日曜の朝
インターネット・ラジオのジス・アメリカン・ライフ、「2011年 父の日」編を聴いているところです。弟が先週薦めてくれました。
15分経過：「父親って皆そんな感じなんだ。」父には失礼かもしれないですが、「そういうもんなんだ」、と思いました。多少ぎこちなくて、家族では彼にしか通用しない発想があります。でもそれでもがんばってそういう過保護かもしれない発想のメリットに関して私たちを説得させようとする：それが愛情の証なんだな、と。
このエピソードのプロローグではジェシカという若い女性がお父さんとの間に起こった変わったハプニングについて語ります。ジェシカが14歳だった頃、ある日、通常無口で感情を表さないお父さんが不意に彼女の肩を撫で始めます。気がついたら彼は毎日ジェシカの肩を撫でるようになっています。彼女はこれが嫌でたまらなく、お父さんの気配を感じていつやってくるのか、とびくびくするようになってしまいます。彼に直接やめてくれないか、と頼んでも状況は変わりません。お母さんに話してみると、お父さんが聴いているラジオ番組が紹介した研究：家族の人に一日数回触れないとその一員は愛されていると実感しないのだ、と。
そこで番組の司会者アイラがジェシカに尋ねます。「彼がもっと直接に、『大好きだよ』と言ってあなたを抱きしめたらどうだった？」ジェシカ笑いながらいわく、「それでも何かお父さんの頭の中でおかしいことが起きてたんじゃないかって思っていただろうわ。だって彼はそういう人じゃないんだもの。どっちみちしょうがなかったっていうことね。」
このエピソードでこれまで紹介されたその他の父親：家を出てニューヨークの大学に通う娘に「テロ対策セット」をこしらえる父親。セットを作っている父親を見ていた当時はあきらめがちの娘だったが、セットを開けてみた二年後、出てきた手紙を読んで彼女はぐっときてしまう。
日曜の朝が日曜の午後になりました。今週末はボーっとしてちょっといい感じです。これから、ジス・アメリカン・ライフを聴き終わり、お掃除を徹底的にし、久しぶりのお料理に心掛けようと思います。心地いいですね。
P.S.親への感謝は年をとるにつれて増してきます。23になってやっとか、と自分にあきれますが、いまさらでも親は聞きたいものだと思います。ブログに招待状をこれから送ります。
I'm listening to an episode of This American Life called "Father's Day 2011," which my brother recommended the other week.
Fifteen minutes in, and I'm thinking to myself, "So dads are all like that." With all due respect to my father, I felt myself finally getting it, that dads are alike in their ways, and that it's a dad thing. My father is a tad awkward, and some of his ideas don't gain currency with any other member of the family. Despite that, I realized, all of his efforts to persuade us to see the merits of his possibly over-protective ideas are just a sign of his love.
In the prologue of this episode, a young woman named Jessica describes a strange incident with her father, who has always been reticent and not one to share his feelings. When Jessica is fourteen, out of the blue, her father starts patting her on the shoulder. Before she knows it, he is patting her shoulder every day. Jessica understably cannot stand this, even coming to dread his presence as he approaches to pat her shoulder. She asks him flat-out to stop but to no avail. As she's talking to her mother, Jessica finds out that the radio program her father has been listening to reviewed the results of a study that showed that for one to feel loved by his or her family, s/he has to be physically touched several times a day.
At this point, the host, Ira Glass, asks Jessica, "What if your father, in a more direct way, had said to you, 'Jessica, I love you. Give me a hug'?" Jessica responds, laughing, "I would have thought something must be wrong with him, because that's just not in his personality to do. So he would have been doomed either way!"
Another father introduced in this episode so far: the one who builds an anti-terrorism kit for his daughter who is heading off to college in New York. At the time, when he is building the kit, the daughter merely throws her hands up, but two years later, when she opens the kit and reads the letter inside, she is overcome with emotion.
Sunday morning has turned to Sunday afternoon. This weekend has been a time to chill out, which I've loved. I'm going to finish listening to the This American Life episode, thoroughly clean the house, and do the rare bit of cooking that I always plan to do. It feels like a cozy weekend.
P.S. As I grow older, I feel more and more gratitude to my parents. I do feel aggravated with myself that it's taken until I was twenty-three to feel this, but I bet that even now, my folks would be glad to hear this. I'm going to send them a blog invitation now.
P.P.S. The approach I've been taking on these posts is to draft the non-English portions first and to back-translate them into English. Even though the first language I learned was Japanese and I still speak exclusively in Japanese with my parents, English took over as my dominant language sometime in middle school. While I don't think writing in English and translating that to Japanese or French is a good practice of my L2 and L3 (effectively, though not actually, my 2nd- and 3rd-acquired languages), the opposite works well for me. That is to say, writing from French and Japanese from the get-go and translating into English later is a much more active use of those linguistic faculties, even if I do have to lean heavily on dictionaries as a crutch.
What I'm doing there is what I consider, in George Steiner's framework, to be internal translation (a less explicit kind of inner translation, in Steiner's framework, is the act of reading, even if the text is in one's native language: it takes an act of interpretation to understand the writing of another). For the benefit of readers who don't speak Japanese or French, I am including English translations. As a Japanese-to-English freelance translator in another life, I also find that this exercise helped hone my translation skills. It made me remember that to be a good translator, one has to know the source language (language from which one translates) well, know the subject matter well, and be a good writer in the target language (language into which one translates).
All of this reminds me that these topics -- language acquisition, childhood language acquisition, translation theory, translation in practice -- are still fascinating to me and are hot topics to boot in the psychological and cognitive science community. The world outside (people and their many languages and cultures), the world inside (the languages inside my head, how they relate to each other, how they take turns with each other): it's all still very fascinating!
