BY YUZURU HONDO

At Sapporo University, a lecture series called "Northern Culture Forum" is held every Tuesday. The event has been sponsored by Faculty of Cultural Studies since 1998. Celebrities, from many fields of study and artistic activities, are invited as lecturers. This forum takes 90 minutes. Students, teachers, and people from society come to audit the lectures. The themes are varied.

Let me tell you about Naoki Yanase, the lecturer of the second forum this year, and his lecture. Naoki Yanase was born in Nemuro, Hokkaido and got a

doctorate in literature at Waseda University. He has written some books

about Japanese and English word play and the interesting aspects of dictionaries. In the lecture, he told us that he had translated "Finegan's Wake" written by James Joyce, who is known as an esoteric writer, and that Joyce uses "Joyce Language" to make his expression richer. After that he explained the difficulty of translating witty remarks from English into Japanese. He gave a couple of example and how he solved them, joking, "I was able to solve this problem when I drank three bottles of beer, that problem took four bottles." At the moment there was much laughter, and then the audience admired him and his bright ideas. For example, how can you translate the sentence "The onion has two circles."? Of course "onion" has two circles only when it is written in English. If you write "tamanegi" in Kanji or Katakana, it has no circle. But if you write in Hiragana, "tamanegi" has two circles! Yanase said, "How great, not I, but the Japanese language is, because it can solve such problems." Then I thought he was great, too.

All of the people who visit Sapporo University as lecturers of the Northern Culture Forum are known all over Japan and even abroad, such as Yuko Tsusima, a writer (first forum), Kazue Kohata, a translator (third forum), and so on. They talk about the topics which are characteristic of a person who is in the forefront of the action. There are a lot of colleges in Japan but few colleges in which people are able to listen to such lectures every week like Sapporo University. In only the first semester this year, ten lecturers will come to the Northern Culture Forum, which is a great opportunity to hear valuable talks. Particularly, when the lecturer is an interpreter, a person of letters, or such, Foreign Languages Faculty students should make time for the lectures and participate in them. They are worth while, and I will keep attending.

However, some students don't have interest or participate in the Northern Culture Forum. As mentioned, people from society are able to attend this lecture series. They listen to the lecturer eagerly. Compared to them, most of the students, who should be there first are Cultural Studies Faculty students, and some of them fall asleep during the lecture. Why don't they participate in the Northern Culture Forum? It cannot be true that they don't know of the event, because there are notices and posters. Some students may have a class or a part time job at the same time. Nevertheless, this means that they miss piles of treasure. It is regrettable that many students don't recognize the fact. I wish more students would come to listen to the lectures.