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自分が読んで興味深く感じた英文記事を中心に取り上げる予定です
Posted at 2014.07.26 Category : PBS Newshour
大使という立場もあり、インタビュー自体はおとなしいものでした。問題点などを挙げる前にしっかりと、日本の同盟国としての役割に感謝しています。こういう気配りを英語学習としても学んでいきたいです。 GWEN IFILL: You said at the time that when you — you were arriving in Japan at a critical time in history for both countries. What are the critical issues that face you right now?
CAROLINE KENNEDY: Well, I think it’s hard to really appreciate fully here at home, when there’s so much going on in the rest of the world as well, how important Japan is as an ally of the United States.
And pretty much everything we do around the world, Japan is really one of our closest, if not our closest, partner. And that includes our economic relationship, our political and security relationship. Asia represents 40 percent of the world’s GDP, so this is a region that is critical to America’s future.
And we need allies and partners, and Japan is really our number one. They’re a democracy. They’re the world’s number three economy. They are absolutely committed to the U.S./Japan alliance. And we do all kinds of other things, like monitor climate change and greenhouse gases with them, scientific exploration, and student exchange.
So it’s really across the board. So there are complicated issues right now, but there are also these longstanding kind of relationships that I think are so important for the United States to build on.
インタビューをした Gwen Ifillさんの取材後記がサイトにありました。米国内では近年いろいろありましたから、ケネディさんにとっても日本で大使を務めることは落ち着きを取り戻すのにいい機会になっているようですね。 The last time I’d seen Caroline Kennedy, she was up to her ears in domestic politics – campaigning for Barack Obama and still recovering from her own abortive effort to run for office. She was tense.
She has now become the very model of a careful, well-spoken diplomat. Life’s not so bad on the back burner.
英語学習的に気になるのは、ケネディさんが名詩のアンソロジーを出した事です。タイトルはずばりPoems to Learn by Heart（暗唱したい詩）。柳瀬尚紀さんが訳されているそうなので、日本語版も欲しいのですが値段が。。。（涙）英語版でも音源がないのは残念ですが、言葉を学ぶものとして有名な詩に慣れ親しむことは大事にしたいです。英語資格をグルグルまわっているような人ばかりじゃ味気ないですからねえ。 （アマゾンの紹介文）
家族や友だちのすばらしさ、負けない心、好奇心の尊さ、ユーモアの力。ぜんぶ詩が教えてくれる。
母ジャクリーンの教えにより、幼い頃から詩に親しんできたキャロライン・ケネディ。シェイクスピアやチョーサーの古典から、ラングストン・ヒューズやジョン・アップダイクの現代詩まで、珠玉の名作を選び、子供から大人まで楽しめる一冊にまとめた。音とリズムにこだわった柳瀬尚紀の名訳で味わう、ずっとそばに置いておきたい詩集。
古典の巨匠から現代詩人まで勢ぞろい!
ジェフリー・チョーサー
ウィリアム・シェイクスピア
ウィリアム・ブレイク
サー・ウォルター・スコット
ジョージ・ゴードン・バイロン卿
アルフレッド・テニスン卿
エドワード・リア
エミリ・ディキンソン
ルイス・キャロル
ロバート・ルイス・スティーヴンソン
ウィリアム・バトラー・イェーツ
ラドヤード・キプリング
ロバート・フロスト
A・A・ミルン
E・E・カミングズ
ロバート・グレイヴズ
ウラジーミル・ナボコフ
ラングストン・ヒューズ
オグデン・ナッシュ
サミュエル・ベケット
W・H・オーデン
ジョン・アップダイク
シェル・シルヴァスタイン
ビリー・コリンズ
Posted at 2014.06.26 Category : PBS Newshour
ニューズアワーで子供に読み聞かせることの大切さを取り上げていました。 I is for infant: Reading aloud to young children benefits brain development読み聞かせることで、子供の言語能力を高めるだけでなく、親子の関係性を強化できるというのが肝になるでしょうか。 DR. PAMELA HIGH: You know, what reading does for very young children is, it gives them a time when they pretty much have the undivided attention of their parents or their caregivers.
It’s a real one-on-one opportunity for children to communicate with their parents and parents to communicate with their children. You know, we know that the more words that are in a child’s language world, the more words they will learn, and the stronger their language skills are when they reach kindergarten, the more prepared they are to be able to read, and the better they read, the more likely they will graduate from high school.
So, children with very poor reading proficiency by the time they enter the fourth grade are the ones at greatest risk to not graduate from high school and then not be able to be successful — successful in their own life course, economically, for example.
