영어로 읽는 고전 _ 헨리크 입센의 어린 에욜프
『어린 에욜프』는 1894년에 쓰인 희곡이다. 산에서 돌아온 알프레드 알메르스는 이제부터 몸이 불편한 아들 에욜프에게 자신을 온전히 바치겠다고 결심한다. 그러던 어느 날 정체 모를 '쥐 부인'이 집을 찾아오고, 곧 가족에게 비극이 닥친다. 알프레드와 소유욕 강한 아내 리타는 묻어두었던 죄책감과 원망, 그리고 자신들의 결혼에 관한 아픈 진실과 마주할 수밖에 없게 된다. 서로를 향한 비난이 터져 나오고 관계가 무너져 가는 가운데, 두 사람은 속죄를 통한 구원이 과연 가능한지를 스스로 결정해야 한다.
Classics Read in English _ Little Eyolf by Henrik Ibsen
Alfred Allmers comes down from the mountains having abandoned the great book he went up there to write. Something happened to him in the high country ? he met death on a path, he says, and walked with it ? and he has come home resolved to give himself instead to his nine-year-old son Eyolf, a boy who wears a crutch and will never run. It sounds like grace. It is also, though Alfred cannot yet say so, a way of paying a debt.
Then an old woman appears at the door with a sack and a small dog, asking whether the household is troubled by anything that gnaws. She takes vermin down to the fjord, she explains, and they follow her willingly, and she sings to them as they go under. She is one of the strangest figures Ibsen ever put on a stage, and she is gone within minutes. Shortly afterward a crutch is seen floating on the water.
What follows is not a play about grief so much as about what grief exposes. Rita, who wanted her husband entirely and resented the child for taking a portion of him, has to hear herself confess it. Alfred has to admit that the boy's lameness was the result of a fall neither parent was watching, because they were occupied with each other. The dead child had wide-open eyes, and both of them now see those eyes everywhere. In the wreckage they turn on each other, then on Alfred's sister Asta, whose place in his affections turns out to rest on a lie about their blood. By the last act two people who have run out of every consolation stand looking at the empty road up to the house and decide, without much hope and without leaving, to try being of some use to somebody. Ibsen offers no absolution. He offers only the flag going back up the pole, and two people who have stopped lying.
Summary
[Mrs. RITA ALLMERS stands beside the table, facing towards the left, engaged in unpacking the bag. She is a handsome, rather tall, well-developed blonde, about thirty years of age, dressed in a light-coloured morning-gown.]
[Shortly after, Miss ASTA ALLMERS enters by the door on the right, wearing a light brown summer dress, with hat, jacket, and parasol. Under her arm she carries a locked portfolio of considerable size. She is slim, of middle height, with dark hair, and deep, earnest eyes. Twenty-five years old.]
ASTA. [As she enters.] Good-morning, my dear Rita.
RITA. [Turns her head, and nods to her.] What! is that you, Asta? Come all the way from town so early?
ASTA. [Takes of her things, and lays them on a chair beside the door.] Yes, such a restless feeling came over me. I felt I must come out to-day, and see how little Eyolf was getting on?and you too. [Lays the portfolio on the table beside the sofa.] So I took the steamer, and here I am.
RITA. [Smiling to her.] And I daresay you met one or other of your friends on board? Quite by chance, of course.
