Steven Millhauser, "Mermaid Fever"

　スティーヴン・ミルハウザー、柴田元幸訳『夜の声』（白水社）がすばらしい。

　https://www.hakusuisha.co.jp/book/b591084.html
　

　翻訳で一番大切なのは、「原文のトーンの再現」であるが、本書収録のミルハウザーの短篇か「マーメイド・フィーバー」でも、「誰とはわからないが、町の状態を報告する町の人」の語り口が見事に日本語で語りなおされている。
冒頭はこうだ。

The mermaid washed up on our public beach in the early morning of June 19, at approximately 4:30 a.m., according to the most reliable estimates. At 5:06 a.m. the body was discovered by George Caldwell, a forty-year-old postal worker who lived two blocks from the water and was fond of his early-morning swim. Caldwell found her lying just below the tide line; he thought she was a teenager who had drowned. The body lay on its side among strings of seaweed and scattered mussel shells. Caldwell stepped back. He did not want trouble. He immediately called 911 on his cell and stood waiting in the near-dark some ten feet from the drowned girl until two police cars and an ambulance pulled up in the beach parking lot. The sun had not yet come up, but a band of sky over the water was turning pearly gray. “I thought she was a high school girl,” Caldwell later told a reporter; we read it in the Listener. “It was still dark out there. I thought she was wearing some sort of a dress with the top torn off. I could tell she didn’t look right. I didn’t want to get too close.” The body was taken to the Vanderhorn Funeral Home on Broadbridge Avenue and examined by the coroner and three local doctors. The initial report stated that the body “had the appearance of a mermaid” but that further tests would have to be conducted before a definitive statement could be issued. Two marine biologists from a nearby university arrived a few hours later and confirmed the accuracy of the initial examination, stating in their confidential report that there could be no doubt the mermaid was authentic.
　

　柴田がどう訳しているか、『夜の声』で確認していただきたい。

　もうひとつ紹介する。この原文も「誰かわからないナレーターが町の様子を報告している」感じがすごくよく出ている。

Perhaps it was the sense that she was leaving us, perhaps it was the knowledge that we had failed her in some way, but as the summer moved toward its end we surrendered extravagantly to our mermaid dreams, as if we knew it was already too late. We were tired of human things, we wanted more. You could feel a kind of violence in the air. At a dance party on Linden Lane, a group of high school girls stripped the clothes off fourteen year-old Mindy Nelson, painted her naked hips and buttocks and legs bright green, bound her ankles with duct tape, and carried her writhing and screaming out of the house into the back woods, where they tossed　her into a shallow stream; her hysterical shouts attracted the attention of a neighbor. At an adult mermaid party in a ranch-house  neighborhood, a costume variation resulted in complaints to the police: through uncurtained windows, in darkened rooms lit only by candles, people in neighboring houses saw men and women dressed in scaly fish-tops that covered their faces and descended to the waist; from the hips down they were entirely naked. In the blue nights of August, groups of boys, wearing no shirts, roamed the back yards of quiet neighborhoods, looking up at second story bedroom windows, where now and then a mermaid would appear, sitting with her tail over the sill as she combed her hair slowly in the dim red light of her room.

　上の一文だけ、ご紹介すると、柴田訳はこうだ。

「彼女が私たちの許を去ろうとしていると感じたからか、それとも自分たちが何らかの意味で彼女を裏切ったと知っていたのか、とにかく夏が終わりに近づくにつれ、あたかももう手遅れとわかっているようかのように、私たちはマーメイドをめぐる夢にどこまでも溺れていった」

　ここを、語り手を「僕」などとして、個人的な物語として訳してしまえば、著者が意図したものとはまるで違う作品になってしまう。まずは原文をよく読み込んで、トーンをつかむことが大切だ。
小説の翻訳は「トーンをいかに再現するか」が大切だが、翻訳でもしない限り、信頼できる翻訳者の翻訳書を素直に味わうのがいちばん正しいあり方なような気がする。
『夜の声』では翻訳者はもちろん、編集者ほかのスタッフも最高の仕事をしている。幅広い読者の期待を満たしてくれる1冊であること間違いない。