또 만나는 반가움: Jane Hirshfield 그리고 Joseph Epstein

 

지난 여름엔 에세이스트 Joseph Epstein 의 "The Ideal of Culture"

(2018), 올 연초엔  시인 Jane Hirshfield 의 "Ten Windows: How

Great Poems Transform the World" (2015)가 많은 즐거움을 주었다.

그때 올린 몇몇 안 되는 포스트 -- blog.daum.net/dslee/1098

(1099, 1101~03, 1105, 1106, 1024, 1026, 1028) -- 에도 그런 게

드러나는지 모르겠다.

뜻밖에도, 그래서 더 반갑게, Hirshfield 와 Epstein 을 또 만나게 됐다.

Hirshfield 의 "Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry" (1997),

Epstein 의 "A Literary Education and Other Essays" (2014)가

 

각각, 이틀 사이로,  'The Book Stack' 과 Smoky Hill Library

라운지에서 내 눈에 들어온 거였다. 

특히 시인은 이번에는 거의 20년쯤이나 젊어진 모습일 테니 그 차이가

느껴지려나도 궁금하다.

 

 Essays by Jane Hirshfield,

"Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry" (1997)

아래 구절들은 (첫 문에 해당하는)

첫 에세이 "Poetry and the Mind of Concentration" 에서:

A lyric poem can be seen as a number of words that, taken

as a whole, become a new, compound word, whose only

possible definition is the poem itself.

[O]ne of Ezra Pound's definitions of poetry was

'the best words in the best order.'

The musical qualities of verse create their own concentration.

Shaped language is strongly immortal, living in a meadowy

freshness outside of time. But it also lives in the moment, in us.

"Who is speaking to whom, and toward what end?" The question's

simplicity is deceptive: in its answering, many shadow

devices of meaning-making step into light.

In poetry, though, one element precedes even this: that a poem

is a poem is itself essential rhetorical information.

It[storytelling] answers both our curiosity and our longing for

shapely forms ... If shapeliness is illusion, it is one we

require -- it shields against arbitrariness and against chaos's

companion, despair. Any story ... connects.

[A] good poem can never be completely entered, completely known.

 

Joseph Epstein, "A Literary Education and Other Essays" (2014)

저자의 "Introduction" 에서도 첫 한 페이지만 읽는데도 벌써

재미가 있다. 저자는 자랑한다: "I have been compared to great

essayists, to Michel de Montaigne, Charles Lamb, William

Hazlitt, Max Beerbohm, and H. L. Mencken."

(Mencken 이 보여서 반갑다.) 두 구절 더 인용한다:

Paul Valery, who said so many smart things about writing,

An essayist is an amateur, in two primary senses of the word.

He is, first, distinctly not an expert; and he is, second, a lover.

Unlike the critic, or even the novelist or poet, there is nothing

professional about the essayist. He comes to the world

dazzled by it. The riches it offers him are inexhaustible.