글쓰기에 관하여 - 레이몬드 카버
Don't complain, don't explain.
최근 카버의 에세이, 단행본 미수록 단편 등을 모아 출판한 "내가 필요하면 전화해"(문학동네)를 읽었고, 이 중 "글쓰기에 관하여"는 인상적이었다. 몇 번이나 되풀이 읽었고, 특히 아래 부분이 마음에 들었다.
내 친구 중 돈이 필요하기 때문에, 편집자나 부인이 자신에게 의지하고 있어서 혹은 자신을 떠나버렸기 때문에 급하게 책을 서둘렀다고 말한 사람이 있다. 글이 썩 좋지 못한 것을 변명하는 것이다. "시간이 더 있었다면 더 나았을거야." 소설가인 친구가 이렇게 말했을 때, 나는 말이 안나왔다. 지금 생각해봐도(다시 생각할리 없지만) 여전히 마찬가지다. 그것은 내 알바가 아닌 것이다. 하지만 우리가 할 수 있는 한 가장 잘 쓸 수 없다면, 애초에 그일을 왜하는가? 마지막에는, 우리가 최선을 다해 일했다는 만족과 그 노동의 증거야말로 무덤에 가져갈 수 있는 유일한 것 아닌가. 나는 그 친구에게, 제발 다른 일을 하라고 말하고 싶었다. 먹고 살기 위한 더 쉽고 아마도 더 정직한 일들이 있을 것이다. 그렇지 않을 거라면 잔말 말고 너의 능력과 재능을 다해서 일하고, 그 다음에는 합리화를 하거나 변명을 대지 마라. 불평하지도 설명하지도 마라.
문학동네 번역도 괜찮다고 생각하지만, 아래 문장들은 의미 전달이 잘 안된다.
"Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing."
위 문장은 "서술의 근본적 정확성은 글쓰기의 유일한 도덕이다"라고 번역되어 있다. 내 생각에 여기서 '서술'은 '문장'으로 번역해야 의미가 잘 들어맞는 것 같다. "문장의 근본적 정확성은 글쓰기의 유일한 도덕이다". '진술'이 더 직역이긴 한데, 아무래도 글쓰기에 관한 글이니 '문장'이 좀 더 자연스럽다.
by Chekhov: " ... and suddenly everything became clear to him." I find these words filled with wonder and possibility. I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that's implied. There is mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What's happened? Most of all - what now?
위 부분은 이렇게 번역되어 있다.
"그리고 돌연 그에게 모든 게 명확해졌다." 나는 이 단어들에 경이로움과 가능성이 가득함을 발견한다. 나는 이 단어들이 보이는 단순명쾌함, 그리고 은연중에 내비치는 이후 벌어질 사건의 암시가 마음에 든다. 이 문장에는 또한 수수께끼도 담겨 있다. 이전까지는 무엇이 그렇게 불명확했나? 왜 이제는 그것이 명확해졌나? 무슨 일이 일어났나? 무엇보다도, 그래서 어떻게 되었나.
무엇보다, 마지막 'what now'를 '그래서 어떻게 되었나'로 번역한 것은 이상하다. 여기서 'what now'는, 그 전에는 불분명했던 것이, 지금은 분명하다는 것임을 강조하기 위한 것이다. 차라리 '지금은 어떻다는 것인가' 정도가 적당하지 않을까.
또한 'I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that's implied.' 이 문장이 어찌보면 핵심인데, 내 생각에는 이렇게 번역되어야 할 것 같다. "나는 그 단순한 분명함, 그리고 여기에 내포되어 있는 탄로남의 낌새를 사랑한다." 위 역자는 앞으로 벌어질 사건에 대한 암시라고 하였으나, 내 생각에 위 의미는 기존에 제대로 알지 못하고 있었던 것들이 드러남, 탄로남(revelation)에 대한 내용이 맞는 것 같다('드러남'이 어감이 더 나은데 이 단어는 그 앞의 unclear한 비밀스러움을 살려주지 못한다. 폭로도 사실 마음에 드는데, 이 단어는 누군가의 적극적인 행위를 연상시켜서 너무 과하다). 그래야 과거에 불명확했던 것들이 이제 명확해지는 바로 그 순간에 대한 표현으로 적당한 것이다. 그 뒤에, 그러한 탄로남이 있다고 기존 사건이 다 설명된 것이 아니라, 여전히 미스테리도 남아있다는 것을 카버는 지적하고 있는 것이다.
