>>60 【【中国】村上春樹 代表作の「ノルウェイの森」はこれまでに１００万部以上が売れた。】
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BOOK REVIEW DESK Rubber Souls By JANICE P. NIMURA Published: September 24, 2000, Sunday
NORWEGIAN WOOD By Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin. 296 pp. New York: Vintage International. Paper, $13.
''I once had a girl / Or should I say, she once had me,'' go the opening lines of ''Norwegian Wood,'' the Beatles song whose title Haruki Murakami borrowed for his 1987 novel. It happens to be a neat summary of Murakami's basic plot: boy falls for complicated girl and is changed forever. But the song, like the book, is not so easily described. An apparently simple lyric shifts upon closer reading; an oddly haunting snatch of melody repeats in the mind. ''Norwegian Wood'' is no idle choice for a title: it creates a subliminal background, both aural and symbolic, for a masterly novel of late-60's love.
Murakami has become popular in the West for a very different kind of fiction: novels like ''A Wild Sheep Chase'' and ''The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle'' feature matter-of-fact narrators enmeshed in bizarre postmodern fantasias. In his native country, however, ''Norwegian Wood'' is the novel that made Murakami famous. Jay Rubin's superb translation is the first English edition authorized for publication outside Japan. (True fans may have tracked down Alfred Birnbaum's earlier translation, published for Japanese students of English.)
Norwegian Wood By Haruki Murakami Vintage, 296 pages
Haruki Murakami is best known in this country for his distinctive and surreal novels like "The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle" and "A Wild Sheep Chase." So it comes as no small surprise that the book that first earned him fame in his native Japan turns out to be a tender, straightforward coming of age story.
Published abroad in 1987 but only now translated and published here, "Norwegian Wood" introduces us to Toru Watanabe, a successful businessman who finds himself overwhelmed with emotion when he hears a muzak version of the Beatles classic on an airplane. As he swoons over the musical madeleine, he's transported back to his days as a university student in Tokyo in the late '60s and his anguished love for two women -- fragile, enigmatic Naoko and wealthy, elusive Midori.
Watanabe vividly recounts his conflicts and complications, including the pain of watching Naoko slip out of his grasp and into madness. Along the way, he only occasionally veers into the maudlin, preferring instead to pepper his recollections with unexpected, welcome flashes of humor. While skillfully chronicling his helpless regard for the women who change his life, he broadens the picture. Here are dead-on observations of the frivolities of youth -- the erotic escapades, the eccentric roommates, the pretentious multiple readings of "The Great Gatsby," the endless nights of drinking and flirting and playing guitar.
Watanabe's wry digressions only serve to make the impending disasters more believable -- when, until we are very old, are we more susceptible to suffering than when we are very young and very sure of ourselves? Watanabe is hip deep in tragedies -- his best friend commits suicide, Midori's father wastes away and dies -- but he boldly declares, "I've chosen to live." Like all true survivors, though, he carries his past like a scar -- it marks him, it's part of him, but it only hurts when he reopens the wound.
The awkward fumblings and lonely regrets of a romantic college student may not be unique, but Murakami has such a warm, unaffected style it's impossible not to be drawn in, and the setting -- the Far East during the Free Love era -- gives the novel an exotic shimmer. Like the song that haunts its hero, Murakami's tale is a melancholy memory of what was and what could have been, a deft combination of adult wisdom and youthful heart.
Über den Staffellauf, der Leben heißt
Haruki Murakamis Liebesroman Naokos Lächeln ist ein schöner Kinoabend.
In den Büchern von Haruki Murakami geht es zu wie in den Filmen von Eric Rohmer. Schöne Menschen plaudern in angenehmer Umgebung ununterbrochen über Leben, Sex, Liebe und Tod und haben dabei keine Mühe, die richtigen Worte zu finden. Dabei halten sie sich alle für etwas ganz Besonderes.
