My Profession as Translator

きわめてめずらしいことに、夜10時だったか11時だったかに眠くなった。我慢せずに眠った。目が覚めたらまだ午前３時前。いいことか悪いことかよくわからない……。ただ、最悪と言ってもいい状況にもかかわらず、自分の中にはなぜか開放されたような気分が存在する。

言葉を選び、意味を読み抜こうとしてきた「翻訳者」（米原万里さんのような人と比較して、自分を「通訳」と呼ぶにはおこがましすぎる）という立場をもっと自覚して、多少の誇りを感じてもいいのではないかとの思いが生じてきた。最初に言語を転換する仕事をしたのは、もう20年ほど前のことだから、言い過ぎではなく「ようやく」か。

あんまり侮辱されたからな。反作用かも。「容易な仕事」だと思わせるほど楽々とさばきすぎたか。米原さんが師匠と呼んでいたロシア語通訳の先達、徳永晴美さんの教えとして紹介されている「言葉ではなく意味を訳せ」を実践できる人がどれだけ少ないか、お探しになってみればおわかりになるかもしれない。そして、これを実践できる翻訳者からいくら（＄＄）請求されるかお知りになってみればよろしい。安い翻訳者はたくさんいるけど、仕事の質に誇りと自信を持てるのなら、そうそう自分を安売りしちゃいかんな。業務料金に下限を設定している翻訳者もいることだし。「言葉ではなく意味を訳せ」を自分なりに表現すれば、「機械ではなく人間として訳せ」だろうか。

それから、「翻訳者」と「記者」の仕事は似て似つかぬものだが、「正確・平易・簡潔」な文章を組み立てる能力を向上させるという点で、相互にプラスにもなった。

ふと、思ったこと。中国から伝わった日本で信仰されている仏教の経典は漢語で書かれているが、発音は日本式だ。和訳して読むなら別だが、中国語を日本語読みしてご利益があるのだろうか？

スターリンの横暴と弾圧の恐怖

During Stalingrad, the Supremo... received bulletins from all his roving Stavka plenipotentiaries, who had to report twice a day, noon and 9 p.m….
Stalin exuded power and energy. ‘One felt oppressed by Stalin’s power,’ wrote his new Railways Commissar who reported to him hundreds of times, ‘but also by his phenomenal memory and the fact he knew so much. He made one feel even less important than one was.’… If he was displeased, wrote Zhukov, ‘he lost his temper and objectivity failed him.’
… Having created an environment of boot-licking idolatry, Stalin was irritated by it.
‘What’s the point of talking to you?’ he would shout. ‘Whatever I say, you reply, “Yes Comrade Stalin; of course, Comrade Stalin… wise decision, Comrade Stalin.”’ (pp. 385-387)

Operation Uranus seemed to refresh Stalin who, observed Khrushchev, started to act ‘like a real soldier’, considering himself ‘a great military strategist’….
At about 10 p.m., [General Alexei] Antonov made his second report…. War was the natural state of the Bolsheviks and they were good at it. Terror and struggle, the ruling Bolshevik passion, pervaded the meetings. Stalin liberally used fear but he himself lived on his nerves: when the new Railways Commissar arrived, Stalin simply said, ‘Transport is a matter of life and death… Remember, failure to carry out… orders means the Military Tribunal’ at which the young man felt ‘a chill run down my spine’….
… When some armies complained that they had not received their supplies, Stalin berated [General A.V.] Khrulev:
‘You’re worse than the Enemy: you work for Hitler.’
The three guard dogs of the Little Corner, Molotov, Malenkov and Beria, ‘never asked questions, just sat there….’ (pp. 388-389)

… ‘We could all remember 1937,’ said Zhukov. If anything went wrong, they knew ‘you’d end up in Beria’s hands and Beria was always present during my meetings with Stalin.’ The generals’ sins were recorded: Mekhlis had accused [I.S.] Koniev of having kulak parents in 1938. Rokossovsky and Meretskov were naturally keen not to return to Beria’s torture chambers. Stalin received information, complaints and denunciations from the secret police and his generals.
When they wrote their memoirs in the sixties, the generals presented themselves as Beria’s innocent victims. They were certainly under the constant threat of arrest but were themselves avid denouncers…. (p. 389)

The ‘terror of the Party’, Beria, who behaved like a villain in a film noir, blossomed in wartime, using the Gulag’s 1.7 million labourers to build Stalin’s weapons and railways. It is estimated that around 930,000 of these labourers perished during the war…. (pp. 390-391)

