小説で世界でいちばん長い1文とは? (2)

先日ノーベル文学賞の発表がありましたが,75年前の1949年に受賞したのが敬愛してやまない作家ウィリアム・フォークナー

3absalom6.jpg

3absalom5.jpg

前回,彼の代表作「アブサロム,アブサロム!」の中の1文が1983年版のギネスブックに「文学で最も長い1文」(the Longest Sentence in Literature)として載っていることを書きました。

Absalom, Absalom!
Absalom, Absalom!

3absalom7.jpg

この小説の第6章に,1,288語でできた1文(無終止文)が出てくるんですが,これがギネスに載ったのです。

まあ,現在では,最も長い英文の記録所有者はイギリス人作家,ジョナサン・コーで,The Rotter's Club(2001年)の 33ページにわたる13,955語の文が最長だそうですが,こちらはギネスに載っていません。

The Rotters' Club (Penguin Essentials, 110) - Coe, Jonathan
The Rotters' Club (Penguin Essentials, 110) - Coe, Jonathan

前回少し出てきましたが,フォークナーは小説を書く手法として「意識の流れ」を用いました。
これは登場人物の思考の過程をそのまま文章にしたものなので,カンマや関係代名詞などを使って後置修飾しながら,多少の文章の破綻はあっても続いていきます

下の文は,これもフォークナーの代表作「八月の光」の原文から。
He「彼(=パーシー・グリム)」の頭の中で素早くかつ落ち着いて思考している様子が「意識の流れ」としてイタリック(斜字体)で表現されています(赤で囲まれた部分)。

3absalom8.jpg

では,ギネスが認定した「文学における最長の1文」(1,288語)の文を見てみましょう。

*私は複数の英語サイトと英語版 Wikipedia から 1,288語としました。日本語サイトでは1,287語と書いている人が多いのですが,日本語版 Wikipedia がそう書いているからでしょう。

William Faulkner's 1,288-word sentence from Absalom, Absalom! (1936). It's recognized as the longest sentence in English literature in the 1983 Guinness Book of Records.

ウィリアム・フォークナー作「アブサロム,アブサロム!」(1936年)の1,288語の文。1983年のギネスブックで「英語文学における最長の1文」として認定されている。


