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Автор Shirley Hazzard
First published in the United States of America by The Viking Press, 1980 Published in Penguin Books 1990
Copyright © Shirley Hazzard, 1980 All rights reserved
The author wishes to thank the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, and its president, Mr. Gordon Ray, for the generous award of a fellowship in connection with this work.
A portion of this book originally appeared in
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Editions Gallimard: "Le Dernier Poème" from
A. J. Gurr: From
Macmillan Publishing Co. , Inc. , and A. P. Watt Ltd. : From "Meditations in Time of Civil War. " Copyright 1928 by Macmillan Publishing Co. , Inc. , renewed 1956 by Georgie Yeats. From "Politics. " Copyright 1940 by Georgie Yeats, renewed 1968 by Bertha Georgie Yeats, Michael Butler Yeats, and Anne Yeats. Both poems from
Macmillan Publishing Co. , Inc. : "At Castle Boterel" from
New Directions Publishing Corp. : From "Verso Sueltos" and "The Shuffled Deck,"
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
Hazzard, Shirley. The transit of Venus/Shirley Hazzard. p. cm. ISBN 0 14 010747 9 I. Title. [PR9619. 3. H369T7 1990] 823—dc20 90-6813
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The author wishes to thank Professor E. M. Burbidge, who so generously responded to questions, from a neophyte, about astronomy.
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By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation.
It was simply that the sky, on a shadeless day, suddenly lowered itself like an awning. Purple silence petrified the limbs of trees and stood crops upright in the fields like hair on end. Whatever there was of fresh white paint sprang out from downs or dunes, or lacerated a roadside with a streak of fencing. This occurred shortly after midday on a summer Monday in the south of England.
As late as the following morning, small paragraphs would even appear in newspapers having space to fill due to a hiatus in elections, fiendish crimes, and the Korean War—unroofed houses and stripped orchards being given in numbers and acreage; with only lastly, briefly, the mention of a body where a bridge was swept away.
That noon a man was walking slowly into a landscape under a branch of lightning. A frame of almost human expectancy defined this scene, which he entered from the left-hand corner. Every nerve—for even barns and wheelbarrows and things without tissue developed nerve in those moments—waited, fatalistic. Only he, kinetic, advanced against circumstances to a single destination.