Within four days of the launch of Operation Uranus, the Germans Sixth Army, 330,000 men, was encircled in what Stalin called the ‘decisive moment of the war’. As the Russians tightened the grip, von Manstein’s counter-attack failed to break through. The Luftwaffe proved incapable of supplying from the air. The encircled Germans suffered a cruel slow death from starvation, ice and dynamite. On 16 December, the Russians counter-attacked into Manstein’s rear, threatening to cut off Army Group Don and break through towards Rostov. In the Little Corner, the impatient Stalin chose General Rokossovsky, not the Stalingrad commander Yeremenko, to oversee Operation Ring, the liquidation of the Six Army.
On 10 January, Rokossovsky attacked the benighted Germans, slicing their pocket in half…. On 31 January, Field Marshal Paulus surrendered and 92,000 starving, frostbitten scarecrows, barely recognizable as men let alone soldiers, became prisoners…. (pp. 392-393)

テヘラン会談

As soon as Roosevelt arrived, Stalin invited him to move into the Soviet compound…. Stalin was determined to separate the Westerners, whom he expected to gang up on him. It happened that this also suited Roosevelt’s strategy to engage Stalin directly, without the British, to prove his suspicions groundless….
Stalin sent word that he would call on the President, a meeting he had prepared carefully. Naturally Beria bugged the presidential suite. Beria’s handsome son, Sergo,… was among the Soviet eavesdroppers…. He did the same for his meetings with Churchill, according to Beria’s son….
Just before three… Stalin… strode ‘clumsily like a small bear’ to call on Roosevelt in the mansion….
Stalin stressed his need for the Second Front before Roosevelt established a rapport by undermining the British Empire. India was ripe for a revolution ‘from the bottom’, like Russia, said FDR, who was ill-informed about Leninism as he was about the untouchables….
At 4 p.m., the Big Three gathered… Stalin and Churchill agreed that Roosevelt was to chair the meeting…. Stalin insisted on the earliest preference for [Operation] Overlord, the cross-channel invasion… Churchill was still unconvinced, preferring a preliminary Mediterranean operation, using troops already in the area. However FDR was already committed to the Channel. As a flustered Churchill realized he was outvoted, Roosevelt winked at Stalin…
On the 29th, Stalin and Roosevelt met again… That morning, the President proposed the creation of an international organization that became the United Nations. Meanwhile, the generals were meeting with Voroshilov who, according to [Hugh] Lunghi (a British interpreter), absolutely refused to understand the amphibious challenge of an invasion of France, thinking it was like crossing a Russian river on a raft. (pp. 411-414)

Stalin… kept up the pressure on Churchill for the Second Front:
‘Do the British really believe in Overlord or are you only saying so to reassure the Russians?’ When he heard that the Allies had not yet agreed on a commander, he growled: ‘Then nothing will come out of these operations.’… Finally, when Churchill would not give a date, Stalin suddenly got to his feet and turning Molotov and Voroshilov, said,
‘Let’s not waste our time here. We’ve got plenty to do at the front.’ Roosevelt managed to pour unction on troubled water.
On 2 December, Stalin, ‘satisfied’ that the Allies had finally promised to launch Overlord in the spring, flew out of Teheran… (pp. 415-417)

少数民族の強制移住

Before they turned to terrorizing Russia proper, Beria and the local boss, Khrushchev, were running a new war in the Ukraine where three nationalist armies were fighting Soviet forces. Then there was the dubious loyalty of the Caucasus and Crimea.
In February 1944, Beria proposed the deportation of the Moslem Chechen and Ingush… … Stalin and the GKO agreed – though Mikoyan claimed he objected to it…. By 7 March, Beria reported Stalin that 500,000 innocents were on their way.
Other peoples, the Karachai and Kalnyks, joined the Volga Germans who had been deported in 1941. Beria constantly expanded the net… Over 300,000 [Balkars] were deported….
Then Beria reported that the treason of Tatars in the Crimea and soon 160,000 were on their way eastwards in forty-five trains… By the time he finished, a triumphant Beria had removed 1.5 million people. More than a quarter of the deportees died, according to the NKVD, but as many as 530,000 perished en route or on arrival at the camps. … this was an apocalypse that approached the Holocaust.
While these cattle cars of human cargo trundled eastwards, famine was raging in Russia, Central Asia and the Ukraine… On 22 November 1944, Beria reported to Stalin another case of cannibalism in the Urals when two women kidnapped and ate four children. Mikoyan and Andreyev suggested giving the peasants seeds:
‘To Molotov and Mikoyan,’ Stalin scrawled on their note, ‘I vote against. Mikoyan’s behaviour is anti-state… he has absolutely corrupted Andreyev…’ This was the beginning of a growing iciness between Stalin and Mikoyan that was to become increasingly dangerous. (pp. 418-419)

