I think going the Clojure route makes more sense, but I am strongly biased towards functional programming languages. It is a simpler language to learn than Java, yet one that provides much richer libraries. You won't, for instance, have to write a for loop to iterate over a collection. Just read "reduce" and think "inject: into:" and you're halfway there.
I am going to disagree there with you. Especially if one comes from the family of C like language , he is going to find Clojure an alien planet at best. Now count into that as a non popular language the amount of books/tutorials/articles on it will be highly limited. Me learning Clojure has been far from smooth and easy and definetly not even remotely close as easy as learning Java and of course light year away as easy as learning python. Also I had the advantage of already studying briefly common lisp still I found learning Clojure much more challenging than I expected mainly because even though it pays tribute on its lisp heritage its a language by itself. I do agree though that is a very promising language for JVM and its certainly a must learn if you target the Java Machine , so recommending clojure is by no means a bad advice. However if one come to either lisp or smalltalk , he must be prepared for severing lacking not so well written and noob friendly documentation and mostly a complete lack of choices in that field. Saying that I like Clojure , I love common lisp and I adore smalltalk . I agree with you that functional programming at least in theory seems extremely tempting way to code.