Lydia Davis, "Essays One" 에서

Tax 보고서 양식을 가지러 들른 동네 도서관에서 그냥 나오기

싫어서 한 권 찾아 들고 나온 책인데 재밌게 읽었다.

 

아래 인용한 구절들이 그런 것처럼, 이 책에 실린 대부분의

에세이들은 글쓰기에 관해서다. 그리고 도움이 될 좋은 책으로

Virginia Tufte 의 "Artful Sentences: Syntax as Styles"을

추천하고 있다.

 

I don't remember thinking of Hemingway as one of my

influences, but I now see resemblances: the simple language,

the repetition, the concrete discriptions.

 

I used to study Kafka's diaries ... They were important to me

for several reasons: the quantity of good writing they

contained; the insight they gave me into what went on

behind the finished pieces of writing -- the rough attempts,

the thoughtfulness, the persistence; and the window they

opened into Kafka's mind -- his combination of fictional

invention and more mundane daily preoccupations.

 

Let your interest, and particularly what you want to write

about, be tested by time, not by other people -- either real

other people or imagined other people.

 

[Davis가 어느 카페의 바깥 테이블에서 적은 "In the wind,

the grass is bowing and the Queen Ann's lace is nodding"이,

처음에는 없던 "In the wind"를 나중에 덧붙인 걸 예로 들면서]

You want the impact of what you write to be unobstructed;

you don't want confusion or hesitation in the reader's mind.

 

* Queen Ann's lace: 풀(꽃) 이름 (사진).

 

Context can mean explanation, exposition. And too much of

it can take away all the interest the material originally had.

 

If you want to be original, don't labor to be original. Rather,

work on yourself, your mind, and then say what you think.

This was Stendhal's advice.

 

She trusted her own instincts -- if doing this interested her,

it was interesting.

 

Be prepared to sit on it for days, weeks, months, years, if

necessary -- keep revisiting it. Work on something else in the

meantime. Return periodically to a piece that is giving you

trouble. Someday you may understand what the trouble is.

 

It is important for you to absorb, regulary, a poem's

concentrated attention to language, and its economy.

 

Saying less rather than more, which sometimes means

cutting some of what you have, can be very effective: for one

thing, it speeds up the pace of the writing a little; for another,

the more explanation you cut, the more active the reader's

mind has to be, making connections. The more active the

reader's mind, the happier the reader is, usually. 

 

Unlike what you may have assumed, or been taught, the

most important skill you can have as a translator is not

expertise in the foreign language, but the ability to write

well in your own language.

 

Flaubert complains; "What a bitch of a thing prose is! It's

never finished; there's always something to redo. Yet I think

pne can give it the consistency of verse. A good sentence

in prose should be like a good line in poetry, unchangeable,

as rhythmic, as sonorous."

 

 

 

Queen Ann's lace