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Zusatztext “The true joy lies in reading in Hemingway’s prose again: precise! lyrical! unwinding in long sentences! suggesting more than it reveals! sumptuous in its descriptions of the valleys! ravines! salt-licks! hills and forests of his beloved Africa. What I really want to do is quote great swaths of his style at its most beautiful! hypnotic and expert.” Informationen zum Autor Ernest Hemingway Klappentext Hemingway's well-documented fascination with big-game hunting is magnificently captured amidst rich descriptions of the beauty and strangeness of East Africa, where he and his wife, Pauline, journeyed in December of 1933. An impassioned portrait of the glory of the African landscape, this immediate and deeply felt account has all of the hallmarks of the most evocative travel writing. Green Hills of Africa INTRODUCTION A WISE MAN ONCE WROTE that hunting is “the old religion.” 1 He used the word religion in the sense of the Latin term religio, meaning to bind people together through repeated rituals. Hunting big game, one of mankind’s oldest pursuits, appears in our earliest artistic expressions—the magnificent cave paintings in France and Spain and the petroglyphs of southern and eastern Africa. Hunting was a key activity in ancient societies. It was more than simply a means of sustenance or, as in later times, a way to procure a trophy for display. Take the central place of the American bison in the lives of the first peoples of North America—particularly the Plains Indian tribes who exploited every part of the animal for many uses, from food, clothing, and shelter to tools, medicine, and cultural rituals. On a recent trip to Montana, I stood on the edge of a buffalo jump and looked out across the vast plain that stretched so far that I could see the curvature of the earth. I tried to envision the plain teeming with buffalo, once the most populous large mammal on the planet, and the great hunts that brought down those massive woolly creatures with nothing but the simplest weapons and human ingenuity. It is a sight now left only to the imagination. Twentieth-century African big-game trophy hunting was practiced for the most part by a small group of some of the wealthiest people in the world; but it carried on, if distantly, the tradition of the royal lion hunts of the ancient Persian and Macedonian kings, which were heralded in art and song as signs of the kings’ strength, bravery, and achievement. For Ernest Hemingway, hunting dangerous game in Africa was a personal test of courage, and hunting was for him one of life’s great pleasures. No small part of the achievement of Green Hills of Africa is the way that Hemingway’s writing brings alive for the reader the experience of being part of a motorcar safari on the Serengeti Plains in the 1930s and what it was like to hunt at that time in the Edenic paradise of the Great Rift Valley in East Africa. On one level, Green Hills of Africa belongs to a tradition of African hunting safari writing, along with such works as Frederick Selous’s A Hunter’s Wanderings in Africa (1881) and Theodore Roosevelt’s African Game Trails (1910). 2 However, it is also a departure from these earlier works, since Hemingway wrote it as a novel that combined the act of hunting on safari with the author’s thoughts on literature and writing. Green Hills of Africa did much to shape the impression of Africa in the minds of its readers, especially those in America and Europe. Going on an African safari was a major undertaking in the 1930s. Hemingway had probably dreamed of hunting in Africa ever since Teddy Roosevelt returned from his African safari in 1910. His own plans finally materialized in 1930 when Gus Pfeiffer, the ...
