No one else can hear the baby speak, but I can. I can hear her say ‘up’ and ‘clap’, I hear ‘stairs’. I hear ‘string’. No one believes my baby says ‘string’, but I know she does, because she loves the bit of string that is tied to the door of the car, and she says ‘shing’. You have to listen hard, I admit that.
For months we have been on call and answer. ‘Ah da da dah,’ says the child. ‘Ah dah dee doo dah,’ I say back. This conversation is surprisingly complex, and gives me a new respect for birds, whales and chimpanzees. With three or four syllables, in all their variations, we can say, the two of us, all that we need, for now, to say.
Still, I dream of the baby turning around, and opening her mouth to say something wonderful and long and syntactically amazing like, ‘Can I go to the shops?’ I know it is in there somewhere — before her first word was ever uttered, there were full sentences playing across her face. The trick is getting them out of there — like pulling down the weather.
There is nothing so exciting as speech. A baby looks at your face as you say a word, and whatever passes between you as you hear the word back, is love and love returned. It is the gaze made manifest. Teaching a child to speak is giving them the world. It is better than feeding them, I realise, as I stand beside the kitchen counter, dropping scraps of words to my daughter’s up-tilted face. And I think that all words are sublimated nurture, or a request for nurture, or its provision. All words happen in the space between you and your dear old Ma.
I develop a theory that all writers have Major Mothers, Serious Mothers, sometimes Demanding Mothers — the kind of women you always know when they are in the room. I test this theory any time I am at a reading or conference, I float it across the dinner table. The last time I did this, one of the writers did not answer. He had started to cry.
Anne Enright, ‘Speech’ in Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, London: Vintage, 2005, 171-72.
ほかのだれも赤ん坊がしゃべっているのを聞くことはできないが、わたしにはできる。わたしにはあの子が「だっこ」や「ぱちぱち」と言っているのが聞こえるし、「だんだん」といっているのも、「ひも」と言っているのも聞こえる。赤ちゃんが「ひも」と言っているとはだれも信じてくれないけれども、わたしには言っているのがわかる。だってあの子は車のドアに結わえつけた紐の切れ端が大好きで、「いぉ」と言うのだ。かなり心して聞かなければわからないけれど。それは認める。
何か月もわたしたちは呼びかけと応答を繰り返してきた。「あーだだだー。」とあの子は言う。「あーだでぃどぅーだー。」とわたしは答える。この会話は驚くほど複雑で、わたしは新たに鳥やクジラやチンパンジーに尊敬の念を抱く。たった３音節か４音節の、音の組み合わせの中で、わたしたち二人は、当面、言うべきことを言えている。
それでも、わたしは赤ん坊が振り返って、口を開いて何か素晴らしくて長くて構文的にも驚くようなことを言ってくれないかと夢見る。「お店に行ってもいい？」とか。その文があの子の中のどこかにあるのはわかっている。娘が初めて最初の言葉を発する前、その表情には完全な文章がちらついていた。秘訣はあそこから引き出すことだ――曇天から雨を降らせるように。
ことばほどワクワクすることはない。あなたが一言発すると赤ん坊はじっとあなたの顔を見る。そしてその言葉が返ってくる間に二人の間に交わされるのは何にせよ、愛であり、愛のお返しである。それはまなざしが形になったものだ。子供に話すことを教えることは世界を与えることだ。食事を与えることよりも良い、とちょっと上を向いた娘の顔に言葉の断片を浴びせながら、わたしはキッチンカウンターのわきに立って自覚する。わたしにはすべての言葉は昇華された滋養、あるいは滋養の要求、あるいは滋養の供給に思える。すべての言葉はあなたとあなたの大切なママとの間で起きるの。
わたしは、すべての作家には「大いなる母」「真面目な母」そしてときには「注文の多い母」がいるという説を立てている――部屋にいるときにはその存在がしかとわかるような女性たちだ。朗読会や集会があるときはいつでもこの説を試みて、食卓の話題にのせてみる。前回やってみた時、作家の一人は返事をしなかった。彼は泣き出したのだ。
No one else can hear the baby speak, but I can. I can hear her say ‘up’ and ‘clap’, I hear ‘stairs’. I hear ‘string’. No one believes my baby says ‘string’, but I know she does, because she loves the bit of string that is tied to the door of the car, and she says ‘shing’. You have to listen hard, I admit that.
For months we have been on call and answer. ‘Ah da da dah,’ says the child. ‘Ah dah dee doo dah,’ I say back. This conversation is surprisingly complex, and gives me a new respect for birds, whales and chimpanzees. With three or four syllables, in all their variations, we can say, the two of us, all that we need, for now, to say.
Still, I dream of the baby turning around, and opening her mouth to say something wonderful and long and syntactically amazing like, ‘Can I go to the shops?’ I know it is in there somewhere — before her first word was ever uttered, there were full sentences playing across her face. The trick is getting them out of there — like pulling down the weather.
There is nothing so exciting as speech. A baby looks at your face as you say a word, and whatever passes between you as you hear the word back, is love and love returned. It is the gaze made manifest. Teaching a child to speak is giving them the world. It is better than feeding them, I realise, as I stand beside the kitchen counter, dropping scraps of words to my daughter’s up-tilted face. And I think that all words are sublimated nurture, or a request for nurture, or its provision. All words happen in the space between you and your dear old Ma.
I develop a theory that all writers have Major Mothers, Serious Mothers, sometimes Demanding Mothers — the kind of women you always know when they are in the room. I test this theory any time I am at a reading or conference, I float it across the dinner table. The last time I did this, one of the writers did not answer. He had started to cry.