ミンスク奪還とポーランド傀儡政権

On 20 May 1944, Stalin met his generals to co-ordinate the vast summer offensive that would finally toss the Germans off Soviet territory. Much of the Ukraine was already liberated and the Leningrad siege finally lifted. Stalin proposed a single thrust towards Bobruisk to Rokossovsky, who knew two thrusts were required to avoid senseless casualties. But Stalin was set on just one… Rokossovsky… was brave enough to insist on his own view.
‘Go out and think it through, General,’ said Stalin, who later summoned him back….
‘Two thrusts are more advisable, Comrade Stalin.’…
‘Go out and think it over again. Don’t be stubborn, Rokossovsky,’…
‘Don’t forget where you are and with whom you’re talking, General,’ Malenkov threatened him. ‘You’re disagreeing with Comrade Stalin.’
‘You’ll have to agree, Rokossovsky,’ added Molotov. ‘Agree – that’s all there is to it!’ The general was summoned back into the study:
‘So which is better?’ asked Stalin.
‘Two,’ answered Rokossovsky. Silence descended until Stalin asked:
‘Can it be that two blows are really better?’ Stalin accepted Rokossovsky’s plan. On 23 June, the offensive shattered the German forces. Minsk and then Lvov were recaptured… Stalin was determined to impose his own government on Poland so that it would never again threaten Russia: on 22 July, he established a Polish Committee under Boleslaw Bierut to form the new government….
‘Germany will try to make peace with Churchill and Roosevelt,’ said Molotov.
‘Right,’ Stalin, ‘but Roosevelt and Churchill won’t agree.’ Then the Poles threw a spanner into the works of the Grand Alliance. (pp. 419-420)

ワルシャワ蜂起

The Red Army offensive ground to an exhausted halt on the Vistula just east of Warsaw when, on 1 August, General Tadeusz Bor-Komorowski and the 20,000 patriots of the Polish Home Army rose against the Germans in the Warsaw Rising. But the patriots, in the words of one distinguished historian, aimed ‘not to help the Soviet advance but to forestall it’. Hitler ordered that Warsaw be razed, deploying a ghoulish crew of SS fanatics, convicts and Russian renegades to slaughter 225,000 civilians in one merciless inferno.
The extermination of the Home Army completed the ‘black work’ of Katyn for Stalin who had no interest in coming to their rescue. Yet the rising and, more particularly, the Western sympathy for it, sent Stalin into a spin. If its success threatened his Polish plan, then Anglo-American fury about its failure threatened the Grand Alliance.
… as Churchill and Roosevelt exerted intense pressure on their ally to aid the Poles, Stalin coolly claimed that their account of the rising was ‘greatly exaggerated’. By the time his armies pushed into Poland, Hungry and Romania, it was much too late for the patriots of Warsaw. (pp. 420-421)

東欧分割

Seven days after the surrender of the Home Army, Churchill arrived in Moscow to divide up the spoils of Eastern Europe. Stalin had stated his real view to Molotov in 1942: ‘The question of borders will be decided by force.’… Churchill… proposed a ‘naughty document’ to list their interests in the small countries by percentage. The Soviet record in Stalin’s own archives showed that, just as Roosevelt had undermined Churchill at Teheran, so now the Englishman opened this conversation by saying that the ‘Americans, including the President would be shocked by the division of Europe into spheres of influence’. In Romania, Russia had 90 per cent, Britain 10 per cent; in Greece, Britain had 90 per cent, Russia 10 per cent….
‘Might it not be thought cynical if it seemed we’d disposed of these issues, so fateful to millions of people, in such an offhand manner?’ said Churchill, half guilty at, and half-revelling in, the arrogance of the Great Powers.
‘No, you keep it,’ replied Stalin. The document was taken seriously enough for Eden and Molotov to negotiate for two more days about the percentage of Soviet influence in Bulgaria and Hungary, both raised to 80 per cent, and Stalin did stick to his part of the deal on Greece but that was because it suited him. The percentages agreement was, from Stalin’s point of view, surely a bemusing attempt to negotiate what was already a fait accompli.
… In December, Charles de Gaulle visited Moscow to sign a treaty of alliance and mutual assistance. In return, Stalin wanted French recognition of Bierut’s Polish Government which de Gaulle refused to give….
… Finally in the early hours (after the banquet), when de Gaulle had gone to bed, the Russians suddenly agreed to sign the treaty without recognition of Bierut. De Gaulle was rushed back into the Kremlin where Stalin first asked him to sign the original treaty. When de Gaulle angrily retorted: ‘France has been insulted’, Stalin cheerfully called for the new draft which was then signed at 6.30 a.m. (pp. 421-423)