15分経過：「父親って皆そんな感じなんだ。」父には失礼かもしれないですが、「そういうもんなんだ」、と思いました。多少ぎこちなくて、家族では彼にしか通用しない発想があります。でもそれでもがんばってそういう過保護かもしれない発想のメリットに関して私たちを説得させようとする：それが愛情の証なんだな、と。
このエピソードのプロローグではジェシカという若い女性がお父さんとの間に起こった変わったハプニングについて語ります。ジェシカが14歳だった頃、ある日、通常無口で感情を表さないお父さんが不意に彼女の肩を撫で始めます。気がついたら彼は毎日ジェシカの肩を撫でるようになっています。彼女はこれが嫌でたまらなく、お父さんの気配を感じていつやってくるのか、とびくびくするようになってしまいます。彼に直接やめてくれないか、と頼んでも状況は変わりません。お母さんに話してみると、お父さんが聴いているラジオ番組が紹介した研究：家族の人に一日数回触れないとその一員は愛されていると実感しないのだ、と。
そこで番組の司会者アイラがジェシカに尋ねます。「彼がもっと直接に、『大好きだよ』と言ってあなたを抱きしめたらどうだった？」ジェシカ笑いながらいわく、「それでも何かお父さんの頭の中でおかしいことが起きてたんじゃないかって思っていただろうわ。だって彼はそういう人じゃないんだもの。どっちみちしょうがなかったっていうことね。」
このエピソードでこれまで紹介されたその他の父親：家を出てニューヨークの大学に通う娘に「テロ対策セット」をこしらえる父親。セットを作っている父親を見ていた当時はあきらめがちの娘だったが、セットを開けてみた二年後、出てきた手紙を読んで彼女はぐっときてしまう。
日曜の朝が日曜の午後になりました。今週末はボーっとしてちょっといい感じです。これから、ジス・アメリカン・ライフを聴き終わり、お掃除を徹底的にし、久しぶりのお料理に心掛けようと思います。心地いいですね。
P.S.親への感謝は年をとるにつれて増してきます。23になってやっとか、と自分にあきれますが、いまさらでも親は聞きたいものだと思います。ブログに招待状をこれから送ります。
I'm listening to an episode of This American Life called "Father's Day 2011," which my brother recommended the other week.
Fifteen minutes in, and I'm thinking to myself, "So dads are all like that." With all due respect to my father, I felt myself finally getting it, that dads are alike in their ways, and that it's a dad thing. My father is a tad awkward, and some of his ideas don't gain currency with any other member of the family. Despite that, I realized, all of his efforts to persuade us to see the merits of his possibly over-protective ideas are just a sign of his love.
In the prologue of this episode, a young woman named Jessica describes a strange incident with her father, who has always been reticent and not one to share his feelings. When Jessica is fourteen, out of the blue, her father starts patting her on the shoulder. Before she knows it, he is patting her shoulder every day. Jessica understably cannot stand this, even coming to dread his presence as he approaches to pat her shoulder. She asks him flat-out to stop but to no avail. As she's talking to her mother, Jessica finds out that the radio program her father has been listening to reviewed the results of a study that showed that for one to feel loved by his or her family, s/he has to be physically touched several times a day.
At this point, the host, Ira Glass, asks Jessica, "What if your father, in a more direct way, had said to you, 'Jessica, I love you. Give me a hug'?" Jessica responds, laughing, "I would have thought something must be wrong with him, because that's just not in his personality to do. So he would have been doomed either way!"
Another father introduced in this episode so far: the one who builds an anti-terrorism kit for his daughter who is heading off to college in New York. At the time, when he is building the kit, the daughter merely throws her hands up, but two years later, when she opens the kit and reads the letter inside, she is overcome with emotion.
Sunday morning has turned to Sunday afternoon. This weekend has been a time to chill out, which I've loved. I'm going to finish listening to the This American Life episode, thoroughly clean the house, and do the rare bit of cooking that I always plan to do. It feels like a cozy weekend.
P.S. As I grow older, I feel more and more gratitude to my parents. I do feel aggravated with myself that it's taken until I was twenty-three to feel this, but I bet that even now, my folks would be glad to hear this. I'm going to send them a blog invitation now.
P.P.S. The approach I've been taking on these posts is to draft the non-English portions first and to back-translate them into English. Even though the first language I learned was Japanese and I still speak exclusively in Japanese with my parents, English took over as my dominant language sometime in middle school. While I don't think writing in English and translating that to Japanese or French is a good practice of my L2 and L3 (effectively, though not actually, my 2nd- and 3rd-acquired languages), the opposite works well for me. That is to say, writing from French and Japanese from the get-go and translating into English later is a much more active use of those linguistic faculties, even if I do have to lean heavily on dictionaries as a crutch.
What I'm doing there is what I consider, in George Steiner's framework, to be internal translation (a less explicit kind of inner translation, in Steiner's framework, is the act of reading, even if the text is in one's native language: it takes an act of interpretation to understand the writing of another). For the benefit of readers who don't speak Japanese or French, I am including English translations. As a Japanese-to-English freelance translator in another life, I also find that this exercise helped hone my translation skills. It made me remember that to be a good translator, one has to know the source language (language from which one translates) well, know the subject matter well, and be a good writer in the target language (language into which one translates).
All of this reminds me that these topics -- language acquisition, childhood language acquisition, translation theory, translation in practice -- are still fascinating to me and are hot topics to boot in the psychological and cognitive science community. The world outside (people and their many languages and cultures), the world inside (the languages inside my head, how they relate to each other, how they take turns with each other): it's all still very fascinating!
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