“HELEN KELLER The Story of My Life”

The biography of Helen Keller , which have always been in the biography series read as a schoolchild , being explained briefly, is the talk of that the woman whose eyes were not visible or ears were not audible made a great effort receiving educational initiation by Ms. Anne Sullivan , completed study, and contributed to education and welfare of physically handicapped persons in the world.
This time, I read not the biography which the others wrote about Helen but autobiography “HELEN KELLER The Story of My Life” to which Helen wrote half her life (to 21 years old).
I have poor vision. But I put on my glasses, I recