15. Fragmentary Blue / New Hampshire(1923) - Robert Frost

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15. Fragmentary Blue / New Hampshire(1923) - Robert Frost

Why make so much of fragmentary blue

In here and there a bird, or butterfly,

Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,

When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?

Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)―

Though some savants make earth include the sky;

And blue so far above us comes so high,

It only gives our wish for blue a whet.

avant : 학자

whet : 자극하다, 갈다, 갈기

쪼가리 파란색

하늘은 확실한 파란색을 필(疋)로 제공하는데,

왜 우리는 어떤 새, 또는 나비, 또는 꽃,

또는 보석, 또는 뜬 눈 등 여기저기의

쪼가리 파란색을 그리 소중하게 여기는가?

어떤 학자들은 하늘을 땅에 포함하기도 하지만,

땅은 땅이고, (아직) 하늘은 아니지 않은가?

드높은 상공의 파란 색이 아주 높이 자리하기에,

파란색에 대한 우리 소망을 자극할 뿐인 것이다.

-신재실 옮김-

단상(斷想): 푸른 하늘은 영생(永生)의 꿈을 드높인다. 푸른 하늘은 무엇인가? 과연 천국인가? 조물주가 땅과 하늘을 갈랐다 하니 땅의 대척점에 하늘이 있는 것은 분명한 것 같다. 하지만 우리가 보는 푸른 하늘은 대기의 굴절에서 오는 물리적 현상이며, 따라서 하늘 역시 땅의 일부라고 주장하는 과학자들도 있지 않은가? 하지만 육안으로 확인할 수 있는 하늘 너머에 진짜 하늘이 존재한다는 상상은 가능하지 않을까? 그런 하늘이 없다면 인생은 너무 가혹하지 않은가?

어쨌든 천국을 향한 인간의 염원은 예나 오늘이나 한결같다. 천국은 있는 것인가? 그렇다면 그 천국에 오를 수는 있는가? 오를 수 없다면, 아예 천국을 건설할 수는 없는 것인가? 천국의 실현을 위한 수많은 사회적, 정치적 실험에도 불구하고, 지상의 천국은 점점 요원한 것 같다. 쪼가리 파란색에 더더욱 집착할 수밖에 …. 새, 나비, 꽃, 보석, 파란 눈, … 땅의 여기저기에 흩어져 있는 쪼가리 파란색을 이어 붙이면 푸른 하늘이 되지 않을까? 하지만 결국 쪼가리 하늘로 그치고 말 것을 …

결국 땅은 땅이고, 하늘이 아니다. 온전한 필(疋)로 드높은 하늘은 너무 높다. 애간장을 태우며 하느님의 약속을 기다릴 수밖에 …. 하지만 영원을 안고 하늘을 우러르는 것도 나쁘지는 않으리라. 쪼가리 파란색을 이어 붙이려는 노력 또한 하느님 보시기에 합당할 것이다.

-신재실 씀-

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youtu.be/jAVuK_iFoC8

youtu.be/HC3Q5G_d0b8

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ROBERT FROST
 SPEAKING ON CAMPUS

Contents

 Introduction
 Getting up things to say for yourself
 Where poetry comes in
 Handling figures of speech
 “Anxiety for the Liberal Arts”
 A book side to everything
 Not freedom from, but freedom of
 Of rapid reading and what we call “completion”
 No surprise to me, no surprise to anybody else
 Pieces of knitting to go on with
 Everything in the world comes in pairs
 My kind of fooling
 About “the great misgiving”
 Wondering how convictions are had
 Something you live by till you live by something else
 Some gamble—something of uncertainty
 The future of the world
 Hang around for the refinement of sentiment
 What I think I’m doing when I write a poem
 Of the “elect” and the “elected”
 Fall in love at sight
 Thinking about generalizations
 “In on the Ground Floor”
 A certain restlessness
 About thinking and of perishing to shine
 A gentler interest in the fine things
 Let’s say bravely…that poetry counts
 I’ll tell you a little about my walks
 Editor’s Note

 References

Wondering how convictions are had

 Robert Frost’s 1958 visit to the University of California at Berkeley involved his speaking and reading on May eighth in the open-air setting of the campus’s Greek Theatre.

 C ALIFORNIA HAS the two great fames, Hollywood and science, the world over. And it’s always my longing that it should come up into having its own literary centers out here. San Francisco ought to be one of them.

 And now this is my chance to say that some newspaper quite perversely made a heading out of my misgivings about the young poets, the “Beat Generation.”

 I had hardly seen the poems. And I’d seen enough of them to see that they were “mis’able,” as we say in New England. But, but, but— added that if it was genuine misery, not affected, it was all right with me. (If any of them are here or anywhere around, in the slums or wherever they are, I hope this reaches them, in my friendliness about it.)

