The 2008 American Ruth Riley Poetry Prize was awarded to the famous poet Gary Snyder, and he also received a $1 million prize. The award is currently one of the most prestigious poetry awards in the United States. It is organized by the most prestigious poetry magazine "Poetry Magazine" in the United States, founded in 1912, and established by pharmaceutical magnate Ruth Riley in 1986. Announcing the news, Poetry editor-in-chief Christian Weiman said: "Snyder is essentially a devout poet of our time, although he doesn't dedicate himself to a god or a way of being. The poem is both a covenant of man's relationship with sacred nature, and a prophecy of the punishment we must suffer if we forget this relationship." Another important poetry award after the Ligan Poetry Award.
Gary Snyder was born in San Francisco in 1930. When he was two years old, his family moved to Kissap County, Washington, in the northwestern United States due to the Great Depression. There, they raised chickens, raised dairy cows, and ran a small orchard. Snyder's ten years here made him realize early on the inseparable traditional relationship between the local population and nature. This understanding of nature is reflected not only in his creations, but also in his future political and environmental protection activities. After his parents divorced in 1942, Snyder moved to Portland, Oregon, with his mother at the age of 12. The rolling mountains on the northwest coast of the United States provided Snyder with the convenience of immersing himself in nature, and also made him develop a hobby of mountaineering since he was a child.
In 1947, Snyder enrolled at Reed College in Oregon, and four years later earned two degrees in literature and anthropology. Here, he met poets Philip Warren and Lou Welzi, who would later become close to the "Beat Generation," and shared a room for a time. He also published his earliest poems in academic journals.
In 1953, Snyder returned to San Francisco and began studying Eastern languages, including Chinese and Japanese, at the University of California, Berkeley. At the same time, he worked hard to study Zen Buddhism, and began to save money to go to Japan to continue his Zen studies. He did not stop writing poetry, but also met Alan Ginsburg, Jack Krouac and others from the eastern United States and became a member of the "Beat Generation". In October 1955, he participated in the famous San Francisco "Six Galleries" poetry reading, reciting his own creation of "Berry Banquet". This recitation became a landmark event in the formation and development of the "Beat Generation" due to Ginsberg's "Howl", so Snyder has always been considered an important "Beat Generation". figure.
Although Snyder was a late integration into the "Beat Generation", he soon had an important influence on his friends around him, especially Krouac, which is directly reflected in his literary works. The two had hitchhiked all the way to Yosemite National Park in central California. Ned as the prototype. Snyder's image can also be seen in Krouac's description of Jaffe. He's "not tall, about 5-foot-7, but he's quite strong, lean, wiry, quick and powerful. His cheeks are high and his eyes are gleaming like one is giggling. The eyes of a laughing old Chinese sage. And the small goatee under his jaw offset the sternness of his handsome face." Snyder also mentioned to him his experience as a forest fire officer on Desolate Peak, which made Crewe Jacques made the same pilgrimage and based it on another novel, Angel of Desolation, in which Snyder appeared as Jarry Wagner.
Most of the Beat Generation were interested in Zen, and Snyder was clearly the most serious of them all. In 1955, Snyder officially became a Buddhist. The next year, with the support of the famous American Buddhist scholar Ruth Fowler Sasaki, he went to Japan to seek Buddhist scriptures. For the next 12 years, Snyder spent most of his time in Japan, attending school at Sangoku Temple and Daitoku Temple in Kyoto, and finally living with others on a small volcanic island. During this period, he returned to the United States only occasionally, and all he did was study and disseminate Zen thought and translate Zen scriptures with Sasaki. It was not until 1968 that Snyder and his wife returned to the United States and settled in the mountains and forests of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in northern California.
Snyder has been longing for China for a long time and has studied Chinese culture in depth. In one of his articles, he mentioned that he first read English translations of Chinese poetry at the age of 19. He once said that the influence of Chinese culture and literature on him was 80% in the 1950s and 1960s. Among Chinese poets, he is most in love with Han Shan, a monk of the Tang Dynasty. Different from other American poets who learned Chinese poetry through English translation, Snyder's Chinese has a certain level, so as early as in San Francisco, he read Hanshan's original works and tried to translate Hanshan's poems with the help and encouragement of the famous Chinese scholar Chen Shixiang. . In the fall of 1958, Snyder published his translation of 24 Hanshan poems in Ivy magazine. In 1965, he combined some of the poems of Hanshan with his own poems and published them in a collection called "Masonry and Poems of Hanshan". His excellent translation and introduction of Hanshan, coupled with the great advocacy of Chinese poetry by Pang De and others, not only allowed Western readers to come into contact with Eastern ideas, but also influenced British and American poetics to a certain extent.
