영어로 읽는 고전 _ 헨리크 입센의 사랑의 희극
『사랑의 희극』은 1862년에 처음 출간된 운문 희극이다. 이상주의자 시인 팔크가 부르주아식 결혼이야말로 진정한 사랑의 죽음이라고 선언하자, 사회는 그를 부도덕한 자로 낙인찍고 따돌린다. 그러나 스반힐은 그의 용기에 감탄하고, 두 사람은 함께 인습을 벗어나 자신들의 이상대로 살기로 한다. 열정적인 사랑은 첫 불꽃이 지나간 뒤에도 살아남을 수 있는가, 아니면 안락한 가정생활 속으로 스러지도록 내버려 두지 않음으로써만 그 순결함을 지킬 수 있는가. 두 사람이 내놓는 뜻밖의 대답은 낭만과 희생에 대해 그들이 믿어온 모든 것을 뒤흔든다.
Classics Read in English _ Love's Comedy by Henrik Ibsen
A summer garden outside Kristiania, and a boarding house full of engaged couples. Falk is young, penniless, a poet, and in a mood to say out loud what everyone present has agreed not to notice: that the engagements around him are not the beginning of love but the machinery of its disposal. He has the evidence in front of him. Pastor Straamand and his wife were once lovers who wrote each other verses; twelve children later he cannot remember the tune. Falk announces that marriage is where love goes to be embalmed, and the company decides he is a dangerous young man.
Svanhild is the one person who is not frightened of him. She has no money, no prospects, and more courage than anyone else in the garden, and when Falk asks her to break with all of it and live the thing itself, she says yes.
Then Ibsen springs the trap that makes this early verse comedy stranger and colder than its title promises. Guldstad, a middle-aged merchant, states his own case plainly: he does not offer poetry, he offers a life, and he warns them that the passion they intend to preserve will not survive the ordinary weather of years. Svanhild believes him. And so, taking Falk's own argument to its conclusion, she refuses Falk ? not because she loves him less but because she means to keep the love intact by never letting it be lived. She marries the merchant. Falk goes off to the mountains and to work. Both call it a victory. Ibsen, characteristically, leaves us to decide whether anything has been saved or whether two people have simply found the most elegant possible way to lose.
Summary
FALK [rises, lifts his glass, and sings].
Sun-glad day in garden shady
Was but made for thy delight:
What though promises of May-day
Be annulled by Autumn's blight?
Apple-blossom white and splendid
Drapes thee in its glowing tent,?
Let it, then, when day is ended,
Strew the closes storm-besprent.
CHORUS OF GENTLEMEN.
Let it, then, when day is ended, etc.
FALK.
Wherefore seek the harvest's guerdon
While the tree is yet in bloom?
Wherefore drudge beneath the burden
Of an unaccomplished doom?
Wherefore let the scarecrow clatter
Day and night upon the tree?
Brothers mine, the sparrows' chatter
Has a cheerier melody.
CHORUS.
Brothers mine, the sparrow's chatter, etc.
