「可哀想に，かおが，こすれて壊れるよ」をどう解釈するか : テクスト解釈としての『白鯨』翻訳事始め

The Japanese language has a variety of personal pronouns, such as“ わたし，僕，おれ，わし；あなた，君，おまえ”. Japanese people choose personal pronouns, based on the social relationship with and the psychological distance to the person they are addressing. When you choose“ わたし” as a personal pronoun addressed to a superior or a stranger, you are showing respect or being docile to the person. When you speak to your superior using“ おれ”, you are showing yourself as a defiant person. The availability of a selection of personal pronouns in Japanese allows a speaker to present to others different aspects of self-perception or subjectivity such as displaying an attitude of docility or defiance. In contrast, personal pronouns in English show the same and unchanging self to anyone, whether the person addressed is a king or a family member. Both linguistically and culturally, there are significant differences between Japanese and English in terms of the meaning and variety of personal pronouns available to a speaker.
When a text written in a foreign language is translated into Japanese, the translator’s understanding of the text determines the choice of personal pronoun for the main characters and eventually how characters will behave in the translated text. When Hideyo Sengoku translated Moby-Dick in 2000, he not only represented Ishmael as a slightly cynical and defiant young man, but also provocatively deviated from what was then thought to be a good translation. In 2001, Toshio Watanabe, a professor emeritus at Tokyo University, criticized Sengoku’s translation severely, which in turn generated a serious discussion about the nature of translation itself.
This argument calls to mind a traditional method of translating Chinese classics into Japanese, 漢文訓読. This translation method adds 訓点, guiding marks like レ, 一二三, and ヲ, to a Chinese text and forcefully changes the Chinese syntax into a Japanese one. By doing this, the original text can be read aloud with its word order unchanged. The reason why such a technically transformed, but still difficult-to-understand, Chinese text seems to read like quasi-Japanese is that Japanese Kanji can retain parts of their Chinese meanings intact in the Japanese language. In this translation method, word-forword translation is indispensable for understanding the Chinese classics. If the original Kanji or Chinese character of the Chinese classics is freely translated into a different word or phrase meaning the same idea, the original text cannot be restored and its interpretation is irrevocably altered and diversified. In this idiosyncratic translation tradition, word-for-word translation has been highly valued.
Sengoku’s translation of Moby-Dick violently breaks this long-cherished tradition and provokes an argument about translation. To evaluate his innovative translation, it is necessary to clarify Ishmael’s stance toward the world he narrates. It can be inferred from Ishmael’s sailing year that Moby-Dick is a story told by Ishmael about war, death and the grief of bereaved families. He sets his sailing year between a presidential election and a bloody battle in Afghanistan in 1842. The president who won the election is thought to be James K. Polk, who would later wage a war against Mexico and acquire one-third of what is present-day US land. This territorial expansion was a precursor to heightened tensions over the issue of slavery which resulted in the fugitive slave act of 1850 and culminated in the Civil War. Ishmael consciously relates what he experiences on the Pequod to war and the grief it incurs.
Ishmael, who wonders why people suffer from disastrous results they did not want, criticizes the dominant Christian churches in 19th century America. Ishmael feels that the churches ignore their proper duty of mitigating the unceasing grief of the bereaved families of dead sailors. The “insular and incommunicable” grief of bereaved families is too much for the families to cope with by themselves. Impatient with the uncaring, inconsiderate churches, Ishmael tries to relieve this grief by accumulating knowledge about whales which he thinks symbolize “the ungraspable phantom of life,” in other words, the mystery of death. His sarcastic attitude toward the dominant churches is evident in Chapters 7 to 10. After carefully examining the meaning which Ishmael intends to convey in the phrase “deadly voids and unbidden infidelities” in Chapter 7, it can be said that the translations of the phrase should ideally emphasize the insularity and incommunicability of the unceasing grief of the bereaved families and the blindness and cold-heartedness of the churches toward them.