영어로 읽는 고전 _ 로버트 히첸스의 근동_달마티아,그리스 그리고 콘스탄티노플
로버트 히첸스의 《근동: 달마티아, 그리스 그리고 콘스탄티노플》은 20세기 초에 쓰인 여행기다. 이 작품은 근동의 여러 아름다운 지역들, 특히 달마티아와 그리스, 콘스탄티노플을 생생하게 탐구하며 그 풍경과 문화적 경험을 풍성하게 담아낸다. 이 여행기는 독자들을 히첸스와 함께 눈부신 장소들을 누비는 여정으로 초대하며, 이 지역들이 지닌 역사적이고도 현재적인 매력을 특별히 강조한다. 책의 서두에서 저자는 달마티아를 소개하며 그 풍경이 품은 고요한 아름다움을 묘사한다. 아드리아 해의 창백한 물빛, 아기자기한 어촌 마을들, 그리고 오래된 요새들이 그것이다. 그는 달마티아의 평화로움과 느린 삶의 리듬을 강조하며 이를 현대성과 대비시킨다. 히첸스는 활기찬 분위기와 풍부한 역사로 유명한 자라 같은 도시들을 생동감 넘치게 그려내는 한편, 그곳 사람들의 삶과 전통, 그리고 그들을 둘러싼 자연환경을 세심하게 관찰한다. 이야기의 서두는 사색적이고 몰입감 있는 분위기를 조성하며, 독자들로 하여금 근동에 깊이 뿌리내린 아름다움과 문화적 신비로움을 음미하도록 이끈다.
Classics Read in English _ The Near East: Dalmatia, Greece and Constantinople by Robert Hichens
There are journeys that move the body through space, and there are journeys that move something deeper — something closer to the soul. Robert Hichens understood the difference, and it is the second kind that animates every page of The Near East.
He begins with Dalmatia, and wisely so. The Adriatic coast has a way of quieting the traveler before they have quite realized they needed quieting. The water here is not the dramatic blue of postcards but something paler, more contemplative — a colour that seems to hold the light rather than reflect it, as though the sea itself is thinking. Against this stillness, ancient fortresses rise from the shoreline with the unhurried permanence of things that have long since stopped needing to prove their significance. The fishing towns along the coast move at the pace of tides and tradition, indifferent to the century in ways that feel less like backwardness than wisdom.
Hichens moves through Zara — its sun-warmed stones, its cheerful markets, its people going about lives shaped by rhythms older than the nation-states that have claimed and reclaimed this land — with the eye of a man who knows that the truest things about a place are rarely found in its monuments. They are found in the quality of its afternoon light, in the way its inhabitants laugh, in the particular silence that settles over its streets at dusk.
This is travel writing of the rarest kind — not a catalogue of sights but a sustained act of attention, an invitation to slow down and truly see. Hichens does not merely visit the Near East. He listens to it. And in doing so, he teaches us how.
Among the contents
Miramar faded across the pale waters of the Adriatic, which lay like a dream at the foot of the hills where Triest seemed sleeping, all its activities stilled at the summons of peace. Beneath its tower the orange-colored sail of a fishing-boat caught the sunlight, and gleamed like some precious fabric, then faded, too, as the ship moved onward to the forgotten region of rocks and islands, of long, gray mountains, of little cities and ancient fortresses, of dim old churches, from whose campanile the medieval voices of bells ring out the angelus to a people still happily primitive, still unashamed to be picturesque. By the way of the sea we journeyed to a capital where no carriages roll through the narrow streets, where there is not a railway-station, where the citizens are content to go on foot about their business, and where three quarters of the blessings of civilization are blessedly unknown.
