<Love> by Ralph Waldo Emerson, 4/10

The ancients called beauty the flowering of virtue. Who can analyze the nameless charm which glances from one and another face and form? We are touched with emotions of tenderness and complacency, but we cannot find whereat this dainty emotion, this wandering gleam, points. It is destroyed for the imagination by any attempt to refer it to organization. Nor does it point to any relations of friendship or love known and described in society, but, as it seems to me, to a quite other and unattainable sphere, to relations of transcendent delicacy and sweetness, to what roses and violets hint and fore-show. We cannot approach beauty. Its nature is like opaline doves'-neck lustres, hovering and evanescent. Herein it resembles the most excellent things, which all have this rainbow character, defying all attempts at appropriation and use. What else did Jean Paul Richter signify, when he said to music, "Away! away! thou speakest to me of things which in all my endless life I have not found, and shall not find." The same fluency may be observed in every work of the plastic arts. The statue is then beautiful when it begins to be incomprehensible, when it is passing out of criticism, and can no longer be defined by compass and measuring-wand, but demands an active imagination to go with it, and to say what it is in the act of doing. The god or hero of the sculptor is always represented in a transition from that which is representable to the senses, to that which is not. Then first it ceases to be a stone. The same remark holds of painting. And of poetry, the success is not attained when it lulls and satisfies, but when it astonishes and fires us with new endeavours after the unattainable. Concerning it, Landor inquires "whether it is not to be referred to some purer state of sensation and existence."

 

virtue : 선, 선행 / 미덕, 덕목

complacency : 현 상태에 만족함, 안주 

dainty : 앙증맞은 (=delicate) / 조심스러운, 얌전한 (=delicate) 

gleam : (흔히 어디에 반사된) 어슴푸레한, 흐릿한

transcendent : 초월하는, 초월적인, 탁월한 

delicacy : 여림, 연약함 

violet : 제비꽃, 바이올렛 

fore-show : 예고[예언]하다, 예시하다, …의 전조를 보이다 

opaline : 오팔 같은, 유백광을 내는 

lustre : 윤(기), 광택 (=sheen) / (특별함을 부여하는) 빛 (→lacklustre) 

evanescent : 쉬이 사라지는, 덧없는, 무상한 

incomprehensible : 이해할 수 없는 (↔comprehensible), (=unintelligible) 

wand : 지팡이

cease : 중단되다, 그치다, 중단시키다 (→cessation) 

 

 

In like manner, personal beauty is then first charming and itself, when it dissatisfies us with any end; when it becomes a story without an end; when it suggests gleams and visions, and not earthly satisfactions; when it makes the beholder feel his unworthiness; when he cannot feel his right to it, though he were Caesar; he cannot feel more right to it than to the firmament and the splendors of a sunset.

 

beholder : 보는 사람, 구경꾼(spectator)

firmament : [옛글투 또는 문예체] 창공, 하늘 

splendor : 훌륭함, 장려(壯麗), 화려함 / (명성 등의) 현저, 탁월, 영예, 영광 / 빛남, 광휘, 광채(brilliance) 

 

 

Hence arose the saying, "If I love you, what is that to you?" We say so, because we feel that what we love is not in your will, but above it. It is not you, but your radiance. It is that which you know not in yourself, and can never know.

 

radiance : (행복감·건강 등이 얼굴에 나타나는) 빛[광채] / (따스하고 밝은) 빛[광휘] 

 

 

 

 

 

※ 출처 : Essays, First Series (1841) 중 5장 LOVE by Ralph Waldo Emerson ※ 랄프 왈도 에머슨 (Ralph Waldo Emerson) : 미국 사상가 겸 시인. 자연과의 접촉에서 고독과 희열을 발견하고 자연의 효용으로서 실리(實利)·미(美)·언어(言語)·훈련(訓練)의 4종을 제시했다. 정신을 물질보다도 중시하고 직관에 의하여 진리를 알고, 자아의 소리와 진리를 깨달으며, 논리적인 모순을 관대히 보는 신비적 이상주의였다. 주요 저서에는《자연론》,《대표적 위인론》등이 있다.