영어로 읽는 고전 _ 토마스 하디의 나팔수 부사관
토마스 하디의 『나팔수 부사관』은 1880년에 출판된 역사 소설이다. 나폴레옹 전쟁을 배경으로 웨이머스를 무대로 삼은 이 작품은 세 명의 매우 다른 구혼자들 사이에서 갈등하는 앤 갈런드의 이야기를 따라간다. 나팔수 부사관인 듬직한 존 러브데이, 그의 변덕스러운 선원 동생 밥, 그리고 비겁한 페스터스 데리먼이 그 세 사람이다. 군사 야영지와 침략에 대한 공포라는 배경 속에서 두 형제는 웰링턴과 넬슨 휘하에서 복무하는 한편, 앤의 마음은 의무와 욕망 사이에서 흔들린다. 하디의 작품으로서는 이례적으로 결말이 완전한 비극은 아니지만, 운명의 그림자는 불길하게 드리워져 있다.
Classics Read in English _ The Trumpet-Major by Thomas Hardy
The Trumpet-Major is Thomas Hardy doing something genuinely unexpected — writing a historical novel with warmth, humor, and a lightness of touch that sits closer to Jane Austen than to the Hardy of Jude the Obscure or Tess. Published in 1880 and set against the vivid, anxious backdrop of Napoleonic-era Weymouth — where military camps crowd the hillsides and the threat of French invasion hangs over every picnic and parade — it is a novel that manages to be both thoroughly entertaining and quietly heartbreaking, sometimes within the same page.
At the center of the story is Anne Garland, a young woman of good sense and genuine feeling who finds herself caught between three men of very different character. John Loveday, the trumpet-major of the title, is the kind of man Hardy clearly admires most — steady, honorable, selfless to a fault, and possessed of the particular tragic quality of being too good to win. His brother Bob is dashing, irresponsible, and entirely aware of his own charm, the sort of man who breaks hearts without quite meaning to and somehow escapes the consequences. And then there is Festus Derriman — pompous, cowardly, and magnificently ridiculous — who provides much of the novel's considerable comic energy.
Behind the romantic triangle, history presses in with increasing urgency. The drums of Trafalgar and Waterloo beat at the edges of the narrative, and Hardy — who researched the period with characteristic thoroughness — renders the atmosphere of a country bracing itself for invasion with remarkable vividness. Unusually for Hardy, the ending stops short of outright tragedy — but in the novel's final pages, as John Loveday marches away toward a war from which history tells us many did not return, Hardy allows himself one moment of characteristic, devastating restraint. It is enough. It is more than enough.
Among the contents
In the days of high-waisted and muslin-gowned women, when the vast amount of soldiering going on in the country was a cause of much trembling to the sex, there lived in a village near the Wessex coast two ladies of good report, though unfortunately of limited means. The elder was a Mrs. Martha Garland, a landscape-painter’s widow, and the other was her only daughter Anne.
Anne was fair, very fair, in a poetical sense; but in complexion she was of that particular tint between blonde and brunette which is inconveniently left without a name. Her eyes were honest and inquiring, her mouth cleanly cut and yet not classical, the middle point of her upper lip scarcely descending so far as it should have done by rights, so that at the merest pleasant thought, not to mention a smile, portions of two or three white teeth were uncovered whether she would or not. Some people said that this was very attractive. She was graceful and slender, and, though but little above five feet in height, could draw herself up to look tall. In her manner, in her comings and goings, in her ‘I’ll do this,’ or ‘I’ll do that,’ she combined dignity with sweetness as no other girl could do; and any impressionable stranger youths who passed by were led to yearn for a windfall of speech from her, and to see at the same time that they would not get it.
