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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

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夏に読む本

 
今週のニューヨークタイムズの書評はSummer Reading特集でCooking / Gardening / Travelといったものが紹介されている感じです。その中で夏の読書の思い出を作家に語ってもらっているコーナーがありました。ジョブズの伝記を書いたアイザックソンとジュノディアスのものを見てみます。

What I Read That Summer
Published: May 31, 2013

The rites of summer are, by definition, fleeting: the summer romance, the summer job or vacation. Only the books seem to stick. Twelve writers recall their most memorable experiences of summer reading, proving perhaps that if you’re looking for an enduring summer romance, a good book might be your best bet.

Walter Isaacson
When I was growing up in New Orleans, my friend Thomas and I used to go fishing across Lake Pontchartrain. We’d stop for lunch at his uncle’s house on the Bogue Falaya, a lazy river teeming with turtles. I was baffled about what “Uncle Walker” did for a living, since he always seemed to be at home, sipping bourbon. He was a kindly gentleman, whose placid face seemed to know despair but whose eyes nevertheless often smiled. His daughter said he was a writer. One summer I read Walker Percy’s “The Moviegoer,” and it dawned on me that writing was something you could do for a living, just like being a doctor or a fisherman. The novel’s wry philosophical depth opened my eyes to what Percy called “the search,” poking around for clues about why we are here. At the end of that summer, I tried to get him to expound on the religious themes in the book, but he fended me off. “There are two types of people who come out of Louisiana,” he said. “Preachers and storytellers.” It was better to be a storyteller.

Walter Isaacson is the president of the Aspen Institute and the author of biographies of Steve Jobs, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin.

Junot Díaz
Junior year I spent my summer working at a steel mill. All my boys were taking it easy and my girl was down at the shore with her family, writing me sketchy letters about all the guys who were “into her.” She was at the beach, planning to leave me I was sure, and there I was wearing thermal greens and metatarsal boots five days a week. When we went into the melt shop I had to put on thermals under the greens to keep my inner organs from being cooked. What was even worse, though, were some of my co-workers. A couple of them tried to sell me paper targets with drawings of “blacks” on them. Their idea of a joke.
It was seriously a lousy job and an even lousier summer.

Still, you got to fight — so I fought. Every lunch break I sat on the deck overlooking the scrap yard and read me some Toni Morrison. I’d brought all of her novels back from Rutgers, vowing to finish them all by summer’s end, and that’s exactly what I did. I read with a concentration I have never again matched. I’ll sure as hell never forget those lunch hours, turning those pages, the Komatsu loader cranking in the distance. I’ll never forget the books or all those heartbreaking lines. “How loose the silk. How jailed down the juice.” I’ll never forget having to close the books, all the strength that took and getting back to work.

I survived the summer. The girlfriend didn’t leave me. And Toni Morrison’s novels took hold of me the way books are wont to do when you’re a certain age. Took hold and never let go.

Junot Díaz’s novel, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. His most recent book is “This Is How You Lose Her.”


といっても今週で個人的に興味を引かれたのがユダヤ人ジョークの本でしたが。。。

Such Small Portions
‘No Joke,’ by Ruth R. Wisse
By ANTHONY GOTTLIEB
Published: May 31, 2013

フリーペーパーのメトロポリスも少し前に夏休み向けの本を紹介していました。日本向けの本ですが、サムライ、和太鼓とかが選ばれているのを見ると外国の人が選んだんでしょうね(苦笑)。でも、その中から、阿川弘之の『春の城』や東日本大震災後の政治について語った本も選ばれていました。『春の城』はKindleだと500円弱で買えるのでお得です。

books
Literary Landscapes
8 Japan-related English books for your summer reading list
May 10, 2013 | Issue: 998 | No Comments | 1,022 views


Citadel in SpringCitadel in Spring
(2013/02/28)
Hiroyuki Agawa

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CITADEL IN SPRING
A Novel of Youth Spent at War
By Hiroyuki Agawa; translated by Lawrence Rogers
An autobiographical novel published by Hiroyuki Agawa in 1949, this translation gives you access to “a surprising historical document as well as a moving account of the cost of militarism and defeat” (The New Yorker). Writer Agawa tells in this fictionalized memoir of his induction into the Imperial Navy, his work as a code-breaker in China, and the effects of Japan’s final capitulation.


