Notes of A Critic

英語版「批評家の手帖」福田恆存著 中村保男英譯

　本書は日本語そのものを取り上げてゐるものではないが、日本語により言語の本質に迫らうとしたもので、福田恆存の言語に關する竝々ならぬ思索の歩みを明示してくれる。本會の評議員であつた中村保男氏が、その内容の普遍的であることから、英語に譯することを思ひたつたのは著者生前のことで、内々の承諾を受けてゐたものである。
茲に、更めてことばとは何かに思ひを致すよすがともし、兩者を顯彰する意味を籠めて、ウエブでの連載をすることとした。どちらかといふとウエブ用の話題が少ない本協議會の、電網上での彩りとなることも願つてゐる。
連載は定期的とは行きかねるが、なるべく頻繁なものとする豫定であり、初めに英文を、次囘にその日本語版を載せることとしてゐる。日本語本文が、横書きになることをお許しいただきたい。
本連載にあたつては、福田敦江夫人および中村周子夫人の掲載許諾を受けてゐることを、感謝の氣持をもつて御報告申上げる。
平成二十一年三月 谷田貝 常夫
Foreword
Many Japanese books have been translated and published abroad so far. But most of them are novels, or essays on things Japanese, and only a few full-fledged critical writings on a universal theme have appeared in English versions.
It is true that Japan has been chiefly on the receiving side of not only technology and new products but also many kinds of literature such as novels, plays, and critical works. I ,as a Japanese, think that Japan must also be an actively transmitting country in as many fields as possible. And one of the fields is literary speculation, one example of which is this work.
Its original title ( translated into English ) is Notes of Ａ Critic，with the subtitle Literary Reflections on The Functions of Words. And the author begins the book with a startling statement that there is nothing certain in this world, and ends it with a reminder that no works of art can be made perfect.
In between he discusses such topics as how reality comes to imitate language; how the only thing that exists is relationship; how words indicate things at the same time as they themselves are things; how the novelist hides himself in his novels when what his readers really want is to hear his voice; how the main characters in Chekhov' play The Three Sisters only interpret themselves in their utterances while in Shakespeare's plays all the characters except the hero cooperate with him to make him the centre of the drama.
While discussing those and other topics, the author cites examples from Greek Sophists, Socrates, Plato, Thomas De Quincey, and such Japanese novelists as Soseki and Futabatei.. Those novelists may be unknown to readers outside Japan, but the author of this book treats them in such a manner that no background knowledge is required, because the topics concerning them is about " funniness" or drollery of the way they depict the characters or situations in their novels.
Thus humour, irony, and dissimulation become one of the main themes of this book which is indeed a many-faceted body consisting of as many as 283 short sections. However, these sections, or notes as the author calls them, often run in a continuous flow, making the whole book a more or less consistent series of discourses rather than a mere collection of numerous fragments.
The above expounding, however, is only a clumsy effort on the side of the translator when one compares it with what the author himself says in his own comment which appears at the end of his complete works:

Linguistic philosophy is a field of study about language, not about words themselves. Words cannot be the subject of any study or learning. If someone asks you what a word is and you open your dictionary, you find that words are meaningful sounds emitted by people. This definition is not wrong, but the real shape of words does not become apparent through it. The definition sounds like a charade which brings only disappointment. If we are going to be disappointed anyway, it would be much better to learn that a word is a word or it is something you are so familiar with, as Dr Johnson said. In short, "What is a word ?" is an unanswerable question.
The content of the philosophy of language and the contents of all the dictionaries are other people's words after all. For those who consult a dictionary, words remain forever the words or utterances of others. If we want to explain words by using words, we must set up some frame and then confine words within it. Words can stabilize themselves only when we use technical terms or other people's words. If we do not like them, we must resort to the natural language which changes its meanings according to the context. That "language" is your own words, your own utterances.
These were the thoughts that were in my mind when I wrote Notes of A Critic. The result, as you see, is my going back and forth between two doors, at one of which stand the things that can be uttered in the form of words and at the other there are the things which are unutterable by words. Thus, shuttling to and fro, I kept mumbling, "That is not the way it really is, no; but nor is this the way it is either", and the result of it all is just a trace of my incessant movement during which I did nothing much more than voraciously savouring the pleasure of the very process.

The last part of the above quotation from the author's own commentary, I think, comes from his modesty, but at the same time it also is the expression of one of his beliefs that one must enjoy the process of doing something rather than trying too hard to reach the conclusion.
Anyway, the readers of this book may be induced to reconsider what they have taken for granted not only about the nature of language or words but also about the relationship between a speaker and his words.
Fukuda Tsuneari, the author, was born in Tokyo, in 1912. He began his literary career as a critic of both Japanese and Western literature, but his activity was not confined to literature and extended to politics particularly during the Cold War. He defended the free world against Communism. His thoughts, however, never left the domain of literature and they remained literary in essence even when he was discussing political situations.
He, in the role of a dramatist, wrote more than ten plays and translated Shakespeare's major plays and directed the staging of many of them. The English works he translated include those of T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, G. K. Chesterton, Ernest Hemingway (The Old Man and the Sea ) etc..
He is also known as the leader of the movement opposing the government-enforced reform of the Japanese language.
All in all, he was one of the Modern Japanese Renaissance men who did not limit themselves to a single role. I hope that he will be known as such (and as more) throughout the world. When he died in1996, he was a member of Japan Art Academy.
2,000 Nakamura Yasuo
1
There is nothing certain in this world. Probably that is why people speak and act with assurance and certainty. At least they prefer to do so. In short, they seek to dominate others with their words and deeds. Only then ― through the process of this domination ― do things which have been uncertain become certain.