ジョージ・バーナード・ショウの『ピグマリオン』の冒頭近くの下町言葉の部分を読んでみた。映画でも有名な部分である。これまで読んでいなかったことを恥ずかしく思う。
それと同時に、正直言って、冒頭のいくつかのセリフは全く分からない。赤で強調しておいた。全然分からない。これはリザという名前の女性で、映画ではオードリー・ヘプバーンも演じた部分だが、本当に手も足も出ない。青で書かれているように、ロンドン以外の場所ではまったく分からないだろうと言っているが、その通りである。
この部分が終わると、幾つかの私には目新しい単語が入っているが、とりあえず分かるセリフである。
ACT I
Covent Garden at 11.15 p.m. Torrents of heavy summer rain. Cab whistles blowing frantically in all directions. Pedestrians running for shelter into the market and under the portico of St. Paul's Church, where there are already several people, among them a lady and her daughter in evening dress. They are all peering out gloomily at the rain, except one man with his back turned to the rest, who seems wholly preoccupied with a notebook in which he is writing busily.
THE FLOWER GIRL. Nah then, Freddy: look wh' y' gowin, deah.
THE FLOWER GIRL [picking up her scattered flowers and replacing them in the basket] There's menners f' yer! Te-oo banches o voylets trod into the mad. [She sits down on the plinth of the column, sorting her flowers, on the lady's right. She is not at all an attractive person. She is perhaps eighteen, perhaps twenty, hardly older. She wears a little sailor hat of black straw that has long been exposed to the dust and soot of London and has seldom if ever been brushed. Her hair needs washing rather badly: its mousy color can hardly be natural. She wears a shoddy black coat that reaches nearly to her knees and is shaped to her waist. She has a brown skirt with a coarse apron. Her boots are much the worse for wear. She is no doubt as clean as she can afford to be; but compared to the ladies she is very dirty. Her features are no worse than theirs; but their condition leaves something to be desired; and she needs the services of a dentist].
THE MOTHER. How do you know that my son's name is Freddy, pray?
THE FLOWER GIRL. Ow, eez ye-ooa san, is e? Wal, fewd dan y' de-ooty bawmz a mather should, eed now bettern to spawl a pore gel's flahrzn than ran awy atbaht pyin. Will ye-oo py me f'them? [Here, with apologies, this desperate attempt to represent her dialect without a phonetic alphabet must be abandoned as unintelligible outside London.]
