有名なスピーチを憶えて、自分がスピーチしているように声に出す、朗唱。英語の勉強としてとてもいいと聞きます。
あの有名なスティーブジョブズのスピーチ。
改めて、このスピーチを朗唱してみたい、と思いました。
そして、改めて聞いて思ったのですが、このスピーチは自分が普段会話するときに役に立つ表現も本当にたくさんあると感じます。
まず、そのようなフレーズ、表現も含めて、スピーチ本文を徹底的に見ていこうと思います。
序文
Thank you.
I'm honored to be with you today for your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world.
commencement: 始まり、学位授与式。正直あまりなじみがありませんでした。
Truth be told, I never graduated from college and this is the closest I've ever gotten to a college graduation.
Truth be told: 実は、実のところ。
the closest I’ve ever gotten: 最上級＋I’ve ever… ～の中で一番～だ。中学で習った構文ですけど、実際に使うのですね。
Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That's it. No big deal. Just three stories.
That’s it: それだけです。それでおしまい。こういう気の利いた言い方、できない。
最初のストーリー: Connecting the dots
The first story is about connecting the dots.
connecting the dots:点と点をつなげる。このスピーチの根幹ともいえるキーフレーズで、この言葉だけでこのスピーチと分かるくらい有名ですね。
I dropped out of Reed College after the first six months but then stayed around as a drop-in for another eighteen months or so before I really quit.
drop-in:ぶらりと立ち寄る人。こういうのをさらっというのは、自分の英語力ではとても無理だなぁ。
So why did I drop out? It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption.
graduate student: 大学院生
put someone up: ～を候補に立てる
adoption: 養子縁組、採択
She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife, except that when I popped out, they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl.
So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking, "We've got an unexpected baby boy.
Do you want him?" They said, "Of course." My biological mother found out later that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school.
biologigal mother: 実の母親。
すごい運命ですね。弁護士夫婦に引き取られていたら、アップルも生まれなかったし、今僕たちはスマホを持っていないかもしれません。
She refused to sign the final adoption papers.
She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would go to college.
This was the start in my life.
relent:(怒り、興奮が和らいで)穏やかになる。不憫に思うようになる。Cambridgeの英英辞典によると、”to act in a less severe way towards someone and allow something that you had refused to allow before”とのことです。
この言葉一つで、実の母親の葛藤と、養子に引き取りたい育ての親の強い思いが見えてきました。
And seventeen years later, I did go to college, but I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents' savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn't see the value in it.
naively: 単純なやり方で。ここでは、浅はかにも、という感じでしょうか。日本語の「ナイーブ」に引きずられてうまく意味をとらえにくいですね。
that was as expensive as Standord:スタンフォードと同じくらい高額な。中学で習うas as構文、ネイティブはしょっちゅう使いますね。僕はこの構文、穴埋め問題なら得意ですが、自分からは話せたことがありません。
all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition: 労働者階級の両親の貯金は自分の大学の学費に使われていった。学校で習って「こんなの使うのかな」と思っていた受動態進行形！ご両親が一生懸命働いた貯えが、自分の大学の学費でどんどん食いつぶされていく様子が表現されています。こうやって解説を書いてみて初めて、自分が表面的にしかこのスピーチをとらえていなかったのかが分かってきました。
see the value in it:それに価値を見出す。valueには動詞seeが使えるのですね。仕事で使えそうな表現です。
I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life, and no idea of how college was going to help me figure it out, and here I was, spending all the money my parents had saved their entire life.
I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life: 自分が人生で何をしたいのかが分からなくなった。「人生で」はwith my life。この文脈なのでin my lifeじゃなくてwith my lifeが適切なのでしょう。
So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK.
work out:うまくいく、出てくる、運動する、など。「運動する」では時々使うのですが、「うまくいく」というのはなかなか能動語彙としては使えないですね。
It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back, it was one of the best decisions I ever made.
ここで大ウケですね。卒業式のスピーチで、「退学したことが人生で最良の決断の一つだった」と来たので。
scary: 恐ろしい、おびえる
The minute I dropped out, I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting.
interest:興味を持たせる。このように無生物主語で他動詞を使う好例ですね。
It wasn't all romantic.
I didn't have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends' rooms.
dorm: 寮(dormitory)
I returned Coke bottles for the five-cent deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the seven miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it.
ここでの”for”は～と引き換えに、という意味ですね。これも能動語彙にしたい。 “by food with”のwithも抜けやすいので、ここで暗記しちゃうと良さそうです。
And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on.
stumble: つまずく、ですが、stumble into だと、あまり意図しないでたまたまやってみる、といった意味になるようです。
turn out: 結局～になる。受験必須イディオムだったと思いますが、こういう文脈で出てくるとしみ込みます。
Let me give you one example.
一つ例を挙げましょう。これも仕事で使おう。
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.
calligraphy:文字をきれいに見せるための手法。グリーティングカードで見るような文字のことです。
Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer was beautifully hand-calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and sans-serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great.
vary: 変化させる
typography: 活字の配列
アルファベットは、それぞれ形が違うので、単純にすべてそれぞれ同じ幅でモニターに写したり印刷したりすると、あまりきれいに見えないんですよね。その幅を、美的感覚に合うように変化させていく技術のことを述べているわけですね。
It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.
capture: 捕らえる、と覚えていましたが、camblidgeの英英辞書によると”to take something into your possession, especially by force.”という意味もあるようです。技術のコントロールの及ばないところにその魅力がある、ということなんでしょう。
find it 形容詞: ～ということが分かる。定番表現ですね。
None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life.
practical application: 実際の適用、実用化されること
But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac.
It was the first computer with beautiful typography.
If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts, and since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them.
