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2007年07月20日

ラフカディオ・ハーン(小泉八雲)

IN YOKOHAMA (from "Out of the East")
But one day they all came back to me --- just for a moment. I was in Yokohama, gazing once more from the Bluff at the divine spectre of Fuji haunting the April morning. In that enormous spring blaze of blue light, the feeling of my first Japanese day returned, the feeling of my first delighted wonder in the radiance of an unknown fairy-world full of beautiful riddles, --- an Elf-land having a special sun and a tinted atmosphere of its own.


SOME FOREIGN POEMS ON JAPANESE SUBJECTS (from "Interpretations of Literature")
Of course this hasty translation is very poor; and you can only get from it the signification and colour of the picture --- the beautiful sonority and luminosity of the French is all gone. Nevertheless, I am sure that the more you study the original the more you will see how fine it is. Here also is a Japanese colour print. We see the figure of the horseman on the shore, in the light of dawn; behind him the still dark sky of night; before him the crimson dawn, and Fuji white against the red sky. And in the open fan, with its red sun, we have a grim suggestion of the day of blood that is about to be; that is all. But whoever reads that sonnet will never forget it; it burns into the memory. So, indeed, does everything that Heredia writes.