After the Great East Japan Earthquake: Political and Policy Change in Post-Fukushima Japan (Asia Insights)After the Great East Japan Earthquake: Political and Policy Change in Post-Fukushima Japan (Asia Insights)
(2013/02/01)
不明

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AFTER THE GREAT EAST JAPAN EARTHQUAKE
Political and Policy Change in Post-Fukushima Japan
Edited by Dominic Al-Badri and Gijs Berends
The co-editors both worked for the EU Delegation to Japan at the time of the 3/11 disasters, and brought together this collection of essays to explore shifts in Japanese politics and policy making two years on. Published by the Nordic Institute of Asian Studies in Copehagen, the book’s contributors include policy experts and Tokyo diplomats.

500円もかからなかったので、春の城の方を買ってみました。なぜ英訳のタイトルがCastle in Springではなくcitadelが使われているのか。Citadelをcicadaと勘違いして『春の蝉』と思っていた自分としても(汗)気になったのですが、杜甫の『春望』に由来する詩の意味もふまえて考えるとこちらの方がふさわしいことを冒頭で訳者の方が丁寧に説明してくださっていました。

(オックスフォード)
citadel
(in the past) a castle on high ground in or near a city, where people could go when the city was being attacked
(figurative)citadels of private economic power


TOEIC的には最後の最後にある謝辞のバリエーションになれておきたいですね。感謝の表現は実生活でも必要不可欠ですし。

(訳者前書き)
It has been more than half a century since Citadel in Spring was first published in Japanese, so I have taken the liberty in this edition of adding an occasional footnote to clarify what the passage of time may have obscured. I have also corrected typographical errors and made minor revisions in the translation.

A comment on the title: the phrase "citadel in spring" is taken from "Spring Prospect" by the T'ang dynasty poet Tu Fu. The poem laments the occupation of the great city of Ch'angan, capital of T'ang China, by a rebel army. It begins:

The realm is destroyed, yet the mountains and livers abide;
The citadel in spring stands deep in tree and grass.

In ancient China the sinograph translated here as "citadel" meant "city," but later came to mean "castle" in Japan. Although the Japanese title Ham no shiro could be translated literally as "Castle in Spring," I have used the word "citadel" in an attempt to encompass both senses, since the word is employed in the novel specifically for Hiroshima Castle, and, in the title, becomes a metaphor for the city itself. I would like to thank the author for explaining a number of terms, especially those related to the old Imperial Navy. I have also profited from discussions with my former colleagues George Durham and the late Richard Howell concerning, respectively, the music festival at the Itsukushima shrine and crypt analysis. For those readers who wish more information on the latter I recommend David Kahn's pioneering The Codebreakers. I would also like to thank Laura Driussi and Ichiba Shinji, formerly with Kodansha International, and Yoshiko Samuel, Professor Emerita of Wesleyan University, for their comments. I am also grateful to my former colleague, Hiroko Igarashi, for her many useful suggestions, and to Edward Lipsett, publisher of Kurodahan Press. Finally, I want to express my gratitude to my wife, Kazuko Fujihira, for her constant encouragement and support over the years.

Lawrence Rogers
Kurtistown, Hawaii


杜甫の『春望』の冒頭2行は英語だとあのようになるのですね。春の城があの有名な漢詩からきた題名だったとは恥ずかしながら思いもよりませんでした。。。

国破山河在
 (国破れて山河在り)
城春草木深 (城春にして草木深し)

感時花濺涙 (時に感じては花にも涙を濺ぎ)

恨別鳥驚心 (
別れを恨んでは鳥にも心を驚かす)

烽火連三月 (
烽火三月に連なり)

家書抵萬金
 (
家書萬金に抵る
)
白頭掻更短 (白頭掻かけば更に短く)

渾欲不勝簪 (
渾べて簪に勝えざらんと欲す)

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