卒業式も無事終了。
いわゆる謝恩会はパスして、本業で湖へ。地元新聞社の取材を受ける。選抜大会の特集とのこと。学校に電話で取材の申し込みがあった時から要領を得ない記者で困った。競技やレースの説明、大会への抱負などをまずはおさえてもらって、選手にインタビュー。その後、水上から激写。１周４ｋｍの間一通りのアングルをカバーしたところで記者さんだけを降ろして、本格的に練習開始。テスト期間に入るとまとまった時間を練習に当てるのが難しいので、集中して約１４ｋｍの高強度UT。
明けて、水曜日が平常授業最終日。
昨年度は、このタイミングで久保野雅史先生に私の授業参観+特別授業をしてもらったのだったなぁ。早いものであれから１年。すこしは成長したと言えるのだろうか…。
木曜日からは、学年末考査スタート。
高１と高２だけなので、作問も幾分楽な感じ。でも、手を抜くと後が怖いので全力で全ての試験を仕上げる。既に、進学クラス２年のライティングと、普通科２年の英語再入門講座は試験も終了。同じ学校の問題とはちょっと思えないくらいやっている中身が違うけれども、入試の入り口も、カリキュラムも、何もかも違うからね。教師も生徒も自分に出来ることを徹底すること。今やっていることを徹底できていれば、次のステップは半分以上出来たも同然。
今日は明日が休みなので、テスト後にエルゴだけ。
UTでのアップ後、ロングインターバルで刺激を。３分オン２分オフの３セットを２ラウンド。へろへろというかヘタレですね。途中であまりにも出力が落ちてきたので、ウェイトトレーニングのフォーストレップスのように、エルゴのハンドルをアシストして続けさせる。せっかくＯ先生に指導してもらって「気づき」を得たのだから、その身体の使い方を自分の財産にするべくトレーニングに励むこと。
帰宅後、娘としばし歓談。
その後、気持ちを切り替えて自分の思索。
「英語で英語を読む」流れから、ずっと考えていたのだが、「訳読」批判は容易いのである。入試問題批判も同様。英文和訳や和文英訳という形式だけをやり玉に挙げるのは無知というもの。モギケンが「誰かの英語力」を見るなら、と自説をぶち上げていたが、その「誰か」は一体どういう人で、何人いて、どういう目的で「見るもの」なのか、というシステムやマネジメントを抜きにして「英文和訳」や「和文英訳」という手法を断罪しても改善には繋がらない。まず、どのような英語力を求めているのかを明らかにすることから。ということで、読解の根本を見直そうと、家にある書籍を再読。
1. 朱牟田夏雄 『英文をいかに読むか』 (文建書房、1959年)
2. 柴田徹士 『英文解釈の技術』 (金子書房、1960年)
3. 倉谷直臣 『英文を正しく読む50講』 (研究社出版、1992年)
4. 河内司 『英文学散文名文選』 (八千代出版、1994年)
5. 村上陽介 『英語正読マニュアル』 (研究社出版、2000年)
6. 筒井正明 『本格派のための「英文解釈」道場』 (大修館書店、2010年)
7. 岸学 『説明文理解の心理学』 (北大路書房、2004年)
8. W.N. Herbert & Matthew Hollis. 2000. Strong Words, modern poets on modern poetry, Bloodaxe Books
9. Orhan Pamuk. 2006. My Father’s Suitcase The Nobel Lecture, Privately printed for Faber and Faber
10. Susan Sontag. 2003. Regarding the Pain of Others, Picador
以下、印象に残った部分をいくつか引く。「構文解析ではなく、筆者の意図を鷲掴みにする」、とか「英語で言い換えながら読み進める」とか、「フローチャートなど情報転移する」とかいろいろ今風の読みの手法はあるだろうが、教室にて大勢で一斉に「英語で読む」にはどんな手だてが考えられるだろうか。
１. からは、モームの一節を。
Each one of us is a prisoner in a solitary tower and he communicates with the other prisoners, who form mankind, by conventional signs that have not quite the same meaning for them as for himself. And life, unfortunately, is something that you can lead but once; mistakes are often irreparable, and who am I that I should tell this one and that how he should lead it? Life is a difficult business and I have found it hard enough to make my own a complete and rounded thing; I have not been tempted to teach my neighbour what he should do with his. (p. 73)
２．からは昔の慶應大の出題。
In the first place, be honest with the child. If you don’t know, say so outright. The surest way to lose his confidence is to pretend that you know when you really don’t. It may work once, and it may work twice, but in the end you’ll be found out and it’ll be a long time before you’ll win back the child’s trust. I don’t mean that every question a child asks should be answered to his complete satisfaction. Some things aren’t his business, and he should be told so. make sure that every answer is a sound foundation for what the child learns as he gets older. (pp. 374-375)
3. から２つ抜粋。出典は不明。発問を工夫すれば、「読めたつもり」からの脱却が可能だろうか。
By the time you get to be sixty, you’ve accumulated enough memories, good or bad, to last a lifetime. The way lifetimes are going these days, you still have quite a long way to go, though, and it’s my feeling that those of us who have reached that age ought to push on to acquire new memories instead of sitting back to consider the old ones. (p. 96)
The opportunities to be alone and undisturbed are no longer easy to find. We Americans have grown so accustomed to the clamor of human activity that we accept it as inescapable. Most of us, like the acquaintance who interrupted my reverie, have even come to regard thoughtful solitude as unnatural. The shocking implication is that the human spirit must be diverted from the calamitous temptation of its own company. (p. 164)
4. より１つ、これもモームですね。 ‘Lucidity, Simplicity, Euphony’。
I have never had much patience with the writers who claim from the reader an effort to understand their meaning. You have only to go to the great philosophers to see that it is possible to express with lucidity the most subtle reflections. You may find it difficult to understand the thought of Hume, and if you have no philosophical training its implications will doubtless escape you; but no one with any education at all can fail to understand exactly what the meaning of each sentence is. Few people have written English with more grace than Berkeley. There are two sorts of obscurity that you find in writers. One is due to negligence and the other to willfulness. People often write obscurely because they have never taken the trouble to learn to write clearly. This sort of obscurity you find too often in modern philosophers, in men of science, and even in literary critics.