出た！仮定法過去完了！これで憶えて使いこなせるようにする！
ちなみに、次のフレーズはこのスピーチで一番受けたところですね。
If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on that calligraphy class and personals computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do.
これも仮定法過去完了です。
Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college, but it was very, very clear looking backwards 10 years later. Again, you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something--your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever--because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.
ここが、最初のストーリーのキーとなるメッセージです。
You have to trust in something – ここでinが入っているところがポイントだと思います。表面的ではなく、中身も含めてすべてを信頼する、という感覚なのではないでしょうか。
自分自身も、20代の頃に仕事と直接関係ないところでちょっとだけ頑張っていたことが今頃になってつながってきて、実感します。
down the road: 将来いつか。
well-worn path: 他の人が着て、つまり行ってきたような(人生の)道、といった意味のようです。そこから外れたとしても、自分の心の芯のところを信じて行動しなさい、というメッセージですね。
二つ目のストーリー: You’ve got to find what you love. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking, and don’t settle.
My second story is about love and loss.
I was lucky.
I found what I loved to do early in life.
Woz and I started Apple in my parents' garage when I was twenty.
We worked hard and in ten years, Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4,000 employees.
We'd just released our finest creation, the Macintosh, a year earlier, and I'd just turned thirty, and then I got fired.
get fired: 首になる、解雇される。
それにしても、すさまじい波乱万丈な人生ですね。
How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew, we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so, things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge, and eventually we had a falling out.
diverge: 枝分かれする、という意味ですが、同様のイメージで意見が異なってくる、ということになります。
have a falling out: 仲間割れする。あまりなじみがなかったので、ここで憶えます。
When we did, our board of directors sided with him, and so at thirty, I was out, and very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating. I really didn't know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down, that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure and I even thought about running away from the Valley.
screw up: 台無しにする。へまをする。screwは、ねじで止めるという意味だと思うのですが、、screw upがどうしてへまをするという意味なのかの語源がちょっとわかりませんでした。スクリュードライバーでめちゃめちゃにしてしまうようなイメージなのでしょうか。
run away from: ～から逃げる。Valleyは言わずと知れたシリコンバレーの事ですね。
But something slowly began to dawn on me.
dawn: 夜明け→dawn on meで、(夜が明けるように)～を理解する。イメージが湧いてくる言い方ですね。
I still loved what I did.
The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit.
I'd been rejected but I was still in love.
And so I decided to start over.
start over: 最初からやり直す。
I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me.
The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything.
ここでの、less sure about everythingの意味が取りづらかったのですが、どんなことにも自信のないビギナーに戻った、という感じでしょうか。
It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods in my life.
free: ～を開放する、という動詞もあるんですね！freeを動詞で使うのを見るのは初めてです。
During the next five years I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife.
Pixar went on to create the world's first computer-animated feature film, "Toy Story," and is now the most successful animation studio in the world.
In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT and I returned to Apple and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple's current renaissance, and Lorene and I have a wonderful family together.
I'm pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn't been fired from Apple.
It was awfultasting medicine but I guess the patient needed it.
turn of events: 事態の変化
Sometimes life's going to hit you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love, and that is as true for work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking, and don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it, and like any great relationship it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking. Don't settle.
二つ目のキーメッセージですね。自分が本当に好きなことをしなさい。それを見つけなくてはならない。見つかっていないなら、探しなさい、立ち止まらずに。
(少し脱線しますが、「自分のすることを愛せ」という言葉は、ニューシネマパラダイスという映画にも出てきましたね。ちょっとこのスピーチと意味合いが違いますが。この映画はストーリーを知らずに映画館で見て本当に感動しました。見ていない方は、ぜひご覧ください。このご時世ですが、チャンスがあればできれば映画館で)
三つ目のストーリー: Stay hungry, stay foolish
My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.
impression on meというように、onをつけると、印象が残るイメージがありますね。
in a row: 続けて
Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
avoid the trap of thinking: 考えの罠を避ける
There is no reason not to: ～しない理由はない。これは頻繁に使えそうな表現ですね。
About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer.
I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas.
pancreas: 膵臓
I didn't even know what a pancreas was.
The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months.
My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months.
It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family.
It means to say your goodbyes.
button up: ボタンを留める。仕上げる
この辺りは、読んでいると悲しくなります。
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor.
biopsy: 生体組織検査
endscope: 内視鏡
intestine: 腸
cell: 細胞
I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery.
sedate: (形容詞)平静な、落ち着いた。 (動詞)鎮静剤で落ち着かせる。
I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades.
Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept.
これまた意味の取りにくい文ですが、「役立つとはいえ、知的な概念でしかない時よりも確信をもって、これを言うことができる」という感じですかね。役立つということが概念的にしかわかっていない時よりも、もっと役立つことが分かった、という意味なんだと思います。
No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.
多分、Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.がこの辺で一番有名なセンテンスだと思いますが、Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition.も印象に残りました。”drown out”というように、”out”という言葉を使うことで自分の心の中が消し出されてしまうイメージを持ちました。
When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalogue, which was one of the bibles of my generation.
It was created by a fellow named Stuart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch.
This was in the late Sixties, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and Polaroid cameras.
it was sort of like Google in paperback form thirty-five years before Google came along.
It was idealistic, overflowing with neat tools and great notions.
Stuart and his team put out several issues of the The Whole Earth Catalogue, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue.
It was the mid-1970s and I was your age.
On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous.
Beneath were the words, "Stay hungry, stay foolish." It was their farewell message as they signed off.
"Stay hungry, stay foolish." And I have always wished that for myself, and now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.
Stay hungry, stay foolish.
最後のキーメッセージです。”Stay hungry, stay foolish”。この言葉は僕はうまく訳せません。英語のまま理解しようと思います。
Thank you all, very much.
皆さん、ありがとうございました。
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