Nur der Protagonist Watanabe glaubt, er sei ein Durchschnittsmensch mit Durchschnittsintellekt und Durchschnittskörper und merkt gar nicht, welche abstrusen Charaktere er um sich versammelt. Zum Beispiel Nagasawa, eine Art japanischer Casanova, der Nacht für Nacht losziehen muss, um Mädchen aufzureißen, während die schönste Frau zu Hause auf ihn wartet. Oder seine Kommilitonin Midori, die beide Eltern bis zum Krebstod pflegte und die sich nun nackt vor das Foto ihres Vaters setzt, um ihm zu zeigen, dass sie inzwischen eine Frau geworden ist. Midori würde sich nichts lieber wünschen, als dass Watanabe beim Onanieren an sie denke.
Cet ample roman d'apprentissage, placé sous le parrainage de Salinger et Fitzgerald, a des résonances autobiographiques. Le tempo du récit est envoûtant : le héros devra rencontrer la souffrance, la folie et la mort pour accéder à une liberté lucide, sans avoir abdiqué sa quête du pur amour. Une immense tendresse, un charme poétique et une intensité érotique saisissants se dégagent de ce roman-manifeste des années 1969-1970.
SDM
Tendresse, charme poétique, tension dramatique et intensité érotique. Magnifique roman d'apprentissage à résonances autobiographiques. Le héros tombe amoureux de l'amie d'enfance de son meilleur ami qui s'est suicidé. Mais, quelque temps plus tard, il s'éprend également d'une étudiante de sa faculté. Recommandé. -- Services Documentaires Multimédia
The only major point I can mention is that if you liked the characters in Wind-Up Bird, you'll like them again here. Not that either is a sequel to the other. It's simply that they are so similar, enough so that it's worth mentioning. The narrator, Toru, has the same first name in both books, and is virtually the same character, aged ten years further in one than in the other. May Kasahara in Wind-Up Bird is Midori in Norwegian Wood. Kumiko in Wind-Up Bird is to some extent Naoko in Norwegian Wood. One can consider this a flaw or not, but based on the copyright, if this is a flaw, it's in Wind-Up Bird. I simply read them out of order.
Having said now what I kept thinking throughout the reading, I've concluded that this is still a great book, and well worth the time to read it through.
GET THE ALFRED BIRNBAUM TRANSLATION, August 17, 2002
Reviewer: A customer from The Dolphin Hotel
It's not "Norwegian Wood" the story itself that I give 1 star to- it's the Jay Rubin translation. Over a decade ago I bought the Alfred Birnbaum translation, and I find Birnbaum to be a far superior translator to Rubin. Rubin's translation of certain sensual phrases from the Japanese turn into stale duds of sentences compared to Birnbaum's more heartfelt ones. Moreover, Rubin deletes words, sentences and paragraphs as he feels fit- Birnbaum does not make as vast edits as Rubin does. In this version of NW, Rubin writes that Murakami has approved this as the official translation. I'm sorry to say that although Murakami is my favorite author in the whole world, I have heard him lecture and his spoken English is remarkably terrible- he may know how to translate written English to Japanese really well, but he could use to learn about translating from his native language to English. I've rattled on long enough- but let it be said, Birnbaum's translation is far superior- and if you do not live in Japan, then go to your local Japanese bookstore in America like Kinokuniya or Asahiya and get it- leave this disgrace of a translation on the shelf.
以前の翻訳（Kodansha Internaional ？）の方が良いと言ってる
Rubin deletes words, sentences and paragraphs as he feels fit
I'm sorry to say that although Murakami is my favorite author in the whole world, I have heard him lecture and his spoken English is remarkably terrible-
So you can imagine how the flame leapt up when I finished the Rubin translation of Norwegian Wood (Murakami's first huge best seller in Japan, published there in 1987 but not brought out in America until 2000) and read a reference in the Translator's Note to "Alfred Birnbaum's earlier translation of Norwegian Wood, which was produced for distribution in Japan ... to enable students to enjoy their favorite author as they struggled with the mysteries of English." We should not, the note enjoined us, try to obtain this bootleg version, for "the present edition is the first English translation that Murakami has authorized for publication outside Japan." Aha!, I thought. So Murakami (or Murakami-plus-Rubin) is indeed running away from Birnbaum, consciously suppressing him, attempting to do away with this shadow self.
