2008_02_08_[SUN]
2008 winners,
* Alexi Zentner: "Touch" in Tin House
* Alice Munro: "What Do You Want To Know For?" in The American Scholar
* William Trevor: "Folie a Deux" in The New Yorker
* Alexi Zentner: "Touch" in Tin House
* Alice Munro: "What Do You Want To Know For?" in The American Scholar
* William Trevor: "Folie a Deux" in The New Yorker
オイチャンはいつも図書館から借りてきた軽めの短編を飯を食いながらの読書として楽しんでいるのだけど≪ながら飯最高！≫ちょと今回は、
2008年のオー・ヘンリー賞選考集を買ってきての【ながら飯】
【ながら飯】はうまいのう。なぜトイレで本を読みながらの【ながらウンコ】はなんで【単独ウンコ】より充実感があるんやろうかのう。
とうぜん昨日から読んでいるのでまだ全部読んでいないんだけど、オー・ヘンリーアワードのオフィシャルに撰者である
Half of a Yellow Sunで 最年少のオレンジ賞を受賞した
チママンダさん≪Chimamanda N. Adichie≫
の寸評が載っていて
Juror Favorite:
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on "Touch" by Alexi Zentner
I admired a number of stories in this collection and spent some time thinking about which to pick. For a moment I thought that I should perhaps be clever and select the story that took the most risks and was ambitious and original, etc. But I didn't. The more short stories I read, the more I realize that while I respect many different types, my ability to love a story remains stubbornly fixed on the same criteria: I like a story to tell a story and to teach me something about what it means to be human and to not be terribly self-conscious or ironic for irony's sake, and most of all, to have emotion. "Touch" does all of these. Its themes of love and loss may be familiar, but it has such memorable characters, such a strong sense of atmosphere, such grace, and all of these done with a wonderfully light touch, that it easily transcends its themes. The language--axes cutting smiles into pines, sawdust flying down men's shirts like mosquitoes, the river like a mouth in a brief yawn--transported me to this small self-enclosed world of people who live through winters of cold-shattered thermometers, a Nature-shaped world that is ordinary and yet filled with wonder. I was moved by the elegiac telling, the unapologetic tenderness that never became maudlin, and the characters--the men hacking out a livelihood with a sort of disinterested dignity, the romantic but tough father, the mother who is determined not to lose any more, the daughter who looks wide eyed at life, the narrator for whom my heart broke at the end. I will remember this story for a long time. After I read it, as I lay in bed waiting for sleep, this image haunted me: a father and a daughter frozen in a river, both reaching out to touch, but not quite touching, the other.
I admired a number of stories in this collection and spent some time thinking about which to pick. For a moment I thought that I should perhaps be clever and select the story that took the most risks and was ambitious and original, etc. But I didn't. The more short stories I read, the more I realize that while I respect many different types, my ability to love a story remains stubbornly fixed on the same criteria: I like a story to tell a story and to teach me something about what it means to be human and to not be terribly self-conscious or ironic for irony's sake, and most of all, to have emotion. "Touch" does all of these. Its themes of love and loss may be familiar, but it has such memorable characters, such a strong sense of atmosphere, such grace, and all of these done with a wonderfully light touch, that it easily transcends its themes. The language--axes cutting smiles into pines, sawdust flying down men's shirts like mosquitoes, the river like a mouth in a brief yawn--transported me to this small self-enclosed world of people who live through winters of cold-shattered thermometers, a Nature-shaped world that is ordinary and yet filled with wonder. I was moved by the elegiac telling, the unapologetic tenderness that never became maudlin, and the characters--the men hacking out a livelihood with a sort of disinterested dignity, the romantic but tough father, the mother who is determined not to lose any more, the daughter who looks wide eyed at life, the narrator for whom my heart broke at the end. I will remember this story for a long time. After I read it, as I lay in bed waiting for sleep, this image haunted me: a father and a daughter frozen in a river, both reaching out to touch, but not quite touching, the other.