Just exactly like Father if Father had known as much about it the night before I went out there as he did the day after I came back thinking Mad impotent old man who realized at last that there must be some limit even to the capabilities of a demon for doing harm, who must have seen his situation as that of the show girl, the pony, who realizes that the principal tune she prances to comes not from horn and fiddle and drum but from a clock and calendar, must have seen himself as the old wornout cannon which realizes that it can deliver just one more fierce shot and crumble to dust in its own furious blast and recoil, who looked about upon the scene which was still within his scope and compass and saw son gone, vanished, more insuperable to him now than if the son were dead since now (if the son still lived) his name would be different and those to call him by it strangers and whatever dragon’s outcropping of Sutpen blood the son might sow on the body of whatever strange woman would therefore carry on the tradition, accomplish the hereditary evil and harm under another name and upon and among people who will never have heard the right one; daughter doomed to spinsterhood who had chosen spinsterhood already before there was anyone named Charles Bon since the aunt who came to succor her in bereavement and sorrow found neither but instead that calm absolutely impenetrable face between a homespun dress and sunbonnet seen before a closed door and again in a cloudy swirl of chickens while Jones was building the coffin and which she wore during the next year while the aunt lived there and the three women wove their own garments and raised their own food and cut the wood they cooked it with (excusing what help they had from Jones who lived with his granddaughter in the abandoned fishing camp with its collapsing roof and rotting porch against which the rusty scythe which Sutpen was to lend him, make him borrow to cut away the weeds from the door-and at last forced him to use though not to cut weeds, at least not vegetable weeds -would lean for two years) and wore still after the aunt’s indignation had swept her back to town to live on stolen garden truck and out o f anonymous baskets left on her front steps at night, the three of them, the two daughters negro and white and the aunt twelve miles away watching from her distance as the two daughters watched from theirs the old demon, the ancient varicose and despairing Faustus fling his final main now with the Creditor’s hand already on his shoulder, running his little country store now for his bread and meat, haggling tediously over nickels and dimes with rapacious and poverty-stricken whites and negroes, who at one time could have galloped for ten miles in any direction without crossing his own boundary, using out of his meagre stock the cheap ribbons and beads and the stale violently-colored candy with which even an old man can seduce a fifteen-year-old country girl, to ruin the granddaughter o f his partner, this Jones-this gangling malaria-ridden white man whom he had given permission fourteen years ago to squat in the abandoned fishing camp with the year-old grandchild-Jones, partner porter and clerk who at the demon’s command removed with his own hand (and maybe delivered too) from the showcase the candy beads and ribbons, measured the very cloth from which Judith (who had not been bereaved and did not mourn) helped the granddaughter to fashion a dress to walk past the lounging men in, the side-looking and the tongues, until her increasing belly taught her embarrassment-or perhaps fear;-Jones who before ’61 had not even been allowed to approach the front of the house and who during the next four years got no nearer than the kitchen door and that only when he brought the game and fish and vegetables on which the seducer-to-be’s wife and daughter (and Clytie too, the one remaining servant, negro, the one who would forbid him to pass the kitchen door with what he brought) depended on to keep life in them, but who now entered the house itself on the (quite frequent now) afternoons when the demon would suddenly curse the store empty of customers and lock the door and repair to the rear and in the same tone in which he used to address his orderly or even his house servants when he had them (and in which he doubtless ordered Jones to fetch from the showcase the ribbons and beads and candy) direct Jones to fetch the jug, the two of them (and Jones even sitting now who in the old days, the old dead Sunday afternoons of monotonous peace which they spent beneath the scuppernong arbor in the back yard, the demon lying in the hammock while Jones squatted against a post, rising from time to time to pour for the demon from the demijohn and the bucket of spring water which he had fetched from the spring more than a mile away then squatting again, chortling and chuckling and saying `Sho, Mister Tawm’ each time the demon paused)-the two of them drinking turn and turn about from the jug and the demon not lying down now nor even sitting but reaching after the third or second drink that old man’s state of impotent and furious undefeat in which he would rise, swaying and plunging and shouting for his horse and pistols to ride single-handed into Washington and shoot Lincoln (a year or so too late here) and Sherman both, shouting, ‘Kill them! Shoot them down like the dogs they are!’ and Jones: ‘Sho, Kernel; sho now’ and catching him as he fell and commandeering the first passing wagon to take him to the house and carry him up the front steps and through the paintless formal door beneath its fanlight imported pane by pane from Europe which Judith held open for him to enter with no change, no alteration in that calm frozen face which she had worn for four years now, and on up the stairs and into the bedroom and put him to bed like a baby and then lie down himself on the floor beside the bed though not to sleep since before dawn the man on the bed would stir and groan and Jones would say, ‘flyer I am, Kernel. Hit’s all right. They aint whupped us yit, air they?’ this Jones who after the demon rode away with the regiment when the granddaughter was only eight years old would tell people that he ‘was lookin after Major’s place and niggers’ even before they had time to ask him why he was not with the troops and perhaps in time came to believe the lie himself, who was among the first to greet the demon when he returned, to meet him at the gate and say, ‘Well, Kernel, they kilt us but they aint whupped us yit, air they?’ who even worked, labored, sweat at the demon’s behest during that first furious period while the demon believed he could restore by sheer indomitable willing the Sutpen’s Hundred which he remembered and had lost, labored with no hope of pay or reward who must have seen long before the demon did (or would admit it) that the task was hopeless-blind Jones who apparently saw still in that furious lecherous wreck the old fine figure of the man who once galloped on the black thoroughbred about that domain two boundaries of which the eye could not see from any point.

*昔は単語の途中で改行されないようになっていたのですが,今はそれができなくて残念です。

「アブサロム,アブサロム!」は語り手のクエンティンが同じハーバード大学に通うカナダ人のシュリ―ヴにトマス・サトペン大佐を中心とするアメリカ南部の歴史を語る物語が中心になります。

これまで4名の方が翻訳しているようです。
これは集英社の世界文学全集の篠田一士訳。篠田訳では「意識の流れ」の部分は小さめの活字になっています。よく見ると赤線で囲った部分は小さい活字に変わっています。

3absalom3.jpg

翻訳家も大変だけど,当時の活字工の人も大変だったろうなあ。

最後に,フォークナーのことはこれまでも何度か書いてきました。
気になる記事がありましたら,そちらもどうぞ。

架空の街 ヨクナパトーファ郡ジェファソン

Faulkner, Faulkner!

大江健三郎さんを偲んで

村上春樹とフォークナー(1) 「響きと怒り」

村上春樹とフォークナー(2) 「納屋を焼く」

村上春樹とフォークナー(3) 「世界の終りとハードボイルド・ワンダーランド」



この記事へのコメント

2024年10月22日 06:26
おはようございます。

 こういう手法もあるのですね。「意識の流れ」、「思考の過程をそのまま文章に」ですか、、、こういう事は私も時々するのですけど、、、でも、書いている自分の思考過程は、一旦句点を打っているんですよね、、、なので、なかなかこんな長文にはなりませんねぇ。

 お気づきになられましたか? ちょっとだけマネをしてみたのですけど(笑)
2024年10月23日 06:13
あきあかねさん
おはようございます。
一本取られました! やはり日本語は不自然な付け足しが並記になりますよね。関係代名詞を持たないのでわかりやすく,言語としては優れていると思います。