그리고 체호프의 위 문장에서 'clear'는 중요한 의미가 있다. 그래서 단어로 통일하는 것이 좋겠다. 내가 좋아하는 clear 에 대한 번역어는 '분명'한이다. 다시 옮기면,
"그리고 돌연 그에게 모든 것이 분명해졌다." 나는 이 단어들에 경이와 가능성으로 가득함을 발견한다. 나는 그것들의 단순한 분명함과 그리고 여기에 내포된 탄로남의 낌새를 사랑한다. 여기에는 또한 미스테리도 있다. 그 전에 분명하지 못했던 것은 무엇인가? 바로 지금 그것이 분명해진 이유는 무엇인가? 무슨일이 벌어진 것인가. 무엇보다도 - 지금은 어떻다는 것인가.
아래는 전문. (아래 뉴욕타임스 기사와 다른 책에 수록된 것과는 약간 차이가 있는데, 아래 기사는 첫 문장에서 그 시기를 27살, 1966년으로 구체적으로 표현되어 있으나, 다른 책에는 '1960년대에'라고만 되어 있다.)
http://movies2.nytimes.com/books/01/01/21/specials/carver-shoptalk.html
When I was 27, back in 1966, I found I was having trouble concentrating my attention on long narrative fiction. For a time I experienced difficulty in trying to read it as well as in attempting to write it. My attention span had gone out on me; I no longer had the patience to try to write novels. It's an involved story, too tedious to talk about here. But I know it has much to do now with why I write poems and short stories. Get in, get out. Don't linger. Go on. It could be that I lost any great ambitions at about the same time, in my late twenties. If I did, I think it was good it happened. Ambition and a little luck are good things for a writer to have going for him. Too much ambition and bad luck, or no luck at all, can be killing. There has to be talent.
Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don't know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that's something else. The World According to Garpis, of course, the marvelous world according to John Irving. There is another world according to Flannery O'Connor, and others according to William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. There are worlds according to Cheever, Updike, Singer, Stanley Elkin, Ann Beattie, Cynthia Ozick, Donald Barthelme, Mary Robison, William Kittredge, Barry Hannah, Ursula K. Le Guin. Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his own specifications.
It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time.
Isak Dinesen said that she wrote a little every day, without hope and without despair. Someday I'll put that on a three-by-five card and tape it to the wall beside my desk. I have some three-by-five cards on the wall now. "Fundamental accuracy of statement is the ONE sole morality of writing." Ezra Pound. It is not everything by ANY means, but if a writer has "fundamental accuracy of statement" going for him, he's at least on the right track. I have a three-by-five up there with this fragment of a sentence from a story by Chekhov: " ... and suddenly everything became clear to him." I find these words filled with wonder and possibility. I love their simple clarity, and the hint of revelation that's implied. There is mystery, too. What has been unclear before? Why is it just now becoming clear? What's happened? Most of all - what now? There are consequences as a result of such sudden awakenings. I feel a sharp sense of relief - and anticipation.
I overheard the writer Geoffrey Wolff say "No cheap tricks" to a group of writing students. That should go on a three-by-five card. I'd amend it a little to "No tricks." Period. I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or a gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily, which may go along with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chi-chi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing - a sunset or an old shoe – in absolute and simple amazement.
Some months back, in the New York Times Book Review, John Barth said that ten years ago most of the students in his fiction writing seminar were interested in "formal innovation," and this no longer seems to be the case. He's a little worried that writers are going to start writing mom-and-pop novels in the 1980s. He worries that experimentation may be on the way out, along with liberalism. I get a little nervous if I find myself within earshot of somber discussions about "formal innovation" in fiction writing. Too often "experimentation" is a license to be careless, silly, or imitative in the writing. Even worse, a license to try to brutalize or alienate the reader. Too often such writing gives us no news of the world, or else describes a desert landscape and that's all - a few dunes and lizards here and there, but no people; a place uninhabited by anything recognizably human, a place of interest only to a few scientific specialists.
