근대 일본의 번역론과 모리타 시켄(森田思軒)

A Study on Morita Shiken’s Theory of Translation

本稿は森田思軒という近代日本を代表する一人の翻訳者に注目し、彼の 翻訳観を考察する。彼が翻訳という行為をどのように捉えていたのか、また理想とする翻訳文体はどのようなものであったかという点について考えていく。翻訳者でありまた新聞記者、批評家でもあった森田思軒は、翻訳作品のほかに翻訳についての言説も複数残している。36歳という若さで亡くなったが、その短い翻訳者生活の中で森田思軒の論は変化していく。本稿はこのような変化を認識しつつ彼の主張を確認し、そしてその森田思軒の思想が訳文においてどう表現されているか検証するものである。そのために彼の翻訳に関するエッセイなどの言説を概ね発表順に見ていく。その結果、先行研究では森田思軒の翻訳文体について「直訳体」、「漢文体」という２つの特徴で説明しており、ぞれぞれ並列的あるいは対立的に規定してきた。しかしながら、本稿の考察によって、森田思軒は西洋思想の真の意味を伝えるために漢字の造語力を活用し、新語を製作したことが確認できた。また、2字漢語を音読することによって、従来の日本語の文章に異化作用をもたらした点から、漢字の多用と欧文直訳体は決して矛盾する要素ではないことが明らかになった。

In the present article, I focus on Shiken Morita, one of the prominent translators in Modern Japan, and explore his view on translation. Our main focus is put upon issues such as “How did he construe the act of translation?” and “What was the ideal translation for him?” Morita, who was a translator as well as a newspaper reporter and a critic, wrote about translation itself, in addition to his translation works. He passed away at the age of 36, but his view on translation underwent several changes during his short period of time as a translator. The aim of this article is to analyze these changes, and explore the ways in which his view on translation was manifested in his translation works. For this purpose, I analyze his statements, as found in his essays, in a chronological order. The main findings of this analysis can be summed up as follows. While previous studies have characterized Morita’s translation view in terms of the “literal translation style” and the “style based on the Chinese classics,” these two features being juxtaposed or contrasted, Morita made use of the word-building capacity of Chinese-based words in order to convey the true meaning of the Western traditions on thoughts and created new words. Furthermore, Morita brought a new feature to the traditional Japanese sentences by introducing the reading of two-character Chinese-based words, and in this sense, the frequent use of Chinese-based words does not contradict with the style of literal translation from Western languages.