幸運が君を見つけてくれる

< 新しい記事

新着記事一覧(全121件)

過去の記事 >

2009年02月19日

村上春樹講演　英語全文

カテゴリ： Candy's Diary

【英語全文】村上春樹「エルサレム賞」受賞スピーチ

　以下の英文は村上春樹さんが講演を終えたあと共同通信エルサレム支局の長
谷川健司特派員（支局長）がエルサレム賞主催者から入手したテキストが基に
なっています。しかし、実際の講演はこれに少し修正が加えられていました。
当日、長谷川特派員が授賞式会場の取材で録音したレコーダーを聞きなおし、
実際に村上さんが話した通りに再現したものです。

“Jerusalem Prize” Remarks

Good evening. I have come to Jerusalem today as a novelist, which is to
say as a professional spinner of lies.

it, too, as we all know. Diplomats and generals tell their own kinds of
lies on occasion, as do used car salesmen, butchers and builders. The
lies of novelists differ from others, however, in that no one criticizes
the novelist as immoral for telling lies. Indeed, the bigger and better
his lies and the more ingeniously he creates them, the more he is likely
to be praised by the public and the critics. Why should that be?

My answer would be this: namely, that by telling skilful lies--which is
to say, by making up fictions that appear to be true--the novelist can
bring a truth out to a new place and shine a new light on it. In most
cases, it is virtually impossible to grasp a truth in its original form
and depict it accurately. This is why we try to grab its tail by luring

and replacing it with a fictional form. In order to accomplish this,
however, we first have to clarify where the truth-lies within us, within
ourselves. This is an important qualification for making up good lies.

Today, however, I have no intention of lying. I will try to be as honest
as I can. There are only a few days in the year when I do not engage in

So let me tell you the truth. In Japan a fair number of people advised me
not to come here to accept the Jerusalem Prize. Some even warned me they
would instigate a boycott of my books if I came. The reason for this, of
course, was the fierce fighting that was raging in Gaza. The U.N.
reported that more than a thousand people had lost their lives in the
blockaded city of Gaza, many of them unarmed citizens--children and old
people.

Any number of times after receiving notice of the award, I asked myself
whether traveling to Israel at a time like this and accepting a literary
prize was the proper thing to do, whether this would create the
impression that I supported one side in the conflict, that I endorsed the
policies of a nation that chose to unleash its overwhelming military
power. Neither, of course, do I wish to see my books subjected to a
boycott.
Finally, however, after careful consideration, I made up my mind to come
here. One reason for my decision was that all too many people advised me
not to do it. Perhaps, like many other novelists, I tend to do the exact
opposite of what I am told. If people are telling me-- and especially if
they are warning me--
“Don’t go there,” “Don’t do that,” I tend to want to “go there”
and
“do that”. It’s in my nature, you might say, as a novelist. Novelists
are a special breed. They cannot genuinely trust anything they have not
seen with their own eyes or touched with their own hands.
And that is why I am here. I chose to come here rather than stay away. I
chose to see for myself rather than not to see. I chose to speak to you
rather than to say nothing.

Please do allow me to deliver a message, one very personal message. It is
something that I always keep in mind while I am writing fiction. I have
never gone so far as to write it on a piece of paper and paste it to the
wall: rather, it is carved into the wall of my mind, and it goes
something like this:

“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will
always stand on the side of the egg.
”

Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg, I will
stand with the egg. Someone else will have to decide what is right and
what is wrong; perhaps time or history will do it. But if there were a
novelist who, for whatever reason, wrote works standing with the wall, of
what value would such works be?
What is the meaning of this metaphor? In some cases, it is all too simple
and clear. Bombers and tanks and rockets and white phosphorus shells are
that high wall. The eggs are the unarmed civilians who are crushed and
burned and shot by them. This is one meaning of the metaphor.

But this is not all. It carries a deeper meaning. Think of it this way.
Each of us is, more or less, an egg. Each of us is a unique,
irreplaceable soul enclosed in a fragile shell. This is true of me, and
it is true of each of you. And each of us, to a greater or lesser degree,
is confronting a high, solid wall. The wall has a name: it is
“The System.” The System is supposed to protect us, but sometimes it
takes on a life of its own, and then it begins to kill us and cause us to
kill others--coldly, efficiently, systematically.

I have only one reason to write novels, and that is to bring the dignity
of the individual soul to the surface and shine a light upon it. The
purpose of a story is to sound an alarm, to keep a light trained on the
System in order to prevent it from tangling our souls in its web and
demeaning them. I truly believe it is the novelist
’s job to keep trying to clarify the uniqueness of each individual soul
by writing stories--stories of life and death, stories of love, stories
that make people cry and quake with fear and shake with laughter. This is
why we go on, day after day, concocting fictions with utter seriousness.

My father passed away last year at the age of ninety. He was a retired
teacher and a part-time Buddhist priest. When he was in graduate school
in Kyoto, he was drafted into the army and sent to fight in China. As a
child born after the war, I used to see him every morning before
breakfast offering up long, deeply-felt prayers at the small Buddhist
altar in our house. One time I asked him why he did this, and he told me
he was praying for the people who had died in the battlefield. He was
praying for all the people who died, he said, both ally and enemy alike.
Staring at his back as he knelt at the altar, I seemed to feel the shadow
of death hovering around him.
My father died, and with him he took his memories, memories that I can
never know. But the presence of death that lurked about him remains in my
own memory. It is one of the few things I carry on from him, and one of
the most important.

I have only one thing I hope to convey to you today. We are all human
beings, individuals transcending nationality and race and religion, and
we are all fragile eggs faced with a solid wall called The System. To all
appearances, we have no hope of winning. The wall is too high, too
strong--and too cold. If we have any hope of victory at all, it will have
to come from our believing in the utter uniqueness and irreplaceability
of our own and others
’ souls and from our believing in the warmth we gain by joining souls
together.
Take a moment to think about this. Each of us possesses a tangible,
living soul. The System has no such thing. We must not allow the System
to exploit us. We must not allow the System to take on a life of its own.
The System did not make us: we made the System.
That is all I have to say to you.

I am grateful to have been awarded the Jerusalem Prize. I am grateful
that my books are being read by people in many parts of the world. And I
would like to express my gratitude to the readers in Israel. You are the
biggest reason why I am here. And I hope we are sharing something,
something very meaningful. And I am glad to have had the opportunity to
speak to you here today. Thank you very much.

☆小田尚子☆ Candy(^_-)ー☆　From Japan☆
☆著書「教えることは学ぶこと」　アルク出版
http://www.bookpark.ne.jp/cm/contentdetail.asp?review=off&content_id=ALCB0042
-------------------------------------------------♪

お気に入りの記事を「いいね！」で応援しよう