今日の「お気に入り」。
" Our sons will go to the universities to study dentistry
or law and to become fatly affluent before they are
thirty . Men who will stand over six feet tall and who
will move their fat , pudgy fingers over the limited
possibilities to be found in other people's mouths .
Or men who sit behind desks shuffling papers relating
to divorce or theft or assault or the taking of life .
To grow prosperous from pain and sorrow and the
desolation of human failure . They will be far removed
from the physical life and will seek it out only through
jogging or golf or games of handball with friendly
colleagues . They will join expensive private clubs
for the pleasures of perspiration and they will not
die in falling stone or chilling water or thousands
of miles from those they love . They will not die
in any such manner , partially at least because we
have told them not to and have encouraged them
to seek out other ways of life which lead , we hope ,
to gentler deaths . And yet because it seems they will
follow our advice instead of our lives , we will experience ,
in any future that is ours , only an increased sense of
anguished isolation and an ironic feeling of confused
bereavement . Perhaps it is always so for parents who
give the young advice and find that it is followed .
And who find that those who follow such advice must
inevitably journey far from those who give it , to distant
lonely worlds which are forever unknowable to those
who wait behind . Yet perhaps those who go find in the
regions to which they travel but another kind of
inarticulate loneliness . Perhaps the dentist feels
mute anguish as he circles his chair , and the lawyer
who lives in a world of words finds little relationship
between professional talk and what he would hope
to be true expression . Perhaps he too in his quiet
heart sings something akin to Gaelic songs, sings in an
old archaic language private words that reach to no
one . And perhaps both lawyer and dentist journey
down into an Africa as deep and dark and distant as
ours .
I can but vaguely imagine what I will never know . "
上に引用したのはアリステア・マクラウドさん ( 1936 - 2014 )
の短編小説 ” The Closing Down of Summer ” ( 1976 ) の一節 。
どんな頭脳が書くんだろう 、こんな難解な文章 。
先だって引用した中野恵津子さん( 1944 - 2013 ) の完成度の高い
「 日本語訳 」の「 英語原文 」です 。
どんな頭脳が訳すんだろう 、こんな難解な文章を平易で達意の日本語に 。
#アリステア・マクラウド # 中野恵津子訳 #灰色の輝ける贈り物 #新潮社
#AlistairMacLeod #TheClosingDownofSummer