It should be noted that real experiment in fiction is original, hard-earned and cause for rejoicing. But someone else's way of looking at things - Barthelme's, for instance - should not be chased after by other writers. It won't work. There is only one Barthelme, and for another writer to try to appropriate Barthelme's peculiar sensibility or mise en scene under the rubric of innovation is for that writer to mess around with chaos and disaster and, worse, self-deception. The real experimenters have to Make It New, as Pound urged, and in the process have to find things out for themselves. But if writers haven't taken leave of their senses, they also want to stay in touch with us, they want to carry news from their world to ours.
It's possible, in a poem or a short story, to write about commonplace things and objects using commonplace but precise language, and to endow those things - a chair, a window curtain, a fork, a stone, a woman's earring - with immense, even startling power. It is possible to write a line of seemingly innocuous dialogue and have it send a chill along the reader's spine - the source of artistic delight, as Nabokov would have it. That's the kind of writing that most interests me. I hate sloppy or haphazard writing whether it flies under the banner of experimentation or else is just clumsily rendered realism. In Isaac Babel's wonderful short story, "Guy de Maupassant," the narrator has this to say about the writing of fiction: "No iron can pierce the heart with such force as a period put just at the right place." This too ought to go on a three-by-five.
Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if they are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason - if the words are in any way blurred - the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. The reader's own artistic sense will simply not be engaged. Henry James called this sort of hapless writing "weak specification."
I have friends who've told me they had to hurry a book because they needed the money, their editor or their wife was leaning on them or leaving them – "something, some apology for the writing not being very good. "It would have been better if I'd taken the time." I was dumbfounded when I heard a novelist friend say this. I still am, if I think about it, which I don't. It's none of my business. But if the writing can't be made as good as it is within us to make it, then why do it? In the end, the satisfaction of having done our best, and the proof of that labor, is the one thing we can take into the grave. I wanted to say to my friend, for heaven's sake go do something else. There have to be easier and maybe more honest ways to try and earn a living. Or else just do it to the best of your abilities, your talents, and then don't justify or make excuses. Don't complain, don't explain.
In an essay called, simply enough, "Writing Short Stories," Flannery O'Connor talks about writing as an act of discovery. O'Connor says she most often did not know where she was going when she sat down to work on a short story. She says she doubts that many writers know where they are going when they begin something. She uses "Good Country People" as an example of how she put together a short story whose ending she could not even guess at until she was nearly there:
When I started writing that story, I didn't know there was going to be a Ph.D. with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women I knew something about, and before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. I brought in the Bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I didn't know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized it was inevitable.
When I read this some years ago it came as a shock that she, or anyone for that matter, wrote stories in this fashion. I thought this was my uncomfortable secret, and I was a little uneasy with it. For sure I thought this way of working on a short story somehow revealed my own shortcomings. I remember being tremendously heartened by reading what she had to say on the subject. I once sat down to write what turned out to be a pretty good story, though only the first sentence of the story had offered itself to me when I began it. For several days I'd been going around with this sentence in my head: "He was running the vacuum cleaner when the telephone rang." I knew a story was there and that it wanted telling. I felt it in my bones, that a story belonged with that beginning, if I could just have the time to write it. I found the time, an entire day - twelve, fifteen hours even – if I wanted to make use of it. I did, and I sat down in the morning and wrote the first sentence, and other sentences promptly began to attach themselves. I made the story just as I'd make a poem; one line and then the next, and the next. Pretty soon I could see a story, and I knew it was my story, the one I'd been wanting to write.
I like it when there is some feeling of threat or sense of menace in short stories. I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation. There has to be tension, a sense that something is imminent, that certain things are in relentless motion, or else, most often, there simply won't be a story. What creates tension in a piece of fiction is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. But it's also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things.
V. S. Pritchett’s definition of a short story is "something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing." Notice the "glimpse" part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse given life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we're lucky - that word again - have even further-ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer's task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He'll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things: of how things out there really are and how he sees those things – like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right, they can hit all
the notes. (1981)
