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 友達の青木美由紀さんは最近本を出しました。美由紀さんは日本で一番優しい、そして一番たくましい女性だと私は思っています。彼女はNPO法人シェアで色々な国で仕事をしてきました。中には、南アフリカでエイズ患者のために働きました。（下の写真はジャイカのサイトと美由紀さんの活動日記より。）

その経験をもとに、本にしました。

この本は南アフリカの状況、親をなくした子供達のこと、エイズで病んでいる子供達のこと等、写真と情報がたくさんつまっています。

元サッカー日本代表北澤豪選手の南アフリカでの経験談も本の最初に載っています。本の売り上げの一部はNPO法人シェアによせられるそうですので、是非ご協力をよろしくお願いします。誰でも美由紀さんのような働きはできませんが、本を1冊買って、その働きに協力することはできます！

There are lots of Japanese words I just plain don’t like. Many of them are related to children and learning and schools, so I haven’t had as much contact with them workwise as mothering-wise. The end result being that I don’t think about them so much as rebel against (and complain about) them.

I recently had work-related contact with one of my least favorite phrases: 集団生活 shuudan seikatsu, literally “life in a group.”  Many mothers use it as a reason for putting their children into preschool as soon as they are eligible–they want the kids to get used to shuudan seikatsu early on.  (My daughters went to preschool the instant they were old enough, but it was because I wanted someone else to play with them for part of the day!)

Anyway, shuudan seikatsu has been stuck in my craw for years–and I never understood exactly why until a few days ago when the word came up in an editing job. The translator had written about the notion of a five-year-old being “adapted for communal life.” I checked the original Japanese, and sure enough, there it was–”able to deal with shuudan seikatsu.”  This was the aha moment!

I grew up in the 60s and 70s–during the glory days of, well, communal life in the United States. Although I never lived in a commune, I was on the fringes for several years and saw many people I loved and respected heading in that direction. Somehow, though, the notion of being unable to personally own anything was more than I could deal with. I had a good bike, a nice flute, the typewriter my dad took to college, and a few hundred dollars in the bank. The possibility of signing away even those was just too depressing.

So that was it!  My brain read shuudan seikatsu as “communal life,” and I was  terrified of the notion that my children, my only blood relatives on this side of the Pacific, would be ripped from my arms, and I would never see them except for short vacations in the summer or maybe at New Years. They would belong to someone else.

After years of living in the shadow of this menacing image, I could finally kill it off–and in plenty of time to apply it to any possible grandchildren. I carefully crossed out  “adapted for communal life” and wrote in “capable of participating fully in group activities.”

Done!

今時の会議の「議題」がなぜかすべて「レジメ」や「レジュメ」へと変わりました。

レジュメは英語で「履歴書」という意味です。どうやって履歴書が議題になりましたか。いつも不思議で仕方がないけれども、会議となると早く帰りたいので、その場では受け流します。

今週末、目眩で寝込みました。音も光もよくないと、刺激なく、自分でぼんやりと二日間あれこれ考えました。目眩していたのであまり深いことは考えられなかったので、この「レジュメ」の謎に取り組みました。となりでイヤホーンでテレビを見ていた相棒兼看護士にiPhoneで「レジュメ」を 調べるように頼みました。

なんと、元々は英語ではなく、フランス語の「resumé 」です。その意味は「要約」、英語では「summary」です。なるほど！履歴書は人の人生の要約とも言えるし、議題は会議の要約でもあります。

数百年前から20世紀まで、英語圏の人はフランスのことを色々憧れました。教育のある人は格好をつけて、話にも文書にもフランス語をたくさん使いました。つまり、今私を困らせているカタカナ言葉は昔フランス人もきっと英語圏人に対して感じました。 「ちゃんと英語があるのに、なぜフランス語の意味を都合よく変えて使っているんだろう」と思った人がいたにちがいありません。

My husband was delighted (perhaps for my sake) to hear that “Bones” substituted “translation” for “murder” (see previous posting).  He said the Japanese sub-titles used the word henkan, which means a kind of transformation. And that makes much more sense, of course.

