The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth
日本語
レトリック（rhetoric）という言葉を聞いたことがあると思います。ぼんやりと、大体のイメージはつくかもしれません。
今回紹介する本は "The Elements of Eloquence"。
参照元が Wikipedia で申し訳ないですが、この本が扱っている内容は、レトリックの中でも日本語における修辞技法に当たるようです（他には修辞学、弁論術も含まれます）。
シェークスピア、ディッケンズ、スターウォーズ、ビートルズ、 ケイティ・ペリー等々、文学、映画の台詞、歌詞からの様々な引用が豊富で、読んでいるだけで楽しくなる本です。
日本語ネイティブが日本語文法を学校で習うように、無意識的に用いられてきたであろう数々の歴史に残る珠玉の言葉の連なりを、レトリックという鍵を使って解きほぐして味わってみようという本です。
日本人でこの本を手に取る人はほとんどいないないでしょう。
具体的なレトリックについては下の英語版で。
English
Shakespeare was not a genius. (...) No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well.
"The Elements of Eloquence" begins with this line.
The author Mark Forsyth journeys and probes unforgettable phrases offered by Shakespeare, Dickens, Yoda, The beatles, and other people to be honored and to be named here without omission...using rhetoric.
Each chapter (39 chapters in total) introduces one rhetorical technique with funny, bright, and evergreen quotes. Here are some:
Transferred Epithets: An adjective is applied to the wrong noun.
The man smoked a nervous cigarette.
Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! — An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time...
The ploughman homeward plods his weary way
The transferred Epithets makes the world come more alive than
"The nervous man smoke a cigarette."
Pleonasm: Use of unneeded words that are superfluous and unnecessary in a sentence that doesn't require them.
I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help.
To be or not to be, that is the question.
Free gift
Pleonasm is an absolutely free gift for giving emphasis and insistence to the notion.
Pleonasm also includes:
A kiss is still a kiss,
A sigh is just a sigh;
Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.
Scesis Onomaton (SKEE-sis o-NO-mat-on): A sentence without a verb.
In the first sentence of Bleak House:
London
The next sentence has no verb either:
Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall.
Then:
Implacable November weather.
Scesis Onomaton helps to hold off deciding the tense: Past, present, and future.
Winston Churchill, in "The Second World War":
In War: Resolution.
In Defeat: Defiance.
In Victory: Magnanimity.
In Peace: Good Will.
Scesis Onomaton does not limit the meanings in the sentence, keeping writers' images open and broading readers' images.
It thus goes well with a poem.
Tennyson, in "Crossing the Bar":
Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
Thomas Kyd, in his best play The Spanish Tragedy:
O eyes! No eyes, but fountains fraught with tears!
O life! No life, but lively form of death!
O world! No world, but mass of public wrongs,
Confused and filled with murder and misdeeds!
O Heavens!
While I was reading this book, many books came to mind, especially "4321" written by Paul Auster.
A rhetoric is probably not a main tool to write something, but just a tool to be used for categorizing and analyzing words and sentences.
I nevertheless have to appreciate this technique, thanks to which I met this book and I now can savour what seem to be simple lines deeply, deeply, deeply (Pleonasm).
