누구보다도 빌 브라이슨의 책은 번역본보다 원본으로 보는 것이 훨씬 재미있다. 이 책도 번역본은 십년 전에 던져버렸지만 원본은 던져버리지 않고 없는 시간을 쪼개 4개월 동안 쥐가 쏠듯이 읽어냈다. 그 이유는 실로 여러 가지인데..
Imagine, if you will, lying in the dark alone in a little tent, nothing but a few microns of trembling nylon between you and the chill night air, listening to a 400-pound bear moving around your campsite. Imagine its quiet grunts and mysterious snufflings, the clatter of upended cookware and sounds of moist gnawings, the pad of its feet and the heaviness of its breath, the singing brush of its haunch along your tent side. Imagine the hot flood of adrenaline, that unwelcome tingling in the back of your arms, at the alarming wild wobble of your frail shell as it roots through the backpack that you left casually propped by the entrance-with, you suddenly recall, a Snickers in the pouch. 애팔래치안 트레일을 경험해보겠다면서 이렇게 곰을 두려워하고 있다. 그 능청이라니..트레일을 시작하기 전에 여러 필요 용품들을 마련하면서도 소비가 소비를 부르는 이상한 등산 용품 이야기를 하는데도 배꼽을 잡을 수 밖에 없다. 왠지 본질보다 사소한 것에 관심이 많은 것 같아 보이는 것이 빌 브라이슨의 매력이자 엉뚱함.
She could not have signaled her availablity to Katz more clearly if she had thrown her skirt over her head and lain across his Hungry Man Breakfast Platter. Katz in consequence was pumping testosterone.
같이 트레일을 함께한 친구 Katz를 이렇게 묘사하기도 하고..Hungry Man Breakfast Platter라니..이것보다 더 미국적으로 한 남자를 묘사할 수 있을까..
Dessert was of course the highlight. Everyone on the trail dreams of somthing, usually sweet and gooey, and my sustaining vision had been an outsized slab of pie. It had occupied my thoughts for days, and when the waitress came to take our order I asked her, with beseeching eyes and a hand on her forearm, to bring me the largest piece she could slice without losing her job. She brought me a vast, viscous, canary-yellow wedge of lemon pie. it was a monument to food technology, yellow enough to give a headache, sweet enough to make your eyeballs roll up into your head-everything, in short, you could want in a pie so long as taste and quality didn't enter into your requirements.
트레일을 오래 걷고 나서 단 것을 열망하는 모습..구구한 표현이 더 절절하게 다가온다.
Distance changes utterly when you take the world on foot. A mile becomes a long way, two miles literally considerable, ten miles whopping, fifty miles at the very limits of conception. The world, you realize, is enormous in a way that only you and a small community of fellow hikers know. Planetary scale is your little secret.
Life takes on a neat simplicity, too. Time ceases to have any meaning. When it is dark, you go to bed, and when it is light again you get up, and everything in between is just in between. It's quite wonderful, really.
You have no engagement, commitments, obligations, or duties; no special ambitions and only the smallest, least complicated of wants.
이렇게 시작하는 챕터도 있는데 왜 그가 트레일에 나섰는지 알 수 있게 해주는 대목이다. 우리가 원하는 삶은 의외로 단순한 것일 거다. 브라이슨도 이렇게 심각할 수 있고 말이다.
We had been a week on the trail and were going to town the next day. That was self-evident. We would hike eight miles, get a room, have a shower, phone home, do laundry, eat dinner, buy groceries, watch TV, sleep in bed, eat breakfast, return to the trail. All this was known and obvious. Everything we did was known and obvious. It was wonderful really.
때로는 단순 반복이 우리를 평화롭고 행복하게 할 수 있다.
정말 멋진 책이고 작가인데 불행하게도 읽는데 시간이 오래 걸린다는 단점이 있다. 하지만 빌 브라이슨의 작품은 꼭 원서로..그래서 번역본으로 휘리릭 읽고 싶지만 못 읽고 있다.