宮沢賢治『銀河鉄道の夜』 #1
一 午後の授業
「ではみなさんは、そういうふうに川だと言われたり、乳の流れたあとだと言われたりしていた、このぼんやりと白いものがほんとうは何かご承知ですか」先生は、黒板につるした大きな黒い星座の図の、上から下へ白くけぶった銀河帯のようなところを指しながら、みんなに問いをかけました。
カムパネルラが手をあげました。それから四、五人手をあげました。ジョバンニも手をあげようとして、急いでそのままやめました。たしかにあれがみんな星だと、いつか雑誌で読んだのでしたが、このごろはジョバンニはまるで毎日教室でもねむく、本を読むひまも読む本もないので、なんだかどんなこともよくわからないという気持ちがするのでした。
ところが先生は早くもそれを見つけたのでした。
「ジョバンニさん。あなたはわかっているのでしょう」
Vocabulary:
宮沢賢治 みやざわけんじ Miyazawa Kenji (author, 1896-1933)
乳 ちち milk
承知する しょうちする to understand, to know, to be aware
星座 せいざ constellation
銀河帯 ぎんがたい galactic belt
Sentence breakdown:
Perhaps the most challenging sentence of today’s excerpt is the first sentence, not because of complicated grammatical structures, but because of its sheer length. Here’s how you can break it down.
First, there’s a natural division between everything in the 「」, and everything that follows. Let’s start with the sentence in brackets.
The basic structure of the sentence is みなさんは…ご承知ですか → ‘Do all of you understand…?’.
The object of the question is この…ものが…何か → ‘this…thing…what is it?’.
ぼんやりと白い simply qualifies もの → ‘this vaguely white thing’. ほんとうは means ‘really’ or ‘in reality’.
This gives us the basic structure of the bracketed part of the sentence → ‘Do all of you understand what this vaguely white thing really is?’.
The remaining segment of the bracketed sentence is framed by the pattern ～たり～たりする, which means ‘do things such as X and Y’. The entire segment functions as a relative clause that qualifies このぼんやりと白いもの. So: ‘a vaguely white thing, of which it was said that it is a river, or a trace of streaming milk, (or something of that nature)’.
Then, the second part of this long sentence. Its basic structure is 先生は…みんなに問いをかけました → ‘the teacher asked everyone’.
He asked this question ‘while pointing to a place’ ところを指しながら.
What kind of ところ was this? It was a 黒板につるした大きな黒い星座の図の…ところ → ‘a place on the large black map of the stars that hung from the blackboard’.
Finally, the 上から下へ白くけぶった銀河帯のような simply qualifies the specific place on the map to which the teacher is pointing → ‘resembling a galactic belt that drifted from top to bottom like white smoke’. 白くけぶる is difficult to translate, but literally means ‘whitely drifting/floating (like smoke)’.
Translation:
“Well everyone, this vague white thing, which was said to resemble a river or a trace of streaming milk, does anyone know what it really is?” the teacher asked the students, while pointing to a large black map of the stars that was hanging from the blackboard, depicting what looked like a white galactic belt, drifting from top to bottom.
Campanella raised his hand. Then, four or five people raised their hands, too. Giovanni also thought of raising his hand, but quickly abandoned the idea. He remembered he once read in a magazine that those things were all stars, but lately, Giovanni felt tired in class everyday, and he didn’t have time to read books, nor were there any books he felt like reading, and so he didn’t know for sure what he was looking at.
But the teacher was quick to see through him.
“Giovanni, you know, don’t you?”
Link:
『銀河鉄道の夜』#1