なぜ「煙突」を訳さなかったのか : 山宮允訳『ブレーク選集』と明治・大正期のブレイク理解

抄録

In 1922 SANGU Makoto published Blake Senshu [Selected Poems of Blake], a collection of Blake's poems in Japanese. In this anthology he gave the Japanese title 'Susu Harai' ['Dust Sweeper'] to a pair of poems entitled 'The Chimney Sweeper', which are respectively collected in 'Songs of Innocence' and 'Songs of Experience', without making any reference to the word 'chimney'. He also uses the same phrase 'susu harai' as a translation of 'the Chimney-sweepers' in 'London'. SANGU consistently avoided the word 'chimney' in his translation because it would have been associated with factories rather than houses at that time. Until the latter half of the nineteenth century, neither a word nor a concept of 'chimney' existed in Japan, as is recorded in La Chine et le Japon au temps present (1869) by Heinrich Schliemann, for example, who visited Edo (today's Tokyo) in 1865. After the Meiji Restoration the new government began modernising the society, economy and military of Japan, and factories and their chimneys were the symbols of this process of industrialisation and advanced technologies. In this historical context it was wise of SANGU not to use the word 'chimney' in his translation. Otherwise, Blake's 'Chimney Sweeper' might have been understood as a criticism of child labour in factories. He carefully selected Japanese words and phrases not to mislead the reader, who was not familiar with things British, and even replaced 'Church' and 'Chapel' with Buddhist terms that were almost equivalent to the original words in Christianity. In this sense, SANGU translated Blake culturally. In other words, his method of translation would not have been effective without sufficient knowledge of eighteenth-century British society. This explains one of the reasons why the poems of Blake's that particularly focus on animals, insects and flowers were preferably translated into Japanese in the place. Consequently in the 1900s and the 1910s in Japan Blake was regarded as a poet of symbolism and mysticism, detached from the society of his own age. It was not until the 1920s, when the Japanese translation of 'The Chimney Sweeper' and other poems about the gloomy life in Georgian London was published, that Blake's social criticism was properly appreciated.