「耳の中の魚」（メモ） - Living, Loving, Thinking, Again

ADAM THIRLWELL “The Joyful Side of Translation” http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/books/review/is-that-a-fish-in-your-ear-translation-and-the-meaning-of-everything-by-david-bellos-book-review.html

David Bellosの翻訳論Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everythingの書評。
最初のパラグラフ。「翻訳論」は陰鬱だということ；

The theory of translation is very rarely ― how to put this? ― comical. Its mode is elegy, and severe admonishment. In the 20th century, its great figures were Vladimir Nabokov*1, in exile from Soviet Russia, attacking libertines like Robert Lowell*2 for their infidelities to the literal sense; or Walter Benjamin, Jewish in a proto-Nazi Berlin, describing the Task of the Translator as an impossible ideal of exegesis. You can never, so runs the elegiac argument, precisely reproduce a line of poetry in another language. Poetry! You can hardly even translate “maman.” . . . And this elegiac argument has its elegiac myth: the Tower of Babel, where the world’s multiplicity of languages is seen as mankind’s punishment ― condemned to the howlers, the faux amis, the foreign menu apps. Whereas the ideal linguistic state would be the lost universal language of Eden.
It’s rarely flippant, or joyful ― the theory of translation.

暴力批判論他十篇 (岩波文庫―ベンヤミンの仕事)

作者: ヴァルターベンヤミン,野村修
出版社/メーカー: 岩波書店
発売日: 1994/03/16
メディア: 文庫
購入: 3人クリック: 50回
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David Bellosのこの本はそうした陰鬱さを打破しているのだという；

(…) He offers an anthropology of translation acts. But through this anthropology a much grander project emerges. The old theories were elegiac, stately; they were very much severe. Bellos is practical, and sprightly. He is unseduced by elegy. And this is because he is on to something new.

David Bellos*3はプリンストンの仏蘭西文学教授だが、Thirlwell氏はそれよりも彼の翻訳経験の方が本書を動機付けているのではないかと述べている。仏蘭西の作家Georges Perec*4とアルバニアの作家Ismail Kadare*5の翻訳。Ismail Kadareの場合はオリジナルのアルバニア語からではなく、著者の監修の下に仏蘭西語訳から英語に重訳された。Thirlwell氏曰く、

Bellos’s twin experience with these novelists is, I think, at the root of his new book, for these experiences with translation prove two things: It’s still possible to find adequate equivalents for even manically formal prose; and it’s also possible to find such equivalents via a language that is not a work’s original. Whereas according to the sad and orthodox theories of translation, neither of these truths should be true.

Thirlwell氏はそうしたDavid Bellosの翻訳実践の一例として、Georges PerecのLa Vie mode d'emploi (Life: A User's Manual)の翻訳を採り上げている。BellosはPerecの原文の“Adolf Hitler/Fourreur”を“Adolf Hitler/German Lieder”と英訳した。ここにBellosの言語観・翻訳観の転換が表れていることになる。前者についていえば、「分離した実体」としての言語、「名」としての言語という言語観の否定；

(…) We’re used to thinking that each person speaks an individual language ― his mother tongue ― and that this mother tongue is a discrete entity, with a vocabulary manipulated by a fixed grammar. But this picture, Bellos argues, doesn’t match the everyday shifts of our multiple languages, nor the mess of our language use. Bellos’s deep philosophical enemy is what he calls “nomenclaturism,” “the notion that words are essentially names” ― a notion that has been magnified in our modern era of writing: a conspiracy of lexicographers. It annoys him because this misconception is often used to support the idea that translation is impossible, since all languages largely consist of words with no single comprehensive equivalent in other languages. But, Bellos writes: “A simple term such as ‘head,’ for example, can’t be counted as the ‘name’ of any particular thing. It figures in all kinds of expressions.” And while no single word in French, say, will cover all the connotations of the word “head,” its meaning “in any particular usage can easily be represented in another language.”
The misconception, however, has a very long history. Ever since St. Jerome translated the Bible into Latin, discussion of translation has dissolved into the ineffable ― the famous idea that each language creates an essentially different mental world, and so all translations are doomed to philosophical inadequacy. In Bellos’s new proposal, translation instead “presupposes . . . the irrelevance of the ineffable to acts of communication.” Zigzagging through case studies of missionary Bibles or cold war language machines, Bellos calmly removes this old idea of the ineffable, and its unfortunate effects.