Pamela,  a fount of knowledge and intuition, has declared that the original script had certainly called for Booth to ask Brennan not to use the word “murder” at the funeral and replace it with the word “transition.” BUT during rehearsals, one of the actors–most likely David Boreanaz, who plays FBI Agent Seeley Booth, MUST have said “translation” instead of “transition,” at which point the entire cast collapsed in laughter and they decided to leave it in.

If this is the case, my philosophical questions have gone to waste. It’s a dark day for my honorable profession, but definitely a brighter one for script writers.

Here in the hinterlands, we do get US and British shows on cable TV although there is no telling when they were made. We enjoy sorting out the time lines of actors who seemingly star in a number of series all at once. Which came first, “LA Law” or “Law and Order?” At the worst, we just sit and try to figure out what program we’re actually watching.

Back to the topic at hand, the episode of Bones we personally watched last night made a teeny tiny step in my territory. The whole Jeffersonian crew was at a funeral when Temperance Brennan (who has an Asperger-ish knack for speaking her mind without regard for the situation) announces that the deceased did not have a heart attack, but has indeed been murdered. Booth encourages her not to use the word “murder” at a funeral because it would upset everyone. He suggests using a code word–”translation” in its place.

Then, of course, the conversation takes off with emotional expressions of, “We’ve got to do something!  This is definitely a translation!”  and “How are we going to tell the widow that her husband has been translated?”  And so on.

It gave me time to think about my occupation. In this episode, is “translation” a synonym for “murder,” or perhaps an antonym? Previous to writing the script, had there been a discussion of a book that had been murdered in translation? Or was it the most benign verb they could think of to take the place and thus make the script funny?  These are questions I want answers to.

Probably questions only a translator would have.

昔のテレビドラマに、東京サラリーマンの主人公が「北関東営業所」という恐ろしいところへとばされました。どうやら渋川だったらしい。しかし、その「営業所」が古びた木造の一軒家でした。小さな石油ストーブで寒そうにしていた主人公（洗濯も営業所の外に干してあった気がする。とにかく、惨めでした。）

それ以来、うちでは群馬が田舎ぽいことを言われると家族全員で一声に「北関東営業所！」と叫びます。

さて、田舎の群馬を祝うブログができました。南向きの本多のお兄さんとお母さんのコラボレーションで高崎 オバサン.comができました。名前が漢字とカタカナになっているだけでも印象的です。高崎周辺、時には高速のPAまで記事になっています。

昨日の「本店タカハシの本店？」が面白いです。 芸術（川柳）とグルメと節約と笑いが混ぜ合わせた楽しいブログです。「関東と信越つなぐ高崎」に興味関心のある方は是非たずねて下さい。毎日更新中、だそうです。

（ちなみに、 本店タカハシのサイトもあります。上記の記事を読んでから是非見て下さい。とくに興味深いのが「本タカWEBチラシ。本タカにこられない方も必見！！」）

翻訳を始めた当初はタイプライターと郵便を使いました。これは1回か2回しかなかったです。どうやら、「ワープロ」と「ファックス」という最新技術がないと在宅翻訳ができないらしいです。

その時、 「ワープロ」と「ファックス」を仕入れるために、約60万円がかかりましたが、運良く英会話の生徒のご主人はそのようなものをあつかる会社の経営者だったので、なんと半額で手に入れました。ファックスはロールになった紙ででてきたので、入った原稿を一枚ずつ切り取る必要がありました。送り返す時も1枚ずつでした。

段々と技術が複雑かつ安くなりました。今は信じられないほどメールでやりとりが簡単です。

Windows VistaのOSができるまでです！ マック派の私は2年前、ついWindowsのノート型PCを買いました。使いにくくて、遅くて、使用者と関係ないような別な人生をすごしているような機械でした。

最近、Windows VistaをWindows 7のOSをメディアプロさんに替えてもらいました。Windows 7は複雑な技術をより簡単化にしたものらしいです。とにかく、新しいパソコンをもらった気持ちです。立ち上がりが早くて、動きがスムーズにできます。まるで、操作をこちらが許された感じです。 それでも機械が別な人生をうらで過ごされているらしいけれど、今のところその「住民」が大人しいのでほっておこうと思います。