３つのRとともに5つのRも大事だと伝えている追加インタビューです。5つのRを伝えているときに４つ目でど忘れしてしまっています。。。 でも特に目新しい研究成果という訳ではなさそうなのにニュースになっているのは、どうやら彼女の所属する団体American Academy of Pediatricsが新たな取り組みを発表したからのようです。 Pediatrics Group to Recommend Reading Aloud to Children From BirthBy MOTOKO RICHJUNE 24, 2014 In between dispensing advice on breast-feeding and immunizations, doctors will tell parents to read aloud to their infants from birth, under a new policy that the American Academy of Pediatrics will announce on Tuesday.
With the increased recognition that an important part of brain development occurs within the first three years of a child’s life, and that reading to children enhances vocabulary and other important communication skills, the group, which represents 62,000 pediatricians across the country, is asking its members to become powerful advocates for reading aloud, every time a baby visits the doctor.
ここでクリントンが絡んできます。クリントン財団も絡んだToo Small to Failという取り組みがあるようで、ちょうど今週の火曜日に新たな取り組みをヒラリーさん自ら発表したようなのです。 Dr. Navsaria is the medical director of the Wisconsin chapter of Reach Out and Read, a nonprofit literacy group that enlists about 20,000 pediatricians nationwide to give out books to low-income families. The group is working with Too Small to Fail, a joint effort between the nonprofit Next Generation and the Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton Foundation that is aimed at closing the word gap.
At the annual Clinton Global Initiative America meeting in Denver on Tuesday, Hillary Rodham Clinton will announce that Scholastic, the children’s book publisher, will donate 500,000 books to Reach Out and Read. Too Small to Fail is also developing materials to distribute to members of the American Academy of Pediatrics to help them emphasize the read-aloud message to parents.
American Academy of Pediatricsのウエブサイトでこの取り組みについてプレスリリースを出していました。 Business, Medical, and Non-Profit Partners Launch New National Effort at CGI America to Help Close the Word Gap6/24/2014 American Academy of Pediatrics, Reach Out and Read, and Scholastic Inc. working with Too Small to Fail to equip parents with tools to promote early literacy and vocabulary development
Denver— At the fourth annual Clinton Global Initiative (CGI) America meeting in Denver, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a new collaborative effort of Too Small to Fail, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), Scholastic Inc. and Reach Out and Read to raise awareness among parents about early language development. For the first time the AAP will promote early literacy—beginning from an infant's very first days—as an "essential" component of primary care visits. Through this commitment, the partners will ensure that doctors, parents and caregivers have the information, tools and books they need to promote reading out loud to children every day starting in infancy.
The effort takes a multi-pronged approach toward equipping parents with the best tools to ensure that their children are prepared to learn as they enter school:
Too Small to Fail and the AAP—an organization representing 62,000 pediatricians—will share messages across their networks and media platforms about the importance of talking, reading out loud and singing to children from birth in order to build vocabulary and promote healthy brain development.
To jump start the partnership, Scholastic has donated 500,000 new, age-appropriate children's books for distribution through Reach Out and Read, the non-profit organization that works with 20,000 medical providers nationwide to promote early reading and give books to families at pediatric visits.
Reach Out and Read will also distribute a toolkit to be developed by the AAP, with support from Too Small to Fail, which will equip pediatricians with resources to educate parents on how to use everyday activities to improve communication with their infants and toddlers.
残念ながら日本の現状は「ヤジ批判」をすれば何かやった気になっているようですが、具体的な取り組みへの関心を持っていきたいですね。
Posted at 2014.03.29 Category : PBS Newshour
「建築界のノーベル賞」ともいわれる米プリツカー賞の今年の受賞者は坂茂さんだそうで。 昨年の伊東豊雄さんと連続して日本人が受賞した事ことになります。PBSのニューズアワーも取り上げていました。 Architect with humanitarian focus wins top architecture prize
March 27, 2014 at 6:48 PM EDT This year’s recipient of architecture’s top award — the Pritzker Prize — has designed innovative structures for people suffering from hardship and disaster for more than 20 years. Japanese architect Shigeru Ban helps his profession focus more on serving those in need. Jeffrey Brown offers a closer look at Ban’s work.
坂さんが常々語っていることをニューズアワーでも伝えていました。 SHIGERU BAN, Architect, Pritzker Prize Winner: After I became an architect, I was very disappointed about my profession as architect, because we are mostly working for privileged people.
But I can use my experience and knowledge more for general public or even for somebody who lost their houses by natural disasters.
