20231014 오밤중의 생각

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 오밤중의 어지러운 생각. 논문 한 편을 쓰는 데 너무 많은 품이 든다. 석사논문이나 박사논문을 이야기하는 것이 아니다. 일반적인 저널 아티클에 실리는 7000 단어 정도의 글을 쓰는 데 1년이 걸린다고 해도 이제는 별로 이상하게 느껴지지 않는다. 기존의 문헌을 소화하고, 자신의 생각을 명확하게 정리하고, 가능한 반박들에 대비하고, 세련된 글로 표현해내는 각 과정이 하나 같이 험난하다. 또 직관을 단순히 표현하는 일과 그것을 다수에게 설득력 있게 만드는 일, 그러니까 철학으로 승화시키는 작업은 전혀 다른 수준의 무엇이다. 나 자신의 한계가 느껴지고 힘에 부친다. 이 페이퍼 도대체 완성이나 할 수 있을까? 물론 고작 6월부터 준비했으니 4개월만에 구시렁거린다면 끈기 부족이다...

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 최근에 쓴 소설의 첫 문단을 번역해보았다. 초등학교 4학년 이후로 처음 영어로 픽션을 써본다. 즐거운 작업이었다.

 "I was reading an American poem out loud inside the train headed for G. With my smallest voice, so that the other passengers would not hear me. I could only understand half of the work; my English was not perfect. But what enlivened my senses was the other half of the work. I was mesmerized by the rhythm made from the words whose meanings I was unaware of. Still, this did not mean that those lines I could understand brought me no pleasure. ‘So how should I presume?’ Fixing my gaze upon that specific line, I could not stop repeating it, over and over again; until my voice, out of too much excitement, seemed to have gotten a bit louder than I intended. The passenger next to me woke up from his sleep. Out of sheer coincidence, he was a native English speaker, a British man. Luckily, he did not complain to me for interrupting his nap. He in fact showed interest to an Asian face reading an American poem. He told me that he had also liked the poem in his college days. I asked him what he thought of the line I was obsessed with. But the more answers he returned, the more suspicious I became of whether we were actually talking about the same line. It turned out that I misunderstood the meaning of one word; I confused ‘presume’ with ‘resume’. Read accurately, the line did not mean ‘so how should I begin again,’ but ‘so how should I assume (or guess, maybe).’ I was surprised that I made an error on what I was pretty confident that I knew about. But I was more shocked at the fact that I could not understand the accurate version at all. I tried to calm myself down by thinking, the goal of reading a poem is not to understand, but to misunderstand; that we read poems in order to become confused. But because I was already caught up with some other confusions, there was no need for me to deliberately fall into another one; I closed the book and said good bye to the British. He left the train with his heavy suitcase when it arrived at one of its stops. Maybe he was planning a long trip, or beginning a new life in a city he had never treaded his footsteps before."