Orlando: A Biography - 올랜도

(오디오 파일 첨부 영문판)

Virginia Woolf 지음

섬달 2025년 04월 25일 출간

작품소개

책소개

명작을 새롭게 만나다
이 책은 텍스트와 오디오 두 가지 형식으로 작품을 감상할 수 있도록 제작되었습니다. 각 장의 시작에 재생 버튼이 있어, 오디오북 내용을 바로 들을 수 있습니다. 독자들은 필요에 따라 읽기와 듣기를 자유롭게 전환할 수 있습니다.
주요 특징
● 편리함: 재생 버튼으로 각 장의 오디오를 손쉽게 들을 수 있습니다.
● 활용성: 집, 통근길, 휴식 시간 등 어디서나 읽기와 듣기를 선택할 수 있습니다.
참고: 재생 버튼 기능을 사용하려면 인터넷 연결이 필요합니다.

Orlando: A Biography (1928) is a groundbreaking novel by Virginia Woolf that blends history, fantasy, and gender exploration. The story follows the life of Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabethan England who mysteriously transforms into a woman and lives for centuries without aging. Through Orlando’s journey across time and identity, Woolf challenges societal norms, particularly the rigid constraints of gender and the fluidity of human experience.

Written as a playful mock-biography, the novel parodies traditional historical narratives while celebrating imagination and literary freedom. Woolf’s lyrical prose and satirical tone create a whimsical yet profound meditation on love, art, and self-discovery. The character of Orlando is said to be inspired by Woolf’s lover, Vita Sackville-West, adding a deeply personal layer to this fantastical tale.

A landmark in feminist literature, Orlando remains a timeless exploration of identity, transcending boundaries of time, gender, and convention. Its innovative style and bold themes continue to inspire readers, cementing Woolf’s legacy as a pioneer of modernist literature.

목차

Orlando: A Biography
Preface
Chapitre I
Chapitre II
Chapitre III
Chapitre IV
Chapitre V
Chapitre VI

책 속으로

He—for there could be no doubt of his sex, though the fashion of the time did something to disguise it—was in the act of slicing at the head of a Moor which swung from the rafters. It was the colour of an old football, and more or less the shape of one, save for the sunken cheeks and a strand or two of coarse, dry hair, like the hair on a cocoanut. Orlando's father, or perhaps his grandfather, had struck it from the shoulders of a vast Pagan who had started up under the moon in the barbarian fields of Africa; and now it swung, gently, perpetually, in the breeze which never ceased blowing through the attic rooms of the gigantic house of the lord who had slain him.

Orlando's fathers had ridden in fields of asphodel, and stony fields, and fields watered by strange rivers, and they had struck many heads of many colours off many shoulders, and brought them back to hang from the rafters. So too would Orlando, he vowed. But since he was sixteen only, and too young to ride with them in Africa or France, he would steal away from his mother and the peacocks in the garden and go to his attic room and there lunge and plunge and slice the air with his blade. Sometimes he cut the cord so that the skull bumped on the floor and he had to string it up again, fastening it with some chivalry almost out of reach so that his enemy grinned at him through shrunk, black lips triumphantly. The skull swung to and fro, for the house, at the top of which he lived, was so vast that there seemed trapped in it the wind itself, blowing this way, blowing that way, winter and summer. The green arras with the hunters on it moved perpetually. His fathers had been noble since they had been at all. They came out of the northern mists wearing coronets on their heads. Were not the bars of darkness in the room, and the yellow pools which chequered the floor, made by the sun falling through the stained glass of a vast coat of arms in the window? Orlando stood now in the midst of the yellow body of an heraldic leopard. When he put his hand on the window–sill to push the window open, it was instantly coloured red, blue, and yellow like a butterfly's wing. Thus, those who like symbols, and have a turn for the deciphering of them, might observe that though the shapely legs, the handsome body, and the well–set shoulders were all of them decorated with various tints of heraldic light, Orlando's face, as he threw the window open, was lit solely by the sun itself. A more candid, sullen face it would be impossible to find. Happy the mother who bears, happier still the biographer who records the life of such a one! Never need she vex herself, nor he invoke the help of novelist or poet. From deed to deed, from glory to glory, from office to office he must go, his scribe following after, till they reach whatever seat it may be that is the height of their desire. Orlando, to look at, was cut out precisely for some such career. The red of the cheeks was covered with peach down; the down on the lips was only a little thicker than the down on the cheeks. The lips themselves were short and slightly drawn back over teeth of an exquisite and almond whiteness. Nothing disturbed the arrowy nose in its short, tense flight; the hair was dark, the ears small, and fitted closely to the head. But, alas, that these catalogues of youthful beauty cannot end without mentioning forehead and eyes. Alas, that people are seldom born devoid of all three; for directly we glance at Orlando standing by the window, we must admit that he had eyes like drenched violets, so large that the water seemed to have brimmed in them and widened them; and a brow like the swelling of a marble dome pressed between the two blank medallions which were his temples. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, thus do we rhapsodize. Directly we glance at eyes and forehead, we have to admit a thousand disagreeables which it is the aim of every good biographer to ignore. Sights disturbed him, like that of his mother, a very beautiful lady in green walking out to feed the peacocks with Twitchett, her maid, behind her; sights exalted him—the birds and the trees; and made him in love with death—the evening sky, the homing rooks; and so, mounting up the spiral stairway into his brain—which was a roomy one—all these sights, and the garden sounds too, the hammer beating, the wood chopping, began that riot and confusion of the passions and emotions which every good biographer detests, But to continue—Orlando slowly drew in his head, sat down at the table, and, with the half–conscious air of one doing what they do every day of their lives at this hour, took out a writing book labelled 'Aethelbert: A Tragedy in Five Acts,' and dipped an old stained goose quill in the ink.

Soon he had covered ten pages and more with poetry. He was fluent, evidently, but he was abstract. Vice, Crime, Misery were the personages of his drama; there were Kings and Queens of impossible territories; horrid plots confounded them; noble sentiments suffused them; there was never a word said as he himself would have said it, but all was turned with a fluency and sweetness which, considering his age—he was not yet seventeen—and that the sixteenth century had still some years of its course to run, were remarkable enough. At last, however, he came to a halt. He was describing, as all young poets are for ever describing, nature, and in order to match the shade of green precisely he looked (and here he showed more audacity than most) at the thing itself, which happened to be a laurel bush growing beneath the window. After that, of course, he could write no more. Green in nature is one thing, green in literature another. Nature and letters seem to have a natural antipathy; bring them together and they tear each other to pieces. The shade of green Orlando now saw spoilt his rhyme and split his metre. Moreover, nature has tricks of her own. Once look out of a window at bees among flowers, at a yawning dog, at the sun setting, once think 'how many more suns shall I see set', etc. etc. (the thought is too well known to be worth writing out) and one drops the pen, takes one's cloak, strides out of the room, and catches one's foot on a painted chest as one does so. For Orlando was a trifle clumsy.

작가정보

저자(글) Virginia Woolf

Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was a key figure in modernist literature and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Known for her innovative narrative techniques, such as stream of consciousness, Woolf's major works include "Mrs Dalloway", "A room of one's own", and "To the Lighthouse," which explore time, memory, and human experience. She was also a prominent feminist, with "A Room of One's Own" advocating for women's intellectual and financial independence. Woolf's writing deeply reflects her personal struggles with mental illness, and her contributions have left a lasting impact on literature and feminist thought. Her legacy endures in the study of literature, psychology, and cultural studies.