Fiona Macdonald “The only surviving recording of Virginia Woolf” https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20160324-the-only-surviving-recording-of-virginia-woolf *1
1937年４月にラヂオ放送された、ヴァージニア・ウルフの現存する唯一の音声。記事には、その全文トランスクリプションが付せられている。これは後に”Craftmanship”というタイトルで刊行されているが。
言葉は単独では存立しない。常に関係の中にある。他の言葉との関係において、また「文（sentence）」の一部として。英語が「若い言語」のときは「新しい言葉を発明することが可能だった」。しかし、英語が「古い言語」になった現在、それは不可能である。「文」をなすためには「新しい言葉」と「古い」ものを組み合わせることが不可欠となる。なお、“multitudinous seas”はシェイクスピアの『マクベス』*2からの引用。
Words, English words, are full of echoes, of memories, of associations – naturally. They have been out and about, on people’s lips, in their houses, in the streets, in the fields, for so many centuries. And that is one of the chief difficulties in writing them today – that they are so stored with meanings, with memories, that they have contracted so many famous marriages.The splendid word “incarnadine,” for example – who can use it without remembering also “multitudinous seas”? In the old days, of course, when English was a new language, writers could invent new words and use them. Nowadays it is easy enough to invent new words – they spring to the lips whenever we see a new sight or feel a new sensation – but we cannot use them because the language is old. You cannot use a brand new word in an old language because of the very obvious yet mysterious fact that a word is not a single and separate entity, but part of other words. It is not a word indeed until it is part of a sentence.
「辞書」に配列することはできるが、手に負えないものとしての「言葉」。「言葉は辞書の中に生きるのではなく、精神の中に生きる」。
(…) It is words that are to blame. They are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most unteachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind. If you want proof of this, consider how often in moments of emotion when we most need words we find none. Yet there is the dictionary; there at our disposal are some half-a-million words all in alphabetical order.But can we use them? No, because words do not live in dictionaries, they live in the mind. Look again at the dictionary. There beyond a doubt lie plays more splendid than Antony and Cleopatra;*3 poems more lovely than the Ode to a Nightingale; novels beside which Pride and Prejudice or David Copperfield are the crude bunglings of amateurs. It is only a question of finding the right words and putting them in the right order. But we cannot do it because they do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.
And how do they live in the mind? Variously and strangely, much as human beings live, by ranging hither and thither, by falling in love, and mating together. It is true that they are much less bound by ceremony and convention than we are. Royal words mate with commoners. English words marry French words, German words, Indian words, Negro words, if they have a fancy. Indeed, the less we enquire into the past of our dear Mother English the better it will be for that lady’s reputation. For she has gone a-roving, a-roving fair maid.
「言葉」の不純性。「言葉」は雅俗を問わず、また内外を問わずくっ付く。
They are highly sensitive, easily made self-conscious. They do not like to have their purity or their impurity discussed. If you start a Society for Pure English, they will show their resentment by starting another for impure English – hence the unnatural violence of much modern speech; it is a protest against the puritans. They are highly democratic, too; they believe that one word is as good as another; uneducated words are as good as educated words, uncultivated words as cultivated words, there are no ranks or titles in their society.
「言語」の可変性。
Perhaps that is their most striking peculiarity – their need of change. It is because the truth they try to catch is many-sided, and they convey it by being themselves many-sided, flashing this way, then that. Thus they mean one thing to one person, another thing to another person; they are unintelligible to one generation, plain as a pikestaff to the next. And it is because of this complexity that they survive.
最後に、「我々の無意識」、「言語のプライヴァシー」という言葉が言及される。
Finally, and most emphatically, words, like ourselves, in order to live at their ease, need privacy. Undoubtedly they like us to think, and they like us to feel, before we use them; but they also like us to pause; to become unconscious. Our unconsciousness is their privacy; our darkness is their light… That pause was made, that veil of darkness was dropped, to tempt words to come together in one of those swift marriages which are perfect images and create everlasting beauty. But no – nothing of that sort is going to happen tonight. The little wretches are out of temper; disobliging; disobedient; dumb. What is it that they are muttering? “Time’s up! Silence!”
*1:Mentioned in https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2025/05/23/105428
*2:Mentioned in https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2024/06/07/140850
*3:Mentioned in https://sumita-m.hatenadiary.com/entry/2020/12/23/023357