8.からは、私の大好きな Grace Nicholsの ‘The poetry I feel closest to’ (2000) から、締めくくりの言葉。「置き換えられないことば」を紡ぎ出す詩人の散文をどう扱うか。
In the act of writing a poem you’re working to satisfy a lot of deep things, you want your ideas and feelings to come out but in a way that’s memorable and pleasurable to you, so all your feelers are out, musical and otherwise, as ideas leap across and link in a process that’s intuitive. Your inner ear is attuned to the underlying rhythm and the actual sounds of words and in a way you’re like a musical composer also, creating almost unconsciously your own harmony.
A poem lives with the life you put into it and the “success” of a poem at times has more to do with the degree of energy, passion or fascination you bring to it rather than formal poetic rules. (p. 211)
9. からは最後の方の印象的なリズムを持つ一節。ノーベル賞作家の講演のことば。繰り返し歌うようなこのことばを「要約」したり「パラフレーズ」したりして本当に分かったと言えるだろうか。
Let me change the mood with a few sweet words that will, I hope, serve as well as music. As you know, the question we writers are asked most often, the favourite question, is: why do you write? I write because I have an innate need to write! I write because I can’t do normal work like other people. I write because I want to read books like the ones I write. I write because I am angry at all of you, angry at everyone. I write because I love sitting in a room all day writing. I write because I can only partake in real life by changing it. I write because I want others, all of us, the whole world, to know what sort of life we lived, and continue to live in Istanbul, in Turkey. I write because I love the smell of paper, pen, and ink. I write because I believe in literature, in the art of the novel, more than I believe in anything else. I write because it is a habit, a passion. I write because I am afraid of being forgotten. I write because I like the glory and interest that writing brings. I write to be alone. Perhaps I write because I hope to understand why I am so very, very angry at all of you, so very, very angry at everyone. I write because I like to be read. I write because once I have begun a novel, an essay, a page, I want to finish it. I write because everyone expects me to write. I write because I have a childish belief in the immortality of libraries, and in the way my books sit on the shelf. I write because it is exciting to turn all of life’s beauties and riches into words. I write not to tell a story, but to compose a story. I write because I wish to escape from the foreboding that there is a place I must go but – just as in a dream – I can’t quite get there. I write because I have never managed to be happy. I write to be happy. (pp. 21-22)
そして、今年になってから読み返すことの多かった10。
People can turn off not just because a steady diet of images of violence has made them indifferent but because they are afraid. As everyone has observed, there is a mounting level of acceptable violence and sadism in mass culture: films, television, comics, computer games. Imagery that would have had an audience cringing and recoiling in disgust forty years ago is watched without so much as a blink by every teenager in the multiplex. Indeed, mayhem is entertaining rather than shocking to many people in most modern cultures. But not all violence is watched with equal detachment. Some disasters are more apt subjects of irony than others.
It is because, say, the war in Bosnia didn’t stop, because leaders claimed it was an intractable situation, that people abroad may have switched off the terrible images. It is because a war, any war, doesn’t seem as if it can be stopped that people became less responsive to the horrors. Compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action, or it withers. The question is what to do with the feelings that have been aroused, the knowledge that has been communicated. If one feels that there is nothing “we” can do---but who is that “we”?---and nothing “they” can do either---and who are “they”?---then one starts to get bored, cynical, apathetic. (pp.100-101)
本日のBGM: Build (the Housemartins live at the BBC)
