Paul Auster, "Baumgartner"

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Paul Auster, "Baumgartner" (2023)

 

 

Chicago Review of Books 서평

뉴욕 타임즈 서평

 

Paul Auster, the Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn

 

 

은퇴한 철학 교수 Baumgartner는 10년 전에 아내를 잃고서 9년 동안은, 마치 환상통(phantom limb syndrome)을 경험하듯, 일상에서 아내를 느낀다. 이해할 수 있는 사람은 이해할 거다.

 

 

Camille Deschiens (위 '뉴욕 타임즈 서평'에서)

 

 

( "Mr. Auster often described himself as a throwback who preferred Emily Brontë over the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard." -- Alex Williams )

 

 

본문에서:

 

The human population had dispersed to the four winds, and instead of people the city was now inhabited by wolves, hundreds of wolves, hundreds upon hundreds of wolves.

 

     Horrible, I thought, so horrible that it contained the horror of the most horrible dream, and suddenly, as if rising up from a dream of my own, the poem by Georg Trakl came rushing back to me -- "Eastern Front," which I had first read fifty years earlier, had read again and again until I knew it by heart and then retlanslated for myself, the World War I poem from 1914 written about Grodek, a Galician city not far from Stanislau that ends with the stanza:

 

          A thorn-studded wilderness girds the city.

          From bloody stairs the moon

          Chases terrified women.

          Wild wolves have stormed through the gates.

 

     How did he know this? I asked. (p. 161)

 

 

When Baumgartner starts up the engine and drives away from the house, he realizes that he has no interest in going into town or adding to his stock of wines and spirits or chancing an unwelcome encounter with someone he knows but doesn't care about that will force him into exchanging vapid pleasantries for two or three endless minutes, so rather than head toward the familiar world of the shopping district, Baumgartner turns in the opposite direction, and before long he is driving south away from the crowded commercial highways and blinking lights toward open country, a sparse nowhere with fewer ad fewer houses and smaller and smaller roads. he believes he is approaching the area called the Pine Barrens, but he isn't quite sure, given how many years it has been since he and Anna set off one Sunday afternoon to explore this mysteriously empty territory and he no longer remembers the details, except that they stopped somewhere to eat a picnic lunch and that as they spread their blanket on the sandy soil and he looked over at Anna's beautiful, shining face, he was flooded with a feeling of happiness so powerful that tears began to gather in his eyes and he said to himself: Remember this moment, little man. remember it for the rest of your life, for nothing more important will ever happen to you than what is happening to you right now. (p. 199)

 

 

시 "Eastern Front" by Georg Trakl, translated by Christopher Middleton