ニューヨークタイムズでの説明も同じような調子で紹介しています。 Pritzker Architecture Prize Goes to Shigeru Ban
By ROBIN POGREBIN MARCH 24, 2014
Architecture generally involves creating monuments to permanence from substantial materials like steel and concrete. Yet this year, the discipline’s top award is going to a man who is best known for making temporary housing out of transient materials like paper tubes and plastic beer crates.
On Monday, the Japanese architect Shigeru Ban was named the winner of this year’s Pritzker Architecture Prize, largely because of his work designing shelters after natural disasters in places like Rwanda, Turkey, India, China, Haiti and Japan.
“His buildings provide shelter, community centers and spiritual places for those who have suffered tremendous loss and destruction,” the jury said in its citation. “When tragedy strikes, he is often there from the beginning.”
In a telephone interview from Paris, Mr. Ban, 56, said he was honored to have won, not because the Pritzker would raise his profile but because it affirms the humanitarian emphasis of his work. “I’m trying to understand the meaning of this encouragement,” he said of the prize. “It’s not the award for achievement. I have not made a great achievement.”プリツカー賞のサイトの発表です。Announcementにしては珍しく「〜賞は〜さんに授与されます」といった表現が最初の部分にないですね。昨年はToyo Ito, a 71 year old architect whose architectural practice is based in Tokyo, Japan, will be the recipient of the 2013 Pritzker Architecture Prize.のような書き出しでした。 AnnouncementShigeru Ban, a Tokyo-born, 56-year-old architect with offices in Tokyo, Paris and New York, is rare in the field of architecture. He designs elegant, innovative work for private clients, and uses the same inventive and resourceful design approach for his extensive humanitarian efforts. For twenty years Ban has traveled to sites of natural and man-made disasters around the world, to work with local citizens, volunteers and students, to design and construct simple, dignified, low-cost, recyclable shelters and community buildings for the disaster victims.
Reached at his Paris office, Shigeru Ban said, “Receiving this prize is a great honor, and with it, I must be careful. I must continue to listen to the people I work for, in my private residential commissions and in my disaster relief work. I see this prize as encouragement for me to keep doing what I am doing — not to change what I am doing, but to grow.“
In all parts of his practice, Ban finds a wide variety of design solutions, often based around structure, materials, view, natural ventilation and light, and a drive to make comfortable places for the people who use them. From private residences and corporate headquarters, to museums, concert halls and other civic buildings, Ban is known for the originality, economy, and ingeniousness of his works, which do not rely on today’s common high-tech solutions.
The Swiss media company Tamedia asked Ban to create pleasant spaces for their employees.
He responded by designing a seven-story headquarters with the main structural system entirely
in timber. The wooden beams interlock, requiring no metal joints.
伊東豊雄さんや坂茂さんなど受賞者が日本人というだけで何か誇らしく感じてしまいますが、社会への貢献的なことが受賞のポイントとなっているのかもしれませんので、そちらの方が重要なことでしょう。In a telephone interview from Paris, Mr. Ban, 56, said he was honored to have won, not because the Pritzker would raise his profile but because it affirms the humanitarian emphasis of his work.と坂茂さんも語っていますね。
Posted at 2013.12.01 Category : PBS Newshour
ノーマンロックウェルの伝記が11月初旬に発売されたようですが、NewshourはThanksgivingに週まで紹介はとっておいたのでしょうか。あの絵が"Freedom from Want"っていうタイトルなんですね。And I think that he kind of captures both an American tradition and the fact that Americans can laugh at their own traditions.とこの絵を説明されていますが、パロディ的な要素があるとは思いませんでした。 JEFFREY BROWN: Let me ask you about one specific work of art, one of the most famous, right, "Freedom from Want," a famous Thanksgiving painting. DEBORAH SOLOMON: Right. That is absolutely my favorite Rockwell. JEFFREY BROWN: Your favorite? Why? Why? DEBORAH SOLOMON: Well, absolutely. Absolutely, it's my favorite -- well, for many reasons. One is that traditional portrayals of Thanksgiving tend to have people giving thanks at a table. And at Rockwell's table, no one is giving thanks. Everybody is kind of talking and animated and not looking at the old couple who are valiantly carrying in this humongous turkey to the table. And I think that he kind of captures both an American tradition and the fact that Americans can laugh at their own traditions. JEFFREY BROWN: Really? DEBORAH SOLOMON: Yes. JEFFREY BROWN: So there's more to it than just saying, here's the American table? DEBORAH SOLOMON: Exactly. It's not a pious image. It captures some of the laughter that does take place in the midst of our most sacred rituals. この話の後でAmerican Mirrorというのがロックウェルがアメリカの日常を反映したのではなく、理想のアメリカを描いたものだという意味で少し括弧付きの使い方を込めているようです。オックスフォードはI paint life as I would like it to be.というロックウェルの言葉を紹介しています。本人もその点を自覚していたのではないでしょうか。 （ロングマン） Rockwell, Norman
(1894-1978) a US artist famous for his pictures which appeared on the cover of 'The Saturday Evening Post.' His pictures often show children and families in ordinary places such as at home, in the countryside, or in small shops.
