My Ántonia, by Willa Cather
Table of Contents
Introduction
Book I— The Shimerdas
Book II— The Hired Girls
Book III— Lena Lingard
Book IV— The Pioneer Woman’s Story
Book V— Cuzak’s Boys
As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across the harvest field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an actual experience. It floated before me on the page like a picture, and underneath it stood the mournful line: Optima dies {~HORIZONTAL ELLIPSIS~} prima fugit.人生最好的日子總是過得最快。
English: Optima dies...prima fugit.. written in a coloured way. it is a quote from Roman Virgil, meaning "In the lives of the mortals, the best days are the first to flee" (literally "a very good day is the first that goes away") Translation: The best days of our lives are childhood days. It appeared in Willa Cather's My Ántoni
Optima dies…prima fugit
– Virgil
This quote comes from the Georgics, an instructive poem written about farming by the epic Roman poet Virgil and translates to "The best days…are the first to flee." Jim studies Virgil when he's away at college and specifically mentions this line at the end of Book 3, Chapter 2. Let's take a look at the passage:
As I sat down to my book at last, my old dream about Lena coming across the harvest-field in her short skirt seemed to me like the memory of an actual experience. It floated before me on the page like a picture, and underneath it stood the mournful line: "Optima dies ... prima fugit."
There are two major connections to My Ántonia in this epigraph. The first is the actual content of the line – the best days are the first to flee. My Ántonia is a romanticized look back at the past, and the transience of youth is a major theme in the novel. Jim in particular is enamored of long-gone better days. (Remember that the novel is itself his memoir and so is all about the past.)
The second connection has to do with the source of this quote, the Georgics. In this lengthy poem, Virgil discusses the virtues of the farming life while teaching his readers the best way to live off the land. The relationship between man and the natural world is another central theme inMy Ántonia. Part of the romantic veneer of Jim's memoir has to do with his admiration for the vast, beautiful open spaces of the Nebraska landscape.
There is also a connection here to Cather's own life, because she studied Latin and Greek herself both in high school and in college (source). We can see Cather's own love for these ancient languages reflected in Jim's passion, and of course in this choice of epigraph.
http://www.shmoop.com/my-antonia/epigraph.html
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查此段，才發現今日世界出版的 {原野長宵} (湯新楣譯，1964再版)是個約1/2的摘譯本。實在有點離譜。
"Men are all right for friends, but as soon as you marry them they turn into cranky old fathers, even the wild ones. They begin to tell you what's sensible and what's foolish, and want you to stick at home all the time. I prefer to be foolish when I feel like it, and be accountable to nobody."
--from MY ANTONIA by Willa Cather
--from MY ANTONIA by Willa Cather
In this powerful and astonishing novel, Willa Cather created one of the most winning yet thoroughly convincing heroines in American fiction. Antonia Shimerda, the daughter of Bohemian immigrants, not only survives her father's suicide, poverty, and a failed romance, she triumphs with high spirits.READ an excerpt here:http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/25296/my-antonia/
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