà đều thất bại. Lần này đọc lại, tôi có tham khảo, nhiều khi là đọc song song, bản dịch của Bùi Giáng, để sáng tỏ những chỗ khó hiểu. Vậy mà cũng phải mất một phần ba cuốn mới bắt đầu vỡ vạc và càng ngày càng cảm nhận nhiều cái hay trong tác phẩm.
Dường như nguyên do của việc khó tiếp cận với cuốn sách bắt nguồn tư chính tác giả và vì vậy người đọc nước ta không hề đơn độc ở cảm giác mong lung, khó hiểu. Bởi vì nhiều độc giả của bản tiếng Anh cũng la làng về cái sự khó đọc của sách này. Tuy nhiên, nếu vượt qua được, sách sẽ bù đắp xứng đáng cho bạn!

Two and a half stars, rounded up to three for old-time's sake. I loved it when I was twelve years old, but I was a rather odd child, fond of day-dreaming and lying on the grass watching the clouds for hours on end. I wanted to run away on a tramp steamer and dreamed of learning to fly.

That must have been the girl who adored this book; decades later, I find I'm too impatient and busy for books like this one.

Terre des hommes is less a book than a loosely connected series of rambling essays with no plot to speak of. The action is thrilling, with the focus on guts and survival against all odds, but the fragmentary tales are often interrupted with long lyrical passages, or philosophical musings. Some of these digressions work, others seem superfluous and distracting. It is a young man's book and very much the reflection of a particular time and culture--it was that aspect I enjoyed the most this time around.

I read this simultaneously with the English version, Wind, Sand and Stars, which had quite a few added paragraphs not it my French edition. I suspect that the additions in the English version were an attempt to add a little context to these essays and weave them together a bit. The translator of my edition Lewis Galantière captured the feeling of the French version of Wind, Sand and Stars than Stuart Gilbert did with Night Flight, but many of the puns and much of the poetry and philosophizing work better in French than in English.

"I looked about me. Luminous points glowed in the darkness. Cigarettes punctuated the humble meditations of worn old clerks. I heard them talking to one another in murmurs and whispers. They talked about illness, money, shabby domestic cares. And suddenly I had a vision of the face of destiny. Old bureaucrat, my comrade, it is not you who are to blame. No one ever helped you to escape. You, like a termite, built your peace by blocking up with cement every chink and cranny through which the light might pierce. You rolled yourself up into a ball in your genteel security, in routine, in the stifling conventions of provincial life, raising a modest rampart against the winds and the tides and the stars. You have chosen not to be perturbed by great problems, having trouble enough to forget your own fate as a man. You are not the dweller upon an errant planet and do not ask yourself questions to which there are no answers. Nobody grasped you by the shoulder while there was still time. Now the clay of which you were shaped has dried and hardened, and naught in you will ever awaken the sleeping musician, the poet, the astronomer that possibly inhabited you in the beginning" Brilliant

I wanted to rate this higher, I really did. A beautiful beginning and brilliant end were dragged down by a long, overwritten section in north Africa dripping will ill-disguised French Colonial contempt for the people there.

But let's get back to that beautiful beginning. I first heard of this book as a child, where a portion of it was anthologized in a book I had (details  here). It described a flight he took to Tierra del Fuego, the southernmost tip of South America, a cold, foggy volcanic landscape thinly peopled (as it remains.) He relayed with perfect grace the bane of travelers everywhere -- encountering interesting people whom you'll never see again, and never know how their stories turned out.

p. 27: We forget that there is no joy except in human relations. If I summon up those memories that have left with me an enduring savor, if I draw up the balance sheet of the hours in my life that have truly counted, surely I find only those that no wealth could have procured me. True riches cannot be bought.

p. 40: I remembered the death of a man. He was a gardener, and he was speaking on his deathbed: “You know, I used to sweat sometimes when I was digging. My rheumatism would pull at my leg, and I would damn myself for a slave. And now, do you know, I’d like to spade and spade. It’s beautiful work. A man is free when he is using a spade. And besides, who is going to prune my trees when I am gone?”

