Attempted Lagarde and Michard Japan: Mishima and Fukazawa Happy Birthday to Joshua, eight years two weeks ago, and Louise, twelve years old today! When you're in second or first, are you entitled to instruction Lagarde and Michard to stake your texts from French? Will you do with Pascal "bet that God exists? You study the friendship between Montaigne and La Boetie and that "to philosophize is to learn to die"?
As for me, I reviewed some great classics of Japanese Lagarde and Michard. I have not totally been touched by grace supposed to originate new
of Yukio Mishima, the poet of youth to the desires disorders, who killed himself by seppuku
(hara-kiri) dressed in national costume in 1970. In the collection "Folio 2 €" were combined "Ken" and "Martyr". The imperial style, with flashes and shortcuts that command admiration
"a pigeon smeared with blood, rays of sunlight piercing the canopy of blood fell on the cheeks of the conqueror, the deep indigo of holding Kendo, the withered lily, all this had in combination as long snares for him ". But subjects revolving around repressed homosexuality gnawing author, who was born down on hairless cheeks of students, their dangerous games that lead to suicide or murder, are just too unhealthy for me. But what fun to get carried away by another major new "Narayama" (Japanese "bushiko Narayama") of Shichiro
Fukazawa. Of course, the title tells you something: its film adaptation, "The Ballad of Narayama" by Shohei Imamura, has been Palme d'Or at Cannes in 1983. The series "imaginary" Gallimard includes the book and the DVD, but I write this post before discovering the film for my bedtime literary impressions unbiased film. A subject, we will not disclose to those who have not heard of a sleek, presqu'ascétique, which goes to the symbolism surrounding the Buddhist story, characters and shocking truth humanity, it is also cruel: a short and powerful masterpiece.
The preface, footnotes and page afterword by the translator Franck Bernard (I remember reading his critics in the Nouvel Obs) is the level of the text itself. They situate in context the thrust of Fukazawa: under the guise of a sociological study on hyper-realistic peasant songs of a remote area (the original title means "the study about the songs of Narayama"), Frank recalls that "These traditions seem good, ultimately, not correspond to anything historically comprehensible in the past Japan's real." A parable about the man instead, or on "the problem of the basis of our own values." But no big words, which gave me the idea of referring to Lagarde and Michard, it also this style earthy, down-to-earth and often humorous, with whom conversations Fukazawa invents his countrymen, in a style reminiscent of the funniest and damsels of Molière's Dom Juan: "I reckon that Grandma has thirty -three teeth. [...] Hey! It must point qu'tu to count beyond twenty-eight. There are surely more! . In any case, the choice of the translator that push this outdated style: his translation of 1958, only a few years after its release in Japan, it is far from the seventeenth century by Jean-Baptiste Poquelin. A final example surprising, but ultimately not inappropriate, is translate the Japanese respectful prefix "O" (as in "o-bento", "o-sake", etc..) by "Sir" when the characters refer to white rice: the land they cultivate is so fertile that they may not relish the "Sir white rice" that during the village festival, the Bon Odori "we still celebrated every summer in Tokyo, and the famous and mysterious pilgrimage to Narayama.
Garbage, it is here 
The graduation ceremony 
The magic of Kappabashi dori 
(photos guarantees without faking) 