（オックスフォード） Norman Rockwell
(1894–1978)
a US magazine artist who drew over 300 covers for the Saturday Evening Post between 1916 and 1963. His pictures, done in a realistic style, were full of warmth and humour and very popular with most Americans. They showed people in small towns and in the country engaged in ordinary activities at home and at work.
I paint life as I would like it to be.
Norman Rockwell
（ウィキペディア） Freedom from Want or The Thanksgiving Picture is one of Four Freedoms paintings by Norman Rockwell that were inspired by United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the State of the Union Address, known as Four Freedoms, he delivered to the 77th United States Congress on January 6, 1941.[1] The other paintings in this series were Freedom of Speech, Freedom from Fear, and Freedom of Worship. Unlike the other freedoms, Freedom from Want was not a commonly understood and accepted universal freedom before its presentation.
Freedom from Want was published in the March 6, 1943, issue of The Saturday Evening Post with a corresponding essay by Carlos Bulosan as part of the Four Freedoms series.[2] The painting was included as the cover image of the 1946 book Norman Rockwell, Illustrator, written when Rockwell was "at the height of his fame as America's most popular illustrator."[3] Although the image was popular in the United States it caused resentment in Europe where the masses were enduring hardship at the time. Drawing comparisons to John Steinbeck, Bulosan's essay spoke on behalf of those enduring the socioeconomic hardships domestically rather than those enduring sociopolitical hardships abroad, and it thrust him into prominence.
この伝記は、ロックウェルのDarker Sideを描いているようです。ニューズアワーでも触れていましたが、homosexualの傾向については取り上げていませんでしたね。 BOOKS OF THE TIMES One Complicated Life, Illustrated
‘American Mirror,’ About Norman Rockwell, by Deborah Solomon
By JOHN WILMERDING Published: October 31, 2013
Most important, we learn of Rockwell’s darker side. The life revealed here is one of anxiety, depression and loneliness, with feelings of failure, neglect and inadequacy. Other adjectives describe Rockwell as unanchored, repressed and loveless. He was a person of “complicated proclivities” and “extreme dependencies,” Ms. Solomon writes. One of them was a lifelong reliance on doctors (a frequent image in his art) because of hypochondria, and later regular visits to psychiatrists, most notably the Freud follower Erik Erikson, who became both counselor and friend.
Rockwell married three times, fathering three sons, but the marriages are characterized as alternatively unhappy, dysfunctional or not sexual. He favored the company of schoolboys as models and younger male artists as friends. One later exception was a friendship with the folk painter Grandma Moses, sufficiently older not to be a threatening female presence. Few girls posed for or appeared as convincingly in his compositions.
Was he a repressed homosexual? We don’t really know. Ms. Solomon points to the homoerotic undertones in early paintings like “Sailor Dreaming of a Girlfriend” (1919), as well as two from 1958, “Before the Shot,” with its bare behind of an innocent young boy at the doctor’s office, and “The Runaway,” showing a beefy policeman seated next to a boy at a cafeteria counter. She uses the phrase “romantic crush” to describe Rockwell’s admiration for his fellow illustrator, J. C. Leyendecker, creator of the Arrow Collar Man. Rockwell once admitted, “Sex appeal seems to be something I just can’t catch on a piece of canvas.”
ニューヨークタイムズの書評は芸術的な再評価とゲイの疑惑にトピックが絞られていたので、普通の英語学習者にはロックウェルの概要を紹介しているWSJの書評の方が参考になります。 Book Review: 'American Mirror' by Deborah Solomon
Norman Rockwell painted our beautiful, bountiful, self-perfecting nation as he knew it could be.
By JONATHAN LOPEZ Updated Nov. 8, 2013 5:23 p.m. ET いやいやNewsHourやNYTのトピックをもっと詳しく知りたいという方はSlateの書評がオススメできます。I paint life as I would like it to be.って表現を悪意を込めて表すとthe sugar coating that sweetened the bitter pillとなっちゃうんですね（苦笑） Mi Gosh and By-heck
Deborah Solomon’s life of Norman Rockwell, whose art looked back to an America that never was.