また、「オリジナルと同一になろうとすること」ではなく「オリジナルに似ようとすること」としての翻訳。「油絵による肖像画」としての翻訳；

It’s often said, for instance, that a translation can’t ever be an adequate substitute for the original. But a translation, Bellos writes, isn’t trying to be the same as the original, but to be like it. Which is why the usual conceptual duo of translation ― fidelity, and the literal ― is too clumsy. These ideas just derive from the misplaced anxiety that a translation is trying to be a substitute. Adolf Hitler/Fourreur! A translation into English as “furrier” would be literally accurate; it would, however, be an inadequate likeness.

Translation, Bellos proposes in a dryly explosive statement, rather than providing a substitute instead “provides for some community an acceptable match for an utterance made in a foreign tongue.” What makes a match acceptable will vary according to that community’s idea of what aspects of an utterance need to be matched by its translation. After all, “no translation can be expected to be like its source in more than a few selected ways.” So a translation can’t be right or wrong “in the manner of a school quiz or a bank statement. A translation is more like a portrait in oils.” In a translation, as any art form, the search is for an equivalent sign.

以前たしか岩崎夏海が柳瀬尚紀はジョイスを訳したからエライとか持ち上げていたのだが*6、この文脈でいえば、柳瀬尚紀の偉さは寧ろルイス・キャロルの『もつれっ話』や『シルヴィーとブルーノ』を訳したことにあるんじゃないの？

もつれっ話 (ちくま文庫)

作者: ルイスキャロル,柳瀬尚紀
出版社/メーカー: 筑摩書房
発売日: 1989/09
メディア: 文庫
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シルヴィーとブルーノ (ちくま文庫)

作者: ルイス・キャロル,Lewis Carroll,柳瀬尚紀
出版社/メーカー: 筑摩書房
発売日: 1987/05
メディア: 文庫
購入: 1人クリック: 6回
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ところで、Thirlwell氏は最後のパラグラフでGoogle Translationは所謂「機械翻訳」ではないと述べている。これは既存の翻訳コーパスを検索して統計的マッチングを行うもの。所謂「機械翻訳」とGoogle Translationの差異、これはここで示された２つの言語観・翻訳観の差異に対応しているといえるか。
さて、Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everythingは『三聯生活週刊』（2011年10月31日号）でも紹介されていた（小貝「翻訳為何重要」、p.166）。Thirlwell氏は本書のタイトルIs That a Fish in Your Ear?については全く言及していないが、小貝の紹介によれば、ダグラス・アダムスの『銀河ヒッチハイク・ガイド』が出典。小貝のテクストから１パラグラフ抜き出しておく；

貝洛斯問了一個令人感到意外的問題：我們可以没有翻訳嗎？　他的答案是可以、幾百年甚至上千年来、世界上不存在翻訳。不同国家的人直接学習一定量的隣国的語言用於交流。馬可・波羅用了多種語言描述他的旅行、他可能都没有意識到其中一些是外語。印刷業的伝播改変了一切。詞語被賦与了固定的含義。詞典被認為了詞語的含義。但貝洛斯説、貝洛斯這個概念本身幾乎無法定義。例如、徳語中有複合動詞、匈牙利語在構詞時可以包括整個句子。

銀河ヒッチハイク・ガイド (新潮文庫)

作者: ダグラス・アダムス,風見潤
出版社/メーカー: 新潮社
発売日: 1982/12
メディア: 文庫
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