[Describing his airplane, and the minds of those who designed it] p. 42: If anything, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer anything to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away.

Exupery was a French nobleman, to the extent 'nobility' still had meaning after the storming of the Bastille. It's delightful that such an elevated personage, further exalted in his then-glamorous career as a pilot, found room in his heart to express genuine admiration for Argentinian fishermen and design engineers at aircraft companies. This was, after all, the man who wrote The Little Prince, the fourth-best-selling book in the world, widely and justly admired for the simple language in which deep and complex ideas are heartbreakingly expressed.

So why the contempt for Africans? And why the loss of control over his tone in the central 60% of the book? Let's address the second point first. A great deal of Exupery's appeal lies in the authority and credibility of his descriptive prose, the awakening that humans first started to undergo when viewing our planet from thousands of feet up. But the longest section of this book describes a crash he and his navigator had in the Libyan desert. (He neglects to mention they were in a race, trying to win a huge cash prize.) They survive the crash without major injury and the first glimmerings that we're hearing some major embellishments start to creep in, because smacking the earth at 170 mph as described is not actually survivable. Then they wander around in the desert for four days, walking forty to fifty miles per day with only an orange, a pint of water and a pint of wine between them.

There is a word for this, and that word is bullshit. Which unfortunately calls into question everything else he's written, even the good parts at the beginning and the end.

Regarding contempt for the natives, the less said the better. Here's a particularly gratuitous example, when they encounter a French sergeant in a remote oasis fortress:

p. 90:
The sergeant went on. “I asked the captain for leave to go to Tunis, seeing my cousin is there and all. He said…”
“What did the captain say, sergeant?”
“Said: ‘World’s full of cousins.’ Said: ‘Dakar’s nearer’ and sent me there.”
“Pretty girl, your cousin?”
“In Tunis? You bet! Blonde, she is.”
“No, I mean at Dakar.”
Sergeant, we could have hugged you for the wistful disappointed voice in which you answered, “She was a nigger.”

Perhaps you are of the opinion that allowances must be made for the times etc., but the passage above is just ugly and reflects poorly on anybody who would choose to include this in a book.

The end of the book changes gears entirely and describes his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, where he went on missions to extract Frenchmen thought to be at risk. The focus here is not on the action, but rather on the thought processes that allow people to go to war, and live with each other afterwards. As he says, "Civil war is not a war. It is a disease."

Others may, and apparently have, enjoyed this more than I did.

4.5 Stars
Beautifully written!

Of course I know it is a mirage! Am I the sort of man who can be fooled? But what if I want to go after that mirage? Suppose I enjoy indulging my hope? Suppose it suits me to love that crenelated town all beflagged with sunlight? What if I choose to walk straight ahead on light feet - for you must know that I have dropped my weariness behind me, I am happy now. . . .

ترجمه ترجمه‌ی سختی بود که نمی‌دونم به خاطر نوع متن و نوشته اینطور بود یا ترجمه‌های روون‌تری هم وجود داره. اگزوپری داستانهایی از آسمون و صحرا و برف و آدم‌هایی که ناامید شدن و از زندگی دست کشیدن و دوباره نجات پیدا کردن می‌گه و یه سری جاها، مثلا بخش صحرا، خیلی حس ایجاد می‌کنه. نمره‌ی ۳.۵ برای کتاب بهتره.

If I had to choose between The Little Prince and this book, I'd choose this book, because in a way you can use it to derive Saint-Exupéry's classic. If The Little Prince is the diamond, this book is the coal: a hard-earned mass of adventure and experience. The book reads like a long letter from your most astonishing friend. Sublime.

This book was fantastic, literally...almost hard to believe that its is the author's real life. Crashing in the Lybian desert, life in the Sahara, looking for a lost friend in the snows of the Chilean Andes, and first-hand accounts of the Spanish Civil War. But most of all, it is a poetic book about the beauty of flying, connection with nature, how challenge and suffering turn the boy into the man, how meaningful bonds between humans form, the contrast between the comfortable life of a bookkeeper and the adventurous life. These messages always hit home for me.