영어로 읽는 고전 _ 헨리크 입센의 욘 가브리엘 르크만
『욘 가브리엘 보르크만』은 1896년에 쓰인 희곡이다. 금융 투기로 복역한 뒤 출소한 지 8년, 몰락한 은행가 욘 가브리엘 보르크만은 여전히 자기 집 안에 갇혀 지낸다. 아내 군힐과 그녀의 쌍둥이 자매 엘라는 아들 에르하르트의 앞날을 두고 충돌하며, 각자 자기 뜻대로 이 젊은이를 차지하려 한다. 가족 간의 긴장이 고조되는 가운데 보르크만의 지난 선택과 현재의 망상이 정면으로 부딪친다. 입센의 마지막에서 두 번째 작품인 이 희곡은 자연주의적 사회극과 그가 말년에 이르러 열어 보인 상징주의 사이를 잇는 다리에 해당한다.
Classics Read in English _ John Gabriel Borkman by Henrik Ibsen
Above the drawing room, a man is walking. He has been walking for eight years ? back and forth across the length of the upstairs gallery, the boards creaking over his wife's head like a sick wolf in a cage, as she puts it. John Gabriel Borkman was a bank director once. He took the deposits entrusted to him and staked them on a vision: mines opened, ore brought up out of the mountains, ships and factories and a whole northern country woken from sleep. The vision was not stupid. The timing was wrong, a rival denounced him, and he went to prison. Since his release he has waited upstairs for the delegation that will come to beg him to resume his work. Nobody is coming.
Below him sit two sisters who have not spoken in years. Gunhild, his wife, is raising their son Erhart to redeem the family name; Ella Rentheim, her twin, raised the boy through his childhood and is dying, and wants him for the time she has left. They negotiate over him like creditors over an estate. Ibsen's quiet cruelty is that Erhart wants neither of them ? he wants to be happy, which in this house is an obscenity, and he leaves with a laughing woman and a sleigh bell fading down the road.
That is when Borkman finally comes downstairs and out into the winter night, and the play stops being a domestic settlement and becomes something else entirely. Climbing the slope with Ella beside him, he speaks to the buried metal as though it could hear him, and hears it singing back. Then a hand of ice closes on his heart. Over his body the twin sisters take each other's hands ? two shadows, they say, over one dead man ? and Ibsen's late style stands fully revealed: the ledger and the mountain, the ruined household and the man who loved a fortune more than a woman, all in the same freezing air.
Summary
MRS. BORKMAN. [Listens; her eyes sparkle with gladness and she involuntarily whispers]. Erhart! At last!
[She rises and draws the curtain a little aside to look out. Appears disappointed, and sits down to her work again, on the sofa. Presently THE MAID enters from the hall with a visiting card on a small tray.
MRS. BORKMAN.
[Quickly.] Has Mr. Erhart come after all?
THE MAID.
No, ma'am. But there's a lady??
MRS. BORKMAN.
[Laying aside her crochet.] Oh, Mrs. Wilton, I suppose??
THE MAID.
[Approaching.] No, it's a strange lady??
MRS. BORKMAN. [Taking the card.] Let me see?? [Reads it; rises hastily and looks intently at the girl.] Are you sure this is for me?
THE MAID.
Yes, I understand it was for you, ma'am.
