영어로 읽는 고전 _ 로버트 히첸스의 이집트의 마법
로버트 히첸스의 《이집트의 마법》은 20세기 초에 쓰인 시적인 여행 기록이다. 이 책은 이집트에 대한 저자의 깊은 매혹을 담아내며, 그 풍경과 역사, 건축물, 특히 상징적인 피라미드와 스핑크스를 탐구한다. 히첸스는 이집트의 신비로운 아름다움과 태양빛으로 물든 대지의 매혹, 그리고 고대 기념물들이 제기하는 영원한 질문들을 성찰한다. 이야기의 서두에서 저자는 사람들이 이집트를 찾는 이유를 묻는다. 꿈과 낭만에 대한 그리움이 여행자들을 이곳으로 이끄는 것일지도 모른다고 암시하면서. 히첸스가 14년 만에 이집트로 돌아온 기억을 떠올리며 시작되는 도입부는 사색적인 분위기를 자아내고, 선명한 하늘을 배경으로 우뚝 솟아오르는 피라미드 앞에서 느끼는 경외감을 강조한다. 그의 묘사는 향수의 감정을 불러일으키며, 깊은 내면의 성찰과 이 땅의 심오한 고요함과 아름다움에 대한 경이로움을 함께 전달한다. 특히 시간의 흐름과 인간의 노력을 영원한 증인으로서 바라보는 피라미드와 스핑크스와의 관계 속에서 그것은 더욱 깊어진다. 도입부는 히첸스의 서정적인 문체와 이집트의 문화적, 역사적 풍요로움에 대한 그의 몰입적인 탐구를 독자들에게 효과적으로 소개한다.
Classics Read in English _ The Spell of Egypt by Robert Hichens
Why does anyone go to Egypt?
Robert Hichens asks this question at the outset of The Spell of Egypt, and it is not a question with a simple answer — nor, one suspects, does he intend it to be. People go for history, for archaeology, for the organized satisfaction of ticking monuments off a list. But Hichens went for something older and less rational than any of these. He went, as he freely admits, for dreams. He went because Egypt is one of the few places on earth that exists simultaneously in the present tense and in some vast, uncontainable elsewhere — a land that belongs as much to the imagination as to any atlas.
He had been before. Fourteen years had passed between his first encounter and his return, fourteen years in which the world had moved and changed and complicated itself in the manner worlds invariably do. But the Pyramids had not moved. They rose against the Egyptian sky exactly as he had left them — indifferent, magnificent, ancient beyond the reach of any adjective he might assemble — and the sight of them struck him with the particular force that only truly permanent things can summon in a creature as impermanent as a man.
Hichens writes about Egypt the way the desert holds heat — slowly, deeply, long after the source has passed. His prose is not the prose of the guidebook or the historian but of someone who has allowed a place to enter him completely, to rearrange something fundamental in his interior landscape. The Sphinx watches from its plateau of silence. The Pyramids cast their ancient shadows across the sand. And Hichens stands before them as we all must, eventually — small, astonished, and grateful beyond words for the reminder that some things were here long before us, and will remain long after we are gone.
Among the contents
Why do you come to Egypt? Do you come to gain a dream, or to regain lost dreams of old; to gild your life with the drowsy gold of romance, to lose a creeping sorrow, to forget that too many of your hours are sullen, grey, bereft? What do you wish of Egypt?
The Sphinx will not ask you, will not care. The Pyramids, lifting their unnumbered stones to the clear and wonderful skies, have held, still hold, their secrets; but they do not seek for yours. The terrific temples, the hot, mysterious tombs, odorous of the dead desires of men, crouching in and under the immeasurable sands, will muck you with their brooding silence, with their dim and sombre repose. The brown children of the Nile, the toilers who sing their antique songs by the shadoof and the sakieh, the dragomans, the smiling goblin merchants, the Bedouins who lead your camel into the pale recesses of the dunes—these will not trouble themselves about your deep desires, your perhaps yearning hunger of the heart and the imagination.
Yet Egypt is not unresponsive.
