フェノロサの能英訳 : 「砧」
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概要
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Ernest Francisco Fenollosa (1853-1908) is one of the most eminent foreign scholars in Meiji Japan (1868-1912). He came to the University of Tokyo in 1878 and taught at the Department of Literature. Very soon he became deeply attracted by Noh. Through lectures and translations he introduced Noh to the West. He persuaded Japanese intellectuals, who at his time were mainly interested in Western civilization, to esteem and preserve their own cultural heritage. Fenollosa was engaged in the translation of a great number of Noh plays, but did not complete a single one. He died of a heart attack during a stay in London. Five years after his death, Fenollosa's wife handed over his notes to the poet Ezra Pound (1885-1972). Pound became enthusiastic about Noh, although he had no special knowledge of Japanese and Japan's traditional arts. Within three years (1916) Pound finished a number of translations and edited them as `Noh' or Accomplishment : A Study of the Classical Stage of Japan by Ernest Fenollosa and Ezra Pound. In the West this book became the most widely read book on Noh. In the preface Pound points out that he considered it as his task to "arrange beauty into the words", and whenever Fenollosa's notes were not clear, he arranged them according to his own poetic imagination. The work is a masterpiece, but cannot be called a translation of the Japanese original. The purpose of this study is to elucidate Fenollosa's own view and understanding of Noh. As example we chose his detailed notes on Kinuta. Fenollosa saw this play in 1898 and worked on its translation for three weeks. At a convention of the American Oriental Society (1900) he presented Kinuta as Noh par excellence. As Fenollosa used to stress in his lectures, the beauty of Noh consists in the highly condensed poetic dramatization of human emotions. The roles are derived from Japanese history, but they express universal types of human character. In Kinuta it is the sorrow of unrequited love in the relation between husband and wife. For the sake of convenient comparison and reference we divided Fenollosa's notes into 29 paragraphs and subdivided each paragraph into four sections : 1. Restoring the Japanese text of Fenollosa's romanization. 2. Literal translation into English of this text. 3. Fenollosa's romanization. 4. Fenollosa's draft of an English translation. The analysis of the draft in section 4 shows how seriously Fenollosa strived for a proper translation of the original, and how deep his insight was into the soul of this Noh play.