勧めている短編小説：Silence, a Fable.
沈黙 (Silence, 1838年)

Public Domain パブリックドメイン (パブリックドメイン - Wikipedia) :

English ver.:

Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Bookshelf - Silence --- A Fable (ed. J. H. Ingram) (eapoe.org)

— 1874 — Works of Edgar A. Poe, edited by J. H. Ingram (vol. II, pp. 213-216)から

和訳 （青空文庫）：

エドガア・アラン・ポー　Edgar Allan Poe 佐々木直次郎訳 沈黙 ――神話 SILENCE ― A FABLE (aozora.gr.jp)

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ある英国紳士が、上流階級の仲間と一緒に大きくて豪華な公共馬車で高速道路(ハイウェイ Highway)を旅している。この種の高価な公共交通機関が提供する素敵なディナーを愉しみ、お決まりのシャンパンを飲んだ後、本と教育の話題に触れてスピーチする：
「そう、読書は旅のようなものだ。
森の中を、多くの柔らかくて
若いものが
湧き上がり、持ち上げられ、走り抜ける。
旺盛に恋する緑の葉、
快活にため息をつく金色の百合、
あるいはホメロス様に沈思をする冷たい清流。
彼らの内なるおぼろげさ、
伸びやかで届くような愛を語っている。
月女神（セレーネ）の針に痺れつつもーー
残酷な娯楽に、
彼女は無邪気に参加した--
若いレディ--
完璧に気性の荒い月。
彼女と彼女のいたずらな遊びへの好意が、
人間の彼女の不安定な顔を読む事に、
探る事にの夢中になれた。
まるで、この主なき(Lordless)果樹園で-----
石の木にたくさんの月光を吸い込んだ
貴重な宝石の実を集めるように-----
この主なきでも秩序正しい果樹園で-----
泳ぎ、多数派の群れ(school of fish)に
加わった墨魚の領主たち
(join the majority 多数派に加えた、英語諺、死亡の意味）
-----燃えるような黒い冷たい川に
落ちた銀色の星である宝石たち-----
死んだ大空(firmament)-----
領主たちが海の下で
多数派(死人）の永遠の踊りに
加わっていた場所-----エリュシオン

---果実の新鮮な砂糖の中に住む
褐色の低木の黒いジュニパーの精と、
露のような目をした露のような体をした
ゼウスとの間の多くの睦まじい囁きから、
すべての甘さは、エンピレアン（empyrean灼天国）の炎を通して、
永遠に変わらない稲妻の幸福へと完全に変化した---
そして、控えめに咲いた
古くて重いマホガニーの
落ちるローマ語のやゲール語の
言玉（詩と祈り・言霊）によって
スパイスを加えられた---
黄色い乳香の暗い涙。
空気は、ラテン語で歌われる
ジビエと花に満ちた、
宇宙的な幽玄さを帯びた、
湿った南部の草原と渓谷から
精製された黒い土の香りが充満している。
木神（シルヴァナス）の祝福を受けながら、
より親しみのある、
ウルガタ(ウルガタ)のイントネーションでも
優しい、抑えられた歓喜
暗く青々とした花々が流れ、
曲がる黄金の液体の饗宴。
そして、すべての冷たい牧歌(Ode on a Grecian Urn)-----
死んだウィルオウィスプ(鬼火）に向かって歌われる言葉。
孤独な恋人の歌い手によって、
はるか昔の太古の木立で、
儀式的な青鬱とともに---
ナイチンゲールのフィロメル(ピロメーラー )は...
静寂の中で歌う...
祈った古い藍の信仰を凌駕する...
青から青、しかし藍より青く...
(紙のページに印刷された靑墨)
旅人は幸せだ、この祝福された荒野を安全なキャラバンで行くことができる...。 その旅は長く、のんびりとしたものだ。多くの友を作り、別れる...友は道を旅する限り続く...永遠の青空の下で...読書、こんな素晴らしい道を..."
(to be continued, 一番いい部分はまた通訳中）

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English Prologue


An English gentleman, travelling in a big and luxurious public carriage with high class companions on the highroad makes a speech, after drinking the customary Champaine after a nice dinner offered by this type of costly public transport,  broaching on the topic of books and education:
"Yes, reading is like a journey;
Through the woodland so many things tender and young do spring,
lifted up, running; vigorously enamored green leaves,
or vivaciously sighing golden lilies, or Homeric thinking cold clear stream.
Do tell their inner dumbness,
their love extended and reaching, yet benumbed by the needles of Selene--
Cruel pastimes so innocently she did partake---a young lady----perfectly temperamental moon
fondness for her and her naughty play has made
Man into her inconstant face con
and glean; like gathering so many moonlight-suckling
precious gemfruits on stone-trees-----
in this lordlessly ordered orchard---inky lords who have swimmed
and joined the school of majority (of inky fishes)
gems that are silver stars fallen in the fiery black cold river--
dead firmament…
where lords had joined the majority's eternal dance below the seas--- Elysium