ちなみに、私のメーンは今もマックです。

白人の女性が日本で生活する上で１つの大きな困りごとは赤ちゃんに泣かれることです。私に気づくとたんに赤ん坊や小さい子供はべそをかいて、涙がうるみはじめる。2〜3日前、３才ぐらいの男の子にまるでゴジラを発見したようなホラー映画にでてくるような表情をされてしまいました。急いで目をそらして、知らないふりをしました。

今朝、うちの教会で6ヶ月の赤ちゃんから何度も微笑み を受けてしまいました。幸せ！でもそれはその通りです。その子のグランパも「あちらの方」です。私を見ても何も変な印象を受けないわけです。半年前に生まれたばかりなのに、もう心が広いですね。日本はもう単一民族ではないとつくづく思いました。これからもたくさん微笑みをもらっちゃいたいです。

数日前、どういうわけか、うちのプリンターが使えなくなりました。今は修理待ちです。今日東京に出かけますが、待合い場所のサイト情報等を印刷できなくて、しばらく困って考え込みました。

そして思い出しました。メモを自分で書けばいいの。

このようにして人間の生まれ持った機能が低下していきますね。たまにはローテックの生活に戻らないといけないと思いました。

A number of years ago I read Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Mt. Everest Disaster by Jon Krakauer. It was a fascinating read, describing all the details of climbing Mt. Everest. It was so descriptive, in fact, that I felt out of breath the entire time I was reading it. I still think about it almost compulsively–the life-threatening, not to mention, incredibly uncomfortable experience that is commonly referred to as “conquering Everest.” Krakauer provided me with a sufficient Everest experience. I’m happy both to have read it and also to never go there myself.

Eat Sleep Sit had much the same effect on me.  The Japanese title is “Eat Sleep Sit: The Story of Training at Eiheiji.” Presumably, the Japanese reader knows the implications of Eiheiji as a temple where Buddhist monks are trained. I appreciate how the Kodansha International editor made it clear in the title that (1) it wouldn’t be an idyllic year of sitting on wooden verandahs gazing out at moss gardens, and (2) it only lasted a year. The latter comes as a relief early on, although by that time the inclusion of “Sleep” in the title begins to raise questions.

Author Kaoru Nonomura decides to quit his job, leave his girlfriend, and set off for a year of training at Eiheiji. When he arrives, he stands at the door to the temple, in the snow, and ends up having to shout himself hoarse before he is allowed in–and the experience (from this reader’s eyes) goes downhill from there as the trainee leaves every last ounce of freewill outside the temple. Every single act of a trainee, each individual motion of that act, is set down by Dogen, the thirteenth-century founder of Eiheiji. As an example, the section “Lavatory” is nine pages long. And this is where the “Into Thin Air” effect begins to take hold. The rules are so complete and invasive that, on the one hand one wants to scream “waaaay too much information,” but on the other it is fascinating and one wants to read every word of it. The monks learn how to live as Zen automatons, although the author concedes that that may be what Zen is all about–emptying the mind by not having to make a single decision, no matter how minor.

I give veteran translator  Juliet Winters Carpenter a great deal of credit for making a large amount of ancient instruction accessible in English to the modern non-Japanese reader. In fact, I looked through the Japanese version at one point and was overwhelmed with the  passages written by Dogen so many centuries ago and even the modern re-rendering of them as the author puts them into practice. I understand that Buddhist scholars were consulted in the translation work, and the results are clearly evidenced by how easy it is to read.

As with Into Thin Air and Mt. Everest, however, Eat Sleep Fit completely cured me of any desire to actually experience spending even a night at Eiheiji. The life of the new monks is a living hell. They get perhaps two or three hours of sleep a night, come close to malnutrition, and are bullied and abused by their senior monks (most who have arrived only a few months ahead of them) in ways that would be considered criminal in any other setting. Looking at the book from this point of view, the clarity of the prose leaves nothing to the imagination, and the reader begins to feel groggy from pain and exhaustion. Here I give Nonomura credit for being able to remember in such detail the sort of trauma that usually wipes clean the memories of its victims.

The final word? I couldn’t put it down! Eat Sleep Sit, for a disconcerting but fascinating read!