それを読んだら気になって買ってしまったよ。
アディーチェは短編でも2003にO. Henry Award
とっとるからな。この寸評かって短い文やのに物凄いリズムカルやな。
『アメリカにいる、きみ』の翻訳版で読んでも才能を感じるもんな。
でトレーラーがウマイと。 中意味の無い映画だとショックはバイバイゲームになるわけやけどその"Touch"はどないやったん?
内容についてはまた時間があったら感想を書くけど、物凄く始めから流れのいい短編だね。チママンダさんが言うようにlove and lossというありがちなテーマなんだけど
べた付かないけども浅くはない愛情をうまく仕上げててよく言えば【堅い作品】皮肉を込めると【賞を狙ったような作品】って感じだね。
つまり、【売り絵】じゃなく【具象作品】で狙っちゃうぞ。みたいなんか。
まぁ。そんな感じかな。読み手の対象レベルを明らかに上げているんだろうなぁ。ってのはなんとなくわかる作品だね。
イントロダクションの部分はただで読めるよ。
rom “Touch,” featured in The O. Henry Prize Stories
The men floated the logs early, in September, a chain of headless trees jamming the river as far as I and the other children could see. My father, the foreman, stood at the top of the chute hollering at the men and shaking his mangled hand, urging them on. “That’s money in the water, boys,” he yelled, “push on, push on.” I was ten that summer, and I remember him as a giant, though my mother tells me that he was not so tall that he had to duck his head to cross the threshold of our house, the small foreman’s cottage with the covered porch that stood behind the mill.
He had run the water when he was younger, poling logs out of eddies and currents and breaking jams for the thirty miles from Sawgamet to Havershand. Once there, the logs went by train without him: either south for railway ties or two thousand miles east to Toronto, and then on freighters to Boston or New York, where the giant trees became beams and braces in strangers’ cities. The float took days to reach Havershand, he said. There was little sleep and constant wariness. Watch your feet, boys. The spinning logs can crush you. The cold-water deeps beneath the logs always beckoned. Men pitched tents at the center of the jam, where logs were pushed so tightly together that they made solid ground, terra firma, a place to sleep for a few hours, eat hard biscuits, and drink a cup of tea.
≪Alexizentner.com : ≫
The men floated the logs early, in September, a chain of headless trees jamming the river as far as I and the other children could see. My father, the foreman, stood at the top of the chute hollering at the men and shaking his mangled hand, urging them on. “That’s money in the water, boys,” he yelled, “push on, push on.” I was ten that summer, and I remember him as a giant, though my mother tells me that he was not so tall that he had to duck his head to cross the threshold of our house, the small foreman’s cottage with the covered porch that stood behind the mill.
He had run the water when he was younger, poling logs out of eddies and currents and breaking jams for the thirty miles from Sawgamet to Havershand. Once there, the logs went by train without him: either south for railway ties or two thousand miles east to Toronto, and then on freighters to Boston or New York, where the giant trees became beams and braces in strangers’ cities. The float took days to reach Havershand, he said. There was little sleep and constant wariness. Watch your feet, boys. The spinning logs can crush you. The cold-water deeps beneath the logs always beckoned. Men pitched tents at the center of the jam, where logs were pushed so tightly together that they made solid ground, terra firma, a place to sleep for a few hours, eat hard biscuits, and drink a cup of tea.
≪Alexizentner.com : ≫
当たり前だけど、プロの英文っていうのはバランスが良くて綺麗だよね。星新一さんとかでもそうだけど特にプロが書くショートは贅肉が取れてて たるいとこがないから気持ちよく読めるよね。
まぁ、ハリーポッターは翻訳で充分やけど、こういう研ぎ澄まされた英語のショートの場合はリズム感とか語幹とかを当然計算して作ってるから
原文でよまなあじわわれんからな。
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男のくせに、しょんべん食らったみたいな顔してグダグダ言わんと梱包を見てみるべさ。はようするべ。
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