영어로 읽는 고전 _ 헨리크 입센의 우리 죽은 자들이 깨어날 때
『우리 죽은 자들이 깨어날 때』는 1899년에 쓰인 희곡이다. 조각가 아르놀 루베크는 오래전 자신의 대표작에 영감을 주었던 모델 이레네와 다시 마주친다. 두 사람은 그 협업이 끝난 뒤로 줄곧 영혼이 죽은 채 살아왔다. 그는 영감 없는 명성에 갇혔고, 그녀는 그가 예술을 위해 자신의 영혼을 훔쳐 갔다고 확신한다. 산속 온천에서 재회한 두 사람 앞에 얽히고설킨 과거가 되살아나고, 그와 함께 위험한 집착도 고개를 든다. 한편 아르놀에게 소홀히 대접받던 아내는 다른 곳에서 자유를 찾는다. 두 쌍은 폭풍이 몰려오는 가운데 불확실한 운명을 향해 산을 오른다.
Classics Read in English _ When We Dead Awaken by Henrik Ibsen
Professor Rubek sits outside a spa hotel with the morning papers he does not read and a wife twenty years his junior who is bored to the point of illness. He is the most celebrated sculptor in the country. He has not made anything he believes in since The Day of Resurrection, the work that made his name — and even that he ruined afterwards, or completed, depending on who is asked. It was once a single figure: a young woman rising out of the earth, waking, with the light of that waking still on her face. Then he added things. Men and beasts crowding the base, and in the middle, half hidden, a portrait of himself with his hands in his hair, unable to get out.
Irena was the model for that figure. She stood before him for a year and gave him everything and he never once touched her, because he was afraid of spoiling his vision — and when the work was finished he thanked her politely and turned to the next thing. She left, and something in her stopped. She has been in institutions since. She arrives at the same hotel now, dressed in white, followed everywhere by a nun who watches her, and she tells Rubek quite calmly that she died long ago and that he is the one who killed her.
Meanwhile his wife Maja has met a bear-hunter, a coarse and entirely alive man who owns a hunting ground and takes what he wants, and she goes off down the mountain with him singing that she is free. Ibsen's arrangement is exact: two couples, one descending into the ordinary world and living, one climbing.
Because Rubek and Irena, having agreed that the years between were a waste, decide to go up to the summit and see the sunrise together — to have, at last, the life they did not take. A storm is coming and the nun and the guide both warn them. They go anyway. Ibsen gives them one moment of ecstatic reunion above the mist, and then the avalanche. Down in the valley Maja's voice is heard still singing about freedom. It was the last thing he wrote; he called it a dramatic epilogue, and within a year a stroke had ended his working life. The old man was settling an account, and the account was his own.
Summary
MAIA.
[Sits for some time as though waiting for the PROFESSOR to say something, then lets her paper drop with a deep sigh.] Oh dear, dear, dear—!
PROFESSOR RUBEK.
[Looks up from his paper.] Well, Maia? What is the matter with you?
MAIA.
Just listen how silent it is here.
PROFESSOR RUBEK.
[Smiles indulgently.] And you can hear that?
MAIA.
What?
PROFESSOR RUBEK.
The silence?
MAIA.
Yes, indeed I can.
PROFESSOR RUBEK.
Well, perhaps you are right, mein Kind. One can really hear the silence.