Anne Enright, ‘Speech’ in Making Babies: Stumbling into Motherhood, London: Vintage, 2005, 171-72.
ほかのだれも赤ん坊がしゃべっているのを聞くことはできないが、わたしにはできる。わたしにはあの子が「だっこ」や「ぱちぱち」と言っているのが聞こえるし、「だんだん」といっているのも、「ひも」と言っているのも聞こえる。赤ちゃんが「ひも」と言っているとはだれも信じてくれないけれども、わたしには言っているのがわかる。だってあの子は車のドアに結わえつけた紐の切れ端が大好きで、「いぉ」と言うのだ。かなり心して聞かなければわからないけれど。それは認める。
何か月もわたしたちは呼びかけと応答を繰り返してきた。「あーだだだー。」とあの子は言う。「あーだでぃどぅーだー。」とわたしは答える。この会話は驚くほど複雑で、わたしは新たに鳥やクジラやチンパンジーに尊敬の念を抱く。たった３音節か４音節の、音の組み合わせの中で、わたしたち二人は、当面、言うべきことを言えている。
それでも、わたしは赤ん坊が振り返って、口を開いて何か素晴らしくて長くて構文的にも驚くようなことを言ってくれないかと夢見る。「お店に行ってもいい？」とか。その文があの子の中のどこかにあるのはわかっている。娘が初めて最初の言葉を発する前、その表情には完全な文章がちらついていた。秘訣はあそこから引き出すことだ――曇天から雨を降らせるように。
ことばほどワクワクすることはない。あなたが一言発すると赤ん坊はじっとあなたの顔を見る。そしてその言葉が返ってくる間に二人の間に交わされるのは何にせよ、愛であり、愛のお返しである。それはまなざしが形になったものだ。子供に話すことを教えることは世界を与えることだ。食事を与えることよりも良い、とちょっと上を向いた娘の顔に言葉の断片を浴びせながら、わたしはキッチンカウンターのわきに立って自覚する。わたしにはすべての言葉は昇華された滋養、あるいは滋養の要求、あるいは滋養の供給に思える。すべての言葉はあなたとあなたの大切なママとの間で起きるの。
わたしは、すべての作家には「大いなる母」「真面目な母」そしてときには「注文の多い母」がいるという説を立てている――部屋にいるときにはその存在がしかとわかるような女性たちだ。朗読会や集会があるときはいつでもこの説を試みて、食卓の話題にのせてみる。前回やってみた時、作家の一人は返事をしなかった。彼は泣き出したのだ。
Translation commentary
Haruko Takakuwa with Students of Ochanomizu University
‘Speech’ is a beautiful piece of essay which captures the moments of the beginning of verbal communication between a mother and a child. It also has some difficult parts and we had a lot of discussion in our freshmen seminar.
First of all, we discussed how to translate ‘up’, ‘clap’, ‘stairs’, ‘string’ and ‘shing’ in the first paragraph. We agreed that bearing in mind that these are a child’s utterance we should opt for hiragana, which is the first writing form we learn in Japanese. Students came up with good Japanese options for ‘up’, ‘clap’ and ‘stairs’ that seem very natural as a baby’s talk, and I used them in my translation. We also considered how we transcribe the baby’s incomplete utterance ‘shing’—in my case, I just left the vowels in the Japanese word himo (i.e. ‘string’).
One of the greatest challenges in this translation was Enright’s figure of speech, ‘like pulling down the weather’ at the end of the third paragraph. In class, we had a lively conversation on what this actually means. We agreed that Enright wants to give a sense of some daunting feat, and there is an image of raindrops being drawn out from a dark cloud. Accordingly, rather than translating the phrase literally (which would be too difficult to make out in Japanese), I translated ‘like pulling down the raindrops from an overcast sky’. A student came up with an idea of using a literary figure of speech for rainfall (「まるで、雨ごいをして、篠突く雨を願うように。」), which worked very beautifully in her translation, while another chose to get rid of the figure of speech and simply put 「なかなか思い通りにいかないけどね」 (‘though it is not the easiest thing to do’), as she felt being too literary and rhetorical could be disturbing for Japanese readers. All in all, the students enjoyed interpreting the phrase themselves and putting it into their own Japanese.
Another difficulty we noticed in class was how we chose an appropriate Japanese word for ‘nurture’ in the fourth paragraph. Many students leant towards such words as 教育 (education), and we had to appreciate the whole paragraph and understand the vital power of speech before we chose a more appropriate 滋養 which brings out the cherishing aspect of the word.
The final paragraph was also a big challenge in that we had to understand why the topic suddenly switches to writers’ mothers to make the translation work. Through our talk, we came to appreciate that the author, as a writer who deals with words and speech as an art form, must attribute much to the words that ‘happen in the space between you and your dear old Ma’ and thought it was an interesting way to end the essay. Vocabulary-wise, ‘Major Mothers’ was difficult to translate as ‘major’ has multiple meanings, from being important or mainstream to its military resonance. I opted for 「大いなる母」 to have some sense of grandiosity, and to keep in parallel with the translation of ‘Serious Mothers’ and ‘Demanding Mothers’.
Last but not least, we had several variations for the title ‘Speech’. Students tended to opt for 「話すこと」 or 「しゃべること」 which focused more on ‘utterance’ or the talking aspect of ‘speech’. I myself chose 「ことば」 (kotoba), as I felt it would emphasise how essential the language itself is for humans. One snag of translating ‘Speech’ as 「ことば」 is that we also use kotoba for ‘a word’ in Japanese, and it might be a little confusing. However, I used kanji version of kotoba 「言葉」 for ‘a word’ to and hiragana 「ことば」 to suggest a more abstract concept of ‘speech’.