황석영--맛과 추억 서문

도서관에서 공부하다 조금 지겨울 땐 옆 서고에 가서 간간이 한국 서적을 본다. 눈에 띄는 책이 몇 권 있다.  황석영의 <<맛과 추억>>이라는 책이 손에 잡혔다. 고은의 두툼한 일기도 빌렸다. 추억이 담긴 음식 얘기는 그냥 들어도 재밌고 정감있다. 읽다가 갑자기 해남에 가고 싶어졌다.  어머니가 해주신 꽃게탕을 실로 몇년만에 함께 먹었다. commensality and taste.

어설프지만 재미로 번역해 봤다.  

 <<황석영의 맛과 추억>> 서문에서 발췌. 재판본.  서울: 디자인 하우스, 2002. 4-7.

 

Excerpts from the preface of Taste and Memories (2001) by Suk-Young Hwang (my translation)

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Anyone who once performed fasting for some reason like being ill would realize how the eating of every breakfast, lunch, and dinner is so crucial an issue during the day. The act of having a meal for our survival or health, on the other hand, helps us divide our time properly, since it gives a timely pause to our activity in daylight. Without eating anything, one would feel that the day gets longer than usual and everything suddenly becomes meaningless. And one of the precious discoveries through the fast is that all the varieties of human relationships vanish, including meeting, parting, conversations, facial impressions, and so on. The surroundings around him or her just appear to be desolate and quiet. Communication with others is, of course, no longer available, and even the feeling of one’s existence disappears. Time without diets cannot be real.

Since I have decided to write about foods, why I recollect, first of all, the experience of fasting is due to an image in my mind about the young Jesus with a cup of wine and a piece of black bread. We know what we call “the Last Supper” of Jesus has been an inspiration for numerous painters for centuries of years, and such symbolic meaning as his blood and body in the supper is now preserved in the similar ritual in the Catholic Church. To restore the meaning of meal in terms of its original purity has been regarded as the start point for every reformist movement. 

We have lost all tastes. Some elements for a delicious meal: sweats of labor, a jovial conviviality in sharing, the land we have inhabited for long time, the family with us till our death, a meeting and reconciliation with the strange and different, a few days spent with our beloved, and, above all, the poverty and need. All these optimize the memory of our taste to the best condition…Foods imply human relationships, and they are kinds of catalyst retrieving our old memories.