 I’ve lived through of course many, many things like this, little movements that you think much might come of, and so seldom anything comes of them.

 Now, I’m not going to talk to you very long. But in this open daylight, it seems as if I could hardly tell you what my greatest interest in the young people over the country is. It seems as if, looking at all this lightness here and all of you spread around, there couldn’t be many who suffered what I suffered from when I was of the college age.

 I suffered from wondering how convictions are had—how you have ’em. I saw older people with them. And I saw older peo ple worried because I seemed to have none. And I worried about it a little myself.

It’s that kind of youth that seems to be my greatest interest in life. Seems as if there couldn’t be anybody here like that. Look at this, in this light. But I presume it’s here. It’s one of the most genuine things in the world.

 Young people take it two ways. Some of them decide to just have ’em—join something: join a church; join a Rotary Club; join something and have it over with. But there’s always someone—(I’ve just been meeting them.)—there are always some around who stay in the pains of it.

 I don’t know whether I’ve got out of ’em myself yet, those pains. But I resolved, at some time along, not to have ’em if I didn’t have ’em. You see, not to worry about it.

 And it came to me this way, in a figure of speech, as so often. I thought to myself, I’ll write a poem here and a poem there and a poem there. And they need have no connection; they need put together into no special great meaning, large meaning-no generalization. Never mind, they’ll be like stars coming out at night, in the evening—one here, one there—all separate, you know, as it looks. And maybe, as the evening darkens, they’ll constellate.

 And they have, somewhat. Critics tell me now that they put together. That’s some reward to me. It doesn’t end it all, but it’s quite a reward. […]

 But, you see, that’s the kind of confidence—if I radiate anything-the kind of confidence in just waiting till this remark and that remark, this insight and that insight—(All separate; don’t worry about ’em.)—as the time darkens, as your life darkens, they constellate; they make figures. And then you’ve got convictions. That’s all of that.

 All that’s in the poems, too, that kind of interest. Not giving it up anywhere, that’s the great bravery; just to wait, to give it time. Don’t just give it up and climb in. Let it solve itself a lot. It’s up to whom to solve it.

 Then, when it comes to symbols in it all, I’ve been saying lately I’ve found myself in a kind of symbolism that I hadn’t noticed all these years. I’m very fond of the symbol, apparently, of what might be the symbol of all symbols: the couplet, the rhymed couplet.

 But that’s a symbol, isn’t it, of all—of all-all things like that; the way things come together? They separate and come together, separate and come together.

 Someone says: “How about the amoeba? It seems very singular a creature.” And I said: “Well, while you’re looking at it, when it looks ever so single and one, it’s probably troubled inside with becoming two. It needs a psychiatrist. It’s beginning to divide.”

 All these things. Quips are like poems, you see. Little quips you make, like that, they’re all toward this. They’re all separate. Let ’em look ever so inconsistent, too.

 Somebody introduced me in New York the other night as if I was all just made out of contradictions. That wouldn’t worry me.

 Let ’em, these things, look ever so different. Many a pair of things look like a standoff. You can’t do anything with ’em; they just stand off. Well, let ’em stand off. What will come of it will. […]

 Take the matter of a person like Brutus. You have Brutus in Shakespeare’s play Julius Caesar, and you have him in Plutarch’s Lives. And he’s quite a nobility. He’s the hero. He’s the heroic republican that we only have a few of left. (He was getting pretty scarce then, too!)

 There he is. He’s a great figure in those two. And then most of you perhaps have read deep enough into Dante to know that he’s in the deepest hell, as one of the three worst people that ever lived—being mumbled forever in the mouth of a monster.

 Now, what are you going to do with that? That’s Shakespeare against Dante. Standoff!

 I delight in ’em, I think. I like to leave ’em standing. Oh, you know, I’m like a dog that has a number of bones around, different parts of the yard. And he goes and gets one and worries it for a while. And then he covers it up a little and goes and worries another one.

 I worry these different subjects, a little bit, now once in a while; get a poem out of ’em, you see—a poem here and a poem there and all that.

 —at Dartmouth College, May 18, 1954:

 T HAT’S WHAT this man that I spoke of last night might say, that as we grow up we leave things behind. […]

 Again, to show what my convictions are, I always dislike people who are leaving everything behind them in that way. They were unfortunate I think, some of them, in reading bad books, just written for children, when they were young. And so they got over those, and they think that’s the process all the way along, just the process of getting over things, to grow up.

 If that’s growing up, I don’t want to grow up. I wouldn’t want to.

 Again, my convictions come in. I’ve got a dislike for that, that idea. I never got over liking any artist that I ever liked. He fell into a place among the others, but always what he was, if he was anything, stays with me. If he was nothing, it’s different.