The Old Man and the Sea (2020)

On this day in 1952, The Old Man and the Sea was published in LIFE. Five million copies of the magazine sold in two days.


1953 Pulitzer Prizes Won By Hemingway and 'Picnic' (May 5, 1953)
"The Old Man and the Sea" won the 1953 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.


The 1954 Nobel Prize citation from the Swedish Academy said in part:
"For his powerful, style-forming mastery of the art of modern narration, as most recently evinced in 'The Old Man and the Sea.'"

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“The Old Man and the Sea is a short novel, only 27,000 words. It is much simpler and enormously better than Mr. Hemingway’s last book, Across the River and Into the Trees. No phony glamour girls and no bullying braggarts sentimentalized almost to parody distort its honest and elemental theme. No outbursts of spite or false theatricalism impede the smooth rush of its narrative. Within the sharp restrictions imposed by the very nature of his story Mr. Hemingway has written with sure skill. Here is the master technician once more at the top of his form, doing superbly what he can do better than anyone else.

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“Mr. Hemingway has always excelled in describing physical adventure and the emotional atmosphere of it. And many of his stories have glorified courage in the face of danger. This one does, too, for the old man is the very embodiment of dogged courage.

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“But good as The Old Man and the Sea is, it is good only in a limited way. The fisherman is not a well-characterized individual. He is a symbol of an attitude toward life. He often thinks and talks poetically and symbolically and so artificially.”

–Orville Prescott, The New York Times, August 28, 1952

2009.4.27 表示讀過



Author
Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea is a novella (127 pages in length) by Ernest Hemingway, written in Cuba in 1951 and published in 1952. It was the last major work of fiction to be produced by Hemingway and published in his lifetime. One of his most famous works, it centers upon Santiago, an aging Cuban fisherman who struggles with a giant marlin far out in the Gulf Stream.^[1] It is noteworthy in twentieth century fiction, reaffirming Hemingway's worldwide literary prominence as well as being a significant factor in his selection for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954. It is no. 1 in The Irish Independant's list of 20 Lifetime Reads.^[2]

The Old Man and the Sea allows various interpretations. Hemingway emphasizes that

No good book has ever been written that has in it symbols arrived at beforehand and stuck in. ... I tried to make a real old man, a real boy, a real sea and a real fish and real sharks. But if I made them good and true enough they would mean many things.^[3]

The style of the work, the simplicity and the concreteness of its descriptions, provides a rich opportunity for symbolic interpretations. Some insights follow.
Santiago represents Christ suffering. Hemingway compares him to Jesus Christ on several occasions. He describes Santiago's cry as a "...a noise such as a man might make, involuntarily, feeling the nail go through his hand and into the wood" (107). Santiago also "...picked the mast up and put it on his shoulder and started up the road. He...[sat] down five times before he reached his shack" (121) much like Jesus did on the journey to his crucifixion, carrying the cross. Later Santiago sleeps "...face down ... with his arms out straight and the palms of his hands up" (122), the position of Jesus on the cross. All throughout the book the old man wishes for salt, a staple seasoning in the human diet. He is a fisherman, similar to Christ's disciples. Hemingway says that Santiago is not a religious man, but he seems to have some faith as shown by his offers to say his "Hail Marys" and praises if he catches the marlin.^[4]

sacred heart of jesus





『老人と海』（ろうじんとうみ、The Old Man and the Sea）は、アーネスト・ヘミングウェイの晩年の小説で、世界的なヒット作となった。1951年に書かれ、1952年に出版された。 カジキと闘う孤独な老漁師サンチャゴの物語。戦いの末捕まえたカジキは、船に引き上げる事が出来ず、曳航して港に戻るまでにサメ（アオザメ）に食われて、獲物は失われてしまった。厭世的な晩年の心境も反映しているものと見られる。
作品の発想は、キューバの首都ハバナから少し東に行ったコヒマルという漁港の漁師達との会話の中から得られたという。ヘミングウェイは、釣りボートが嵐で遭難しかかって、その港にたどり着いた事から、頻繁にここを訪れていたという。 ヘミングウェイが1954年にノーベル文学賞を受賞したのには、この作品によるところが大きい。

The Old Man and the Sea : Om Illustrated Classics

Ernest Hemingway

Om Books International - 240 pages

The Old Man and the Sea : Om Illustrated Classics
Ernest Hemingway



The old man and the Sea (노인과 바다)

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Mr. Hemingway had a deadpan wit to which he gave many a special twist, as when he translated Spanish literally. Santiago, the man character in "The Old Man and the Sea," is a great American baseball fan and engages in the following dialogue:
"The Yankees cannot lose."
"But I fear the Indians of Cleveland."
"Have faith in the Yankees, my son. Think of the great DiMaggio."
"I fear both the Tigers of Detroit and the Indians of Cleveland."
"Be careful or you will fear even the Reds of Cincinnati and the White Sox of Chicago."
The man who could thus put the nuances of American baseball into the Spanish locutions of a humble fisherman; who rarely lost his sense of the humor that he found was as much a part of war and disaster as was courage itself, was born in Oak Park, Ill., a middle-class suburb of Chicago.



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When Breit asked Faulkner to write a review of Hemingway’s 1952 novella The Old Man and the Sea, he refused. Yet when a couple months later he got the same request from Washington and Lee University’s literary journal, Shenandoah, Faulkner relented, giving guarded praise to the novel in a one paragraph-long review. You can read it below.

His best. Time may show it to be the best single piece of any of us, I mean his and my contemporaries. This time, he discovered God, a Creator. Until now, his men and women had made themselves, shaped themselves out of their own clay; their victories and defeats were at the hands of each other, just to prove to themselves or one another how tough they could be. But this time, he wrote about pity: about something somewhere that made them all: the old man who had to catch the fish and then lose it, the fish that had to be caught and then lost, the sharks which had to rob the old man of his fish; made them all and loved them all and pitied them all. It’s all right. Praise God that whatever made and loves and pities Hemingway and me kept him from touching it any further.