---from many a convivial whispers
between black juniper nymphs of the brown shrubs
that live in the fruits' fresh sugar---
and dew-eyed and dew-bodied Zeus,
has all sweetness through empyrean flare 
into fulgurated happiness everlasting fully turned --- 
and spiced by some modestly blooming
old and heavy mahogany Roman
or Gaelic speech-beads that fell---dark tears of yellow frankincense.
The air is redolent of black earthy scents rectified from the dampened southern meads and glens turned cosmically aethereal,
full of games and flowers sung in Latin. Even in intonations more familiar and Vulgate.
kind, suppressed glee.
---golden liquid repast through which darkly verdant flourishment
do flow and bend, blessed by Sylvanus.
And all cold pastorals-----words sung to the dead wil-o-wisp.
By a lone lover-songstress, in the antediluvian groves long-past,
with some ceremonial blue.---Philomel the Nightingale… in silence does sing.
Surpassing the lustily pallid forgetfulness the older indigo faith to which prayed.
Blue out of blue, yet bluer than indigo.
(inky words printed on paper pages)
Travellers happy, in safe caravans through this blessed wilderness may go….
for their journey is long and leisurely; many friends to be made and parted with…
friends last for as long as they travel on the road…under the eternal blue sky.
Reading, such a fine way to go…"

The drunk, sleeping little dwarf that lives in a small cabin
down below the passenger compartment
Who likes to watch the spokes on the wheel turn,

was waken up by
the English howling, and quite annoyed. 
After downing yet another bottle of rice wine,
He spews out these words like a charged rifle:
"Man, have you ever travelled far? beyond thy little happy English sky,*1
Have you ever read true dead poets' words most heartfelt? Ye who think not things,
that really sting your heart and leaves scabbed scars, or think not anything at all; ye lazy
English man and your priggish, prudish Victorian poetry,
More vulgar Vulgate made even more up and proper, booming with hollow cants, yet
with all the ruddy and healthy parts removed---the Good Book mutilated in quotes--humiliated…
that only tell and not show---bad poetry and bad form. moralisaing yourselves like a sheep grazing his neighbours' grass in a vast and green meadow---
nay, rather a pig wallowing in the cold dung and preaching the love from high above in abundance.
I do remember some dross written in you most Victorian English, it goes like this (written perhaps, by yet another very learnt and sonorous Englishman):

The English gentleman (quite enraged):
What? What! Little man, what is your business with our English poems? Isn't it justifiable to pursue natural realism in all kinds of art as the highest form of creative beauty lies in the ordered, rational and apparent universe? And isn't it the best thing to do if one pursues the highest, the transcendental through affirming real and natural things, regarding topics including the good old human tragedy and the sublime sensibility and many others? There is only one religion, philosophy and aesthetics which is naturalism (proud invention of our island nation, the British rationalism that confounded the barbarously mystic and ancient idealism from the continental Europe). Apparently you have not read much and do not understand the good, classic forms in English verses and proses that exude the air of high moral judgements and excellent intellectual character of a learnt and virtuous spirit residing in a natural and orderly body, nor do you understand the artistic methods employed by the great Anglo-Saxon poets and novelists that explore the strength and pathos of all noble human sentiments, or explore the deep, dark, manifold dimensions of involuted human psycho…..

The dwarf:
Silence!

The dwarf:
Shut ye tongue. Blabbering mouth. Speak ink no more. Your tears are not worth their salt.  

The dwarf:
I will tell you a tale---- a tale of true human tragedy. Save your cheap tears meant for soapy things (soap opera) to weep for some righteous despair!

The dwarf:
This was written by a poet in pain. Poe-et in Pain.

He spoke in silence---- he spoke a Fable:

Poe-et's shy, pink-eared Western Lotus,
wailing and weeping in the scarlet paradise of golden silence----their enfolded lines, terse miens and soft limbs; rosy, all too rosy in rose's good fortune had themselves
ravished, chewed and chocked by the white corpse-worms.
Silence---the golden fable. Begetters' many troubles.
The lotus can but sigh.
"and nod to and fro their everlasting heads."
Blueness turned purple; redness turned white.
The red blood rain like acid burning their remains.
And into sallow frame of bones they turned.
Green were the many trees that stood, by the river
Red and ruddy from the flesh-thawing rain;
White too. Sickly corpse wax mixed with stale saffron.
The river does not wish to join the brighter and more salubrious ocean,
"but [doomed to] palpitate forever and forever beneath the red eye of the [evil, black] sun"
Green were the many trees that stood, primeval and tall;
Greener, greener still than Man knew, greener than many
strangely perfumed nameless green bugs, insects, snakes and worms that lurked invisible in the grass..
bigger than the antediluvian sacred mountains---hidden, under the venerably old sky.
who sometimes drank from the ancient oceans that yet once lived
A good score more leviathans that were but those crawling things' lovely children.
Lived there too awesome behemoths, with their gleaming, jagged teeth;
Many a strong legions' girth does each ragged beast claim, 
Many a glistening camps of titan-soldiers that were their white bellies---their weight crushed the mountains.