By Ben Davis In 1972, Ramparts, the San Francisco journal that had been one of the key outlets for the 1960s New Left, published a barbed little takedown of Norman Rockwell. Titled “Capitalist Realism,” the item was occasioned by a touring career retrospective of Rockwell’s work:
His later work contains attempts at a greater “relevance”: but his is one world where nothing has really changed. Rockwell is Rockwell, possibly the only one who sincerely believes in his vision of things. This retrospective is vintage nostalgia. It holds up a mirror to America: not the America that was, or the America that should have been, but the sugar coating that sweetened the bitter pill.
Ramparts’ venomous assessment is well-turned but unremarkable—Norman Rockwell was, after all, a representative of the “culture” against which the “counterculture” pitted itself. The funny thing is that five years earlier, the venerated American illustrator had assented to do a cover for the outspokenly lefty magazine, offering a double portrait of the British philosopher Bertrand Russell for the May 1967 issue (which also contained Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam.”) Evidently, by this time, the Rockwell legend was so overpowering that it was impossible to see through, even by those who might have had a reason to.
The Ramparts review uses the metaphor of the mirror, and American Mirror: The Life and Art of Norman Rockwell happens to be the title of Deborah Solomon’s robust new biography. Like the author of “Capitalist Realism,” Solomon is aware that Rockwell didn’t “mirror” American life in any true way; his work was, if anything, a kind of funhouse mirror in reverse, turning a world that was really full of strange bumps and twists into something eerily becalmed and normal-looking. “Rockwell Land is its own universe, freestanding and totally distinct,” Solomon admits at the outset. We think of his work as of the past now, but even in its own time it was out-of-time: Already in 1936, his editor at the Republican, anti-New Deal Saturday Evening Post was fuming to Rockwell that the subject of his illustration The Ticket Agent, a glum, bony man trapped behind the cage of a window at a small-town train station, came off as too provincial: “We feel it would be more typical of millions of our citizens if he worked in a town of between ten and fifty thousand inhabitants and not such ‘Mi gosh’ and ‘by-heck’ surroundings.”
ロックウェルの絵は好きなので、この伝記は年末の読書リストに入れたいと思います。
Posted at 2013.11.23 Category : PBS Newshour
今週はケネディ大統領暗殺から50年ということに話題が集中しています。TIMEのiPad版には暗殺直後に出た号をすべて読むことができます。デジタル版ならではの新たな楽しみですね。 同じ週のためか日本ではあまり話題になっていませんが、リンカーンのゲッティスバーグ演説も150周年なんですね。 各自が演説を読み上げるという試みがなされているのをニューズアワーで知りました。 有名な書き出しは、聖書の詩編を連想させる表現で始まっていて、キング牧師のI have a dreamの演説もこれに則っているのですね。 （ロングマン） score
plural score a group of 20, or about 20, people or things
a score of something
Our coach was escorted by a score of policemen.
three score years and ten old use (=70 years, a person's expected length of life)
まあ、Four score and seven years agoを日本語に訳す場合は87年前となってしまうのですが、以下の プロジェクト杉田玄白の翻訳では工夫されていました。ちなみにリンカーンが指しているのはアメリカの独立宣言のことです。 Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.
４世代(*1)と７年前に私たちの祖先たちはこの大陸に、自由の理念から生まれ、全ての 人が平等に創られているという命題に捧げられた一つの新しい国を生み出しました。下記がキング牧師の演説のはじめです。 Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation.
今から100年前に、我々が今日その像の下に立っている偉大なるアメリカ人(＝リンカンー大統領)が、奴隷解放宣言に署名しました。
This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice.
この重要な宣言は、それまで燃えさかる不正義の炎に焼き焦がされてきた何百万もの黒人奴隷たちにとって、希望を示す素晴らしい灯りでした。
It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.
それは奴隷制度のもとでの長い夜の終わりを告げる喜びの夜明けでした。
ロングマンでthree score years and ten old use (=70 years, a person's expected length of life)とあるように人の一生を指す表現のようで、聖書の詩編は以下のようにありました。 新共同訳 詩編 090編 010節
人生の年月は七十年程のものです。健やかな人が八十年を数えても／得るところは労苦と災いにすぎません。瞬く間に時は過ぎ、わたしたちは飛び去ります。
御怒りの力を誰が知りえましょうか。あなたを畏れ敬うにつれて／あなたの憤りをも知ることでしょう。
生涯の日を正しく数えるように教えてください。知恵ある心を得ることができますように。
(King James Version)
10 The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labour and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away.
11 Who knoweth the power of thine anger? even according to thy fear, so is thy wrath.
12 So teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.さまざまな方の演説をご覧になるには こちらのサイトを訪問ください。残念ながらテイラースイフトのフルバージョンの演説はありませんが。。。
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