In 1984, Snyder visited China as a member of the US delegation to the "China-US Writers Conference", which finally fulfilled his dream of more than 30 years. During his stay in China, he specially took his Japanese wife, who was born in Shanghai, with Ginsburg to Suzhou Hanshan Temple, because they believed that Hanshan once became a monk in this place. Although Chinese historians are inconclusive on whether there is a Hanshan person in history and whether Hanshan is a hermit in Suzhou, for these Hanshan admirers from the United States, they do not care. Snyder presented his English translation of Hanshan Poems to the abbot of Hanshan Temple, and also wrote a poem on the spot called "Beside the Maple Bridge".
Scholars have different views on Snyder's "Beat" identity. Some people think that Snyder is more of a member of the "San Francisco Renaissance", which should be more accurate than "Beat". Snyder himself also has reservations about the title of "Beat". He once denied that he is a "Beat" poet. However, in the early days of the formation and development of the "Beat Generation", he and "The key members are close, and even though Snyder parted ways with the Beat Generation back in 1956 and traveled alone to Japan, the two remain in close contact. In 1984, he and Ginsburg visited China again, which seemed to confirm his "Beat" identity once again. It is worth mentioning that on many occasions, Snyder always used the word "us" instead of "them" when talking about the "Beat Generation".
Snyder, like Ginsburg and other "Beat Generation" writers, was radical thinking and concerned with social issues. From the perspective of poetry creation, Snyder also has similarities with the "Beat Generation". For example, he also expresses the bohemian and cynical life attitude of hippies in his poetry, and he also resorts to intuition, dreams, religion, and mythology. even drugs. But he also clearly differs from "Beat" poets such as Ginsburg. Ginsberg's concern for society is concentrated on the political life of the country, while Snyder is more concerned with ecological issues; he is also completely different from Ginsberg's hoarse "howl" in the way of expression in poetry. On the basis of his moving description of natural ecology, Ned showed his unique multi-ecological thought, thus making himself the most passionate "environmentalist poet" in the post-modern period.
There is no doubt that Snyder, who has won multiple poetry awards, is a successful poet. After entering the 1970s, he was more regarded as an ecological poet and ecological warrior, known as "the contemporary Thoreau". Snyder is an excellent ecological poet, and the value and significance of his poetry lies above all in its perfect ecological value. In his poems he taught people how to observe nature and human beings in nature, and by describing all things in nature, he made people see life other than human beings. The environmentalism and green movement emerged in the late 1970s, and Snyder was a natural poet for this movement.
Snyder's ecological thought can be seen as a combination of traditional Eastern culture, Zen thought, love for nature and wilderness, and respect for manual labor. Snyder's translation of Hanshan's poems are all works that describe nature and praise the secluded life, which is in line with Snyder's philosophical thought and aesthetic taste.
Snyder advocated biodiversity, which to a certain extent developed the land ethic of Aldo Leopold, the "father of ecological ethics" in the United States. Leopold put forward the idea of "land ethic" in his famous book "Almanac of Sand Country". He believes that humans live in a community that includes soil, water, plants and animals. Land ethics is to turn the role of human beings who appear as conquerors in the community into equal members and citizens of this community. In this community, each member has the right to its continued existence. A thing is right only if it helps to maintain the harmony, stability and beauty of the biological community; otherwise, it is wrong. The land ethic implies respect for each member, as well as respect for the community itself. Snyder expressed this land ethic in the form of poetry. As he pointed out, in nature, "the classes most ruthlessly exploited are: animals, trees, water, air, flowers and plants". But in fact, life has no grades. The life of stones and grass is as beautiful, wise and valuable as Einstein's life.
Snyder not only fully expresses his pastoral ideals in his poetry creation, but more importantly, he is also a practitioner of returning to nature. In the history of American literature, this kind of love for rural life and longing for nature has a long history, and the most representative is Thoreau. As a practitioner of the idea of "returning man to nature", he once spent a period of seclusion on the shore of Walden Lake near Concord from 1845 to 1847, admiring the changes of the four seasons in nature, Enjoy the fun of working outdoors. Snyder, on the other hand, performed similar physical labor for most of his life. After returning to the United States from Japan, he worked successively as a lumberjack, a forest fire officer, a seaman, etc., to have close contact with nature, and also provided substantial material for his poetry creation.
On June 5, 1972, the "United Nations Conference on Human Environment" was held in Stockholm, Sweden. 113 participating countries adopted the "Action Plan" and the "Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment" to protect the global environment, which became the most important part of environmental protection in human history. an important milestone. Snyder, as an attendee, witnessed this historic moment firsthand. Snyder, who is no longer "broken", has made unremitting efforts for the world's ecological and environmental protection cause through his poetry creation, ecological proposition, and practice, and has become "the most contributing ecological writer in the 20th century in the United States".
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