Yet upon one's more scrutinizing gaze, all the aeonless beasts----their immeasurable forms;
are nothing but hulking and sad dark milky stones now, with their fabled stories soaring up the upper sky; too ancient,
 and too ancestral to name---such is the length of the time
bygone after the cessation of the tides of organic history.
Though the eternal waves-----of the unstoppable ocean;
does remain-----when all that were salty and sentimental---
were sublimed into the aery quiverings and rockings in all things…
winds driving through the ancient trees, dead flowers, strange water,
and the eerie golden clouds in the scarlet sky.
And of tears' gushing out,
of Man's quiverings and rockings of their heads eternally to and fro,
owing to fear, sorrow or regret---- were but the children
of the immortality of the dead waves
that the wine-drunk ocean once slept and dreamt.


Do any things feminine have the luxury
to taste bitter wine without thinking of their children?
Are those the sighs of autumn leaves you think you have heard?
Ye gilded lilies to black earth tenderly may go--nodding back and forth in inverse with regret--
-bury it beneath you with their beatified mortal livery.
But in the earth with colours immortal they may rot---and do you
dare to unearth them----dead sighs and bleeding wombs.
Life they did not bear, and from them shall never be borne.
Does the river effulgent of Jupiter's solar grains with his rainbow foam--
yet flow from their overmatured and much overloved forms--
River Lethe that has faded usuzakura(薄桜）turned into inky white--
Lorded over and engirdled the Sleepy Cave of Lesmosyne.
--imbibed thus regrettably constant from its abyssal moats,
by sweet honey-bearing, dead virgins who forgot what to forget---
before they attempted to take in the first quaff.

Are they still, are their stillness yet still;
for you to consume? And abuse the juice parts
As you wish----biting into, deflowering, crushing…
the woodland-dwelling boar you are; sees many things,
but in them only either as food or the afterthoughts of food.
who had dug up all the roots and grubs
from giant incense-bearing trees that grew to the height of heavens;
profound with sorrows; but do you penetrate their
sad blue thrones encrusted with frankincense,*2
underneath, where the earth is more firm and lordly,
all so you can eat?
Eaters of all things saintly ancestral----and defiler of 
tombs and graves sealed with silver wisdom…golden silence.
dark tombs and graves; may they be decorously buried.
Embalmed and mummified; waiting,
for the return of their lost ghosts that ventured too far away.
From their homes that are their twilight selphcre,
and so the sorrows of the body and the joy of the spirit,
may join once more.

Yet in silence, where all the sighs,
Turnings and bitings, most beloved bitter hatred and disgust;
Little white worms within the soul's hollows, if their rheumy eyes and hundred-feet harrying Man were to cede--- to some calmer and colder earthly cot---black profundity.
Deep doomed profundity----starless eternity. Damned be
what was above the black firmament erected only after death.
Silence. Golden silence which was a fable told by the sinistral black Genie.
Bid all men good night and farewell, and returned to his abyssal tomb.
Never again to be sealed, till Man's Lot above the ground,
was done undone.

Thus gazed the blue and rheumy eyes of
the monstrous lynx from out of the abyss-----at you.
And in answer to her gaze, Thus,

quoth he, Man: Silence, Nevermore!
Silence.
And the she-lynx monster gazing at you with blue rheumy eyes
and forever haunts that abyss never to be closed
which is called Tomb,
the lynx monster, heard, and came out therefrom
,who is called Silence,
thus she replied:" I am Silence, Nevermore?"
....
Silence.
Thus quoth She Silence, not-Man: " Nevermore."

quoth he, Man: Silence,
"Nevermore!"
…
Silence.
And the she-lynx monster gazing at you with blue rheumy eyes
and forever haunts that abyss never to be closed
which is called Tomb,
the lynx monster, heard, and came out therefrom
,who is called Silence,
thus she replied:" I am Silence, Nevermore?"
....
Silence.
Thus,
quoth she, Silence, not-Man:
" Nevermore."

*1 this whole stanza is a reference to "Silence, a fable" written by Edgar Allan Poe.

*2 Shakespeare wrote a play that has a line like this.
Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1992, act 1, scene 1, line 29. (I am not sure, ChatGPT gave me this reference but I cannot find the exact lines though)

*3 Telltale Heart: Another one of Poe's classic weird tales.
*4
Man: " Silence, (be) Never-More!"
----(eternal recurrence is dead, he shall return never more…)
Silence:"（I am) Silence; (Man, forsooth, you are) Nevermore!"
----(eternal recurrence is dead, he shall return never more…)

人：”沈黙（は）、永劫不帰（えいこふき）！
（永劫回帰はもう亡くなり、お前はもう決して戻らないものになった！）
沈黙：”（私は）沈黙、（人よ、お前こそは）永劫不帰！”
（永劫回帰はもう亡くなり、お前はもう決して戻らないものになった！）

（人：”沉默----（请）永不再有！
沉默：“(我是)沉默。（人---你是）永不再有!"）