Naturally I sought out the bootleg version immediately. Thanks to the Internet, such things are now readily available, if at a shocking price: The two little paperbacks of the Kodansha English Library edition cost me over $100. Not surprisingly, I found that the Birnbaum version was better, in exactly the way his opening sentences of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle were better.
The first three novels I read by Murakami -- A Wild Sheep Chase, Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World, and Dance, Dance, Dance -- were all translated by Alfred Birnbaum. When I finished the books, I was mildly curious to know more about Murakami; I was desperate to know more about Birnbaum. Who was this guy who could come up with two completely different kinds of English, an old-fashioned fairy-tale diction and a sharp-edged modern idiom, to render the two intertwined plot strands of Hard-Boiled Wonderland? How did he manage to do that weird, youthful, but never annoyingly with-it voice in which Murakami's narrator-protagonists spoke to themselves? How, in short, could he make a Japanese writer sound so remarkably American without losing any of his alien allure? All I could find out, from the jacket notes, was that Birnbaum was born in Washington, D.C., in 1957, grew up in Japan, and lived at various times in Los Angeles, Tokyo, London, and Barcelona.
Then The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle came out. This may still be Murakami's best-known novel in America; it was his first crossover book, the one that signaled his emergence from the ghetto of Kodansha to the classy precincts of Knopf. I started the first chapter as soon as the book was available, but right away I sensed that something was wrong. Turning to the front of the book, I noticed the name of a new translator: Jay Rubin. What had happened to my beloved Birnbaum? I called Kodansha, Knopf, the Society of Translators -- no answer. Nobody knew anything about the missing Birnbaum. He had apparently completed the transformation required of the Ideal Translator and become a figment, a ghost, an invisible man.
Here, submitted as Exhibit A, are the opening sentences of the Rubin translation:
"When the phone rang I was in the kitchen, boiling a potful of spaghetti and whistling along with an FM broadcast of the overture to Rossini's The Thieving Magpie, which has to be the perfect music for cooking pasta.
"I wanted to ignore the phone, not only because the spaghetti was nearly done, but because Claudio Abbado was bringing the London Symphony to its musical climax."
Not bad, eh? Perfectly good English sentences presented by a reasonably interesting narrator. But now listen to Exhibit B:
"I'm in the kitchen cooking spaghetti when the woman calls. Another moment until the spaghetti is done; there I am, whistling the prelude to Rossini's La Gazza Ladra along with the FM radio. Perfect spaghetti-cooking music.
"I hear the telephone ring but tell myself, Ignore it. Let the spaghetti finish cooking. It's almost done, and besides, Claudio Abbado and the London Symphony Orchestra are coming to a crescendo."
And there he is, my Birnbaum -- or rather, my voice-in-the-ear version of Murakami, my Birnbaum-inflected Japanese narrator, my unemployed cosmopolitan wastrel who loves jazzy rhythms and thinks of his life in the present tense. Even the tiny details (the Italian rendering of the Rossini title, the use of the term "crescendo" rather than "musical climax") seem to me crucial to the smart but strangely innocent voice. In this translation, the logic of cause-and-effect English sentence structure has been jettisoned in favor of some other mode, and it is that mode -- the intrusion of the surprising and the foreign and the unknowable into the mundane regime -- which marks the world of a Haruki Murakami novel.
「Nora: The Real Life of Molly Bloom」by Brenda Maddox
Page 21: "... yes O yes I pulled him off into my handkerchief . . ." Nothing interested Joyce more than Nora's sentimental education, as "The Dead" proves. In the case of Willie Mulvagh, whose very name Joyce bestowed on Molly Bloom's first lover ..."
80："sentimental education" == first loves at puberty?：2005/07/10(日) 02:50:07
One line of inquiry is to consider that most 19th (and 20th) century authors suggest emotions are passive responses to things that happen to the subject:
Flaubert differs, suggesting our feelings are like muscles that can be schooled and strengthened; but there are other possibillities.
81："sentimental education" == first loves at puberty?：2005/07/10(日) 02:52:26
Since it's not a usual English phrase, just about any use of it in English is in fact at least an allusion to Flaubert
(just as "tea-soaked madeleine" is an allusion to Proust).
Sterne's "A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy" conveys the same meaning and precedes Flaubert.
The Grand Tour was an essential part of the young man's education, and the "sentimental education" was one aspect.
They are inextricably related.
82："sentimental education" == first loves at puberty?：2005/07/10(日) 02:57:50
The Grand Tour (1700-1760)
Places: England, Scotland, Britain, Europe.
[Preliminary entry] The “Grand Tour” was an essential part of the education of many young English gentleman in the eighteenth century and generally involved travelling for up to three years and stopping at cultural centres such as Paris, Venice, Florence and Rome. As travel became easier in the course of the century the Tour often extended to Naples, Sicily and/or Greece and was on occasion undertaken by young women and married couples.
Typically the young gentleman was accompanied by a tutor, or ciceroni, with whom he would read the classics, such as Pliny and Cicero, to extend the sensibility and the understanding. Among the most famous of the many such tutors was Adam Smith who resigned his professorship at Glasgow in 1763 to act as tutor to young Duke of Buccleuch at an annual salary of £300 plus travelling expenses and a pension of £300 a year thereafter. Such a princely sum far exceeded his modest professorial stipend and the time spend abroad enabled Smith to begin writing The Wealth of Nations (1776).
83："sentimental education" == first loves at puberty?：2005/07/10(日) 03:13:17
84："sentimental education" == first loves at puberty?：2005/07/10(日) 03:16:00
情操教育
cultivation of aesthetic sentiments // culture of sentiments // education in good taste // education of one's feelings // enrichment program // sentiment [emotional] education
Google comes up with the following explanation by Flaubert:
"I want to write the moral history of the men of my generation-- or,
more accurately, the history of their feelings. It's a book about
love, about passion; but passion such as can exist nowadays-- that is to say, inactive."
The phrase is one that anyone might make up, in any of various senses. But the title appears to be very frequently alluded to,
sometimes ironically & sometimes irrelevantly. In _The Age of Longing_, by Arthur Koestler, it is the title of a chapter detailing the evolution of a revolutionist's son into an apparatchik.
2 of 15 people found the following review helpful:
Classic example of the desperation to find a modern classic, January 21, 1999
Reviewer: A reader
This book was abominably boring and pretentious. The protagonist was about as much fun as a roll of sandpaper Charmin. AP English classes every year are being forced to read this mind-numbing drivel. It must stop!
The only thing that interests me is style. (JJII 697)
From my point of view, it hardly matters whether the technique is 'veracious' or not; it has served me as a bridge over which to march my eighteen episodes, and, once I have got my troops across, the opposing forces can, for all I care, blow the bridge sky-high.
p. 521 ? --- If I gave it all up immediately, I'd lose my immortality. I've put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant, and that's the only way of insuring one's immortality.
Joyce's reply for a request for a plan of Ulysses, as quoted in James Joyce (1959) by Richard Ellmann
14 Oxen of the Sun http://park8.wakwak.com/~w22/469.htm
原文では、古代英語から現代英語までの英語散文文体史の変遷を、継ぎ目なく次々にパロディすることで、川が流れるがごとく表現しているところなんでしょ。そこを日本語文体史のパロディにしっかり変えてるなんて、かっこいいよね。ホント、すんなり理解できたら、どれほど楽しめることか。私もトホホ。
254 さてさて原文に対照する所は如何でしょう（笑）幸いな事に一緒に引用されております（笑）後、私は英語に関しては劣等生ということを断わって置きますねぇ（笑）
「he was told, a portrait of his grandfather by Leroy. Smiling and spreading out his hands」
御覧の通り、原文では単に「ルロワが描いた祖父の肖像」程度の意味と言うのに、若島さんはピリオドの位置を読み間違えてスマイリングなんぞと言う姓を持つ画家を勝手に作り出してしまっている訳です（笑）
これは別に駄洒落でも何でもなく、劣等生にでも分かる英語のミスでしょうねぇ（笑）
まぁ学生がこの程度の誤訳をやっていても仕方が無いでしょう。併し若島さんの世界は「ナバコフ色」に染まっておられるようです（笑）それなのにピリオドをずらして読み違え、訂正すらせずに本の形になっているのはいかがでしょう。幸いな事に絶版のようですけど（笑）
若島さんの言うナバコフ色という奴がどうも怪しいものだと思えてきませんかねぇ（笑） このような方が「ロリータ」を翻訳し「アーダ」を翻訳しようとしている訳です（笑） 他にも「博物館を訪いて」の冒頭部だけでも随分怪しい翻訳をしている様ですねぇ（笑）
正直↑のリンク先の方も随分と文学通の振りをされているようですが、さして重要でもない所に拘って、後は勝手にディレッタント風を吹かせているだけです（笑）若島の徹底的愚鈍さを顕にしたにも関わらず、それにも気付いておられないとは（笑）
255 さてさて、引き続いて若島さんの翻訳の第一行を御注視の程を（笑）「奇妙な癖」？ なんでしょう、ちょっと可笑しいですねぇ（笑）
原文では「a person with oddities」となっております（笑）試しにネット辞書（笑）で引いて見ますと、「oddity」は「変人・奇妙な」となっている訳ですねぇ（笑）
ですから「奇妙な癖」では少々無理のし過ぎではないでしょうか（笑）「変な性格の人物」位が適切だと思いますが（笑）
「mildly」を「やんわり」で他の方々が考えつかない訳を考えだしているというのに、とんだ間違いをしでかしてしまった訳ですねぇ……でも、これまたネット辞書（笑）では「やんわり」は「gently」に対応する筈なんですが（笑）
さてさて、こう書くと若島ファン（笑）の方々から「ナバコフだから」と言う免罪符を突きつけられるかもしれません（笑）
「それは駄洒落さ」「言葉の魔術よ！」「英語初心者どころか劣等生が、しかも随分怪しい日本語を使う愚物が専門家に文句をつけるな！」と言ったところでしょうか（笑）
大した権威主義だとは思いますけれど、正直な話、ナバコフとて人の子です（笑）
機械的に駄洒落や表現の象徴を掴んでいっても小説全体は見渡せません、ましてや小説の筋だけ読むようではもってのほかな訳です（笑）
小説は作者の意に反した方向に流れる事すらあります（笑）
若島さんはべったりな所はナバコフべったりですが（発言自体がそうですよねぇ（笑））
しっかりと尊厳を守るべきところで叛逆者（笑）を演じなさっております。
しかもこの人はマクベスどころかそこいらの小物大名小名連中よりよほどクオリティが低いと言うのに、それ以上を目指され様と為さっておられるからずっこける、
果てはいらぬ所にまで嘴を突っ込まれて阿呆な信奉者を増やされるからたまったものではないでしょう（笑）
Here form is content, content is form. You complain that this stuff is not written in English. It is not written at all. It is not to be read – or rather it is not only to be read. It is to be looked at and listened to. His writing is not about something, it is that something itself.
Dante...Bruno.Vico..Joyce, 1929 (p.14) --- On Joyce’s Finnegans Wake:
The forms of zest are innumerable. Sherlock Holmes, it may be remembered, picked up a hat which he happened to find lying in the street. After looking at it for a moment he remarked that its owner had come down in the world as the result of drink and that his wife was no longer so fond of him as she used to be.
Life could never be boring to a man to whom casual objects offered such a wealth of interest. Think of the different things that may be noticed in the course of a country walk. One man may be interested in the birds, another in the vegetation, another in the geology, another in the agriculture, and so on. Any one of these things is interesting if it interests you, and, other things being equal, the man who is interested in any one of them is better adapted to the world than the man who is not interested.
-- Bertrand Russell, The Conquest of Happiness, p. 95
その遺言とは、ナボコフの「遺作」についてのもの。彼が死の間際まで書き綴っていた未完の小説『The Original of Laura(ローラの原型)』の原稿は、スイスの銀行の貸し金庫に30年ほど保存されてきた。しかし、そもそもこの原稿についてナボコフは、相続人である妻ヴェラに、死後すぐに破棄するように明確に指示していたという。結局その遺言を実行できないまま、ヴェラが91年に亡くなってしまったため、遺言の実行は彼の息子ドミトリ(73)に委ねられることになった。
