한 문장에 1천288개 단어를 쑤셔 박은 윌리엄 포크너

 
윌리엄 포크너 William Faulkner가 1936년 소설 압살롬 압살롬! Absalom, Absalom!에서 물경 1천288개 단어로 구성된 문장을 썼는데, 이는 영문학에서 가장 긴 문장 중 하나로 알려져 있다.

아래가 바로 그 구절이다.

인내력 시험하고 싶은 분은 한 번 달라들어 봤음 싶다.
 
Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds ‑would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’61 had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying ‘Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point. 
 
참고로 이걸 파파고 자동번역기에 얹어봤다. 
 
아버지처럼, 만약 아버지가 내가 그곳에 나갔던 전날 밤에도 아버지가 그것에 대해 많이 알고 계셨다면, 그는 내가 돌아온 다음 날에도 그랬습니다. 그는 마침내 악마가 해를 끼칠 수 있는 능력에는 한계가 있을 것이라는 것을 깨달은 미친 무력한 노인이었습니다. 그는 자신의 상황을 쇼걸인 조랑말처럼 보셨을 것입니다. 조랑말은 그녀가 가장 중요한 곡조가 경적과 바이올린, 드럼이 아니라 시계와 달력에서 나온다는 것을 깨닫고, 자신의 격렬한 폭발과 반동 속에서 단 한 번 더 격렬한 총성을 전달하고 먼지로 부서질 수 있다는 것을 깨닫는 낡은 대포처럼 보였을 것입니다. 조랑말은 여전히 그의 범위와 나침반 안에 있는 장면을 바라보며 아들이 사라진 것을 보았습니다. 아들이 아직 살아 있다면, 그의 이름은 달라졌을 것이고, 그를 낯선 사람들이나 용으로 부르는 사람들은 아들이 전통을 이어갈 수 있는 이상한 여자의 몸에 뿌릴 수 있는 어떤 것이든 간에, 유전적 악과 해를 저지르고, 다른 이름으로 그리고 올바른 이름을 듣지 못한 사람들 사이에서, 이미 찰스 본이라는 이름을 가진 방적인 존재를 선택한 딸은 방적인 역할을 맡게 되었습니다. 그녀는 슬픔과 슬픔 속에서 그녀를 계승하러 왔지만, 닫힌 문 앞에서 본 홈스펀 드레스와 선보넷 사이에서, 그리고 다음 해에 존스가 관을 짓고 있을 때 입었던 것처럼, 세 여성이 그곳에서 사는 동안 자신의 옷을 입고, 음식을 직접 키우고, 요리한 나무를 베었습니다 (폐어장에서 손녀와 함께 살던 존스에게서 받은 도움을 언급하자면, 지붕이 무너지고 썩어가는 현관이 무너진 채로 문에서 잡초를 잘라내기 위해 빌리게 만들었으며, 결국 그가 잡초를 베지 않고, 적어도 2년 동안은 식물성 잡초를 베지 않고, 여전히 입었습니다) 이모의 분노는 그녀를 마을로 돌아가 도둑맞은 정원 트럭과 밤에 그녀의 앞 계단에 남겨진 익명의 바구니들 속에서 살게 했습니다. 세 사람, 흑인과 백인 두 딸, 그리고 이모는 그녀의 거리에서 12마일 떨어진 곳에서 지켜보고 있었습니다. 두 딸이 오래된 악마, 고대의 바리코스와 절망에 빠진 파우스투스는 이미 채권자의 손을 어깨에 얹은 채 마지막 메인을 던지고, 작은 시골 가게를 운영하며 빵과 고기를 구하려고 했습니다. 그는 잔인하고 가난에 찌든 백인과 흑인들과 함께 니켈과 더미 위에서 신랄하게 흥정을 벌였습니다. 한때 그는 자신의 경계를 넘지 않고도 10마일을 질주할 수 있었습니다. 그의 빈약한 재고에서 나온 값싼 리본과 구슬, 심지어 노인도 15세 시골 소녀를 유혹하여 그의 파트너 손녀를 망치기 위해 사용할 수 있는 오래된 폭력적인 색깔의 사탕까지 말이죠 
 
옮기다 말았다. 기계도 지쳤다. 또 지 맘대로 막 끊었다.