「レジェンド」の使い方

レジェンド葛西さんの活躍は勇気づけられましたが、英語表現的にどうなのでしょうか。来週がオスカーの発表になるからか、NPRラジオのFreshAirで映画『風立ちぬ』のレビューがありました。

'Wind Rises' Is Exquisite, And Likely To Be Hayao Miyazaki's Last
by DAVID EDELSTEIN
February 21, 2014 1:14 PM

このラジオではacclaimedという形容詞で宮崎監督の偉大さを表現していましたが、ネット検索してみると以下のような表現のバリエーションがありました。

anime legend Hayao Miyazaki
Legendary Director Hayao Miyazaki
Japanese animation great Hayao Miyazaki

the famous anime director Hayao Miyazaki
famed Hayao Miyazaki
Anime's most beloved director, Hayao Miyazaki
acclaimed director Hayao Miyazaki
venerated animated film director Hayao Miyazaki
revered anime director Hayao Miyazaki

Oscar-winning director Hayao Miyazaki
Spirited Away Director Hayao Miyazaki

タイトルに絡めればanime legendとかlegendary directorとかあるので、英語でもレジェンドのまま使えそうですね。

先ほどのFresh Airのレビューですが大変好意的に受け止めてくれています。アメリカ人はIt's the Buddhist carpe diem — go with the flowと日本映画に東洋的なモノを見出そうとしてしまうのでしょうか。carpe diemはラテン語でSeize the day（その日を摘め）です。

The machine spoken of by Jiro and his Obi-Wan Caproni looks like a mechanically enhanced bird — there's barely any border between objects that are natural and engineered. Jiro's chief design is inspired by the curve of a mackerel bone; he takes his cues from living creatures. Miyazaki has given us living machines before, among them the mythical bus in My Neighbor Totoro, but here they're a mix of inorganic and organic. Everything has a spirit: levers, flaps and, of course, the wind.

The title comes from a line by poet Paul Valéry: "The wind is rising, we must try to live." It's the Buddhist carpe diem — go with the flow. The wind carries off the parasol of a fragile girl, Nahoko, voiced by Emily Blunt, into the hands of Jiro — who'll fall in love with her. Their love is idealized, but what an ideal. Though she's obviously dying of TB, she's plucky. She faces into the wind.

日本でも話題になりましたが、軍事兵器の設計者が主人公であることに触れざるを得ないようです。このトピックでも好意的に捉えてくれています。

The movie's central contradiction is between the purity of Jiro's dreams and the deadly uses to which his plane — the legendary Zero fighter — is put. Does Miyazaki downplay the evil? Some critics say yes. One even stopped an awards meeting of a Boston critics society to say that anyone who voted for the movie was accepting the whitewash of atrocities. I don't see it that way. Miyazaki's irony isn't as broad as, say, Bertolt Brecht's in Galileo, the tragedy of a man whose appetite for science and lack of regard for its consequences lead inevitably — in Brecht's formulation — to weapons of mass destruction. But it's hard to imagine Miyazaki being that on-the-nose. The terrible implications are there, but underplayed.


Vanity Fairの最新号は恒例のHollywood特集なのですが、そこでも宮崎監督の作品が取り上げられていました。こちらは、真珠湾攻撃で使われた戦闘機の設計者という紹介の仕方をしています。米国人で複雑な気持ちを抱いてしまう人も多くいそうです。原爆設計者の恋物語を日本人は素直に見れるかと言われればやはり複雑ですから。。。

The Wind Rises, director Hayao Miyazaki's latest - and, he says, last - animated feature, has sparked controversy on many fronts. The film is the fictionalized story of airplane engineer Jiro Horikoshi, who designed the Mitsubishi Zero fighter, used in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Miyazaki, widely considered the greatest of animators - Spirited Away won an Oscar in 2003 - is a pacifist, and his rich, sensitive epic film has raised the hackles of political conservatives in Japan, who want a return to militarization, as well as in the U.S., where any celebration of the design process of one of the most efficient killing machines of World War II has been questioned.



でも、上記のレビューのように作品そのものを鑑賞して素晴らしいと讃えてくれている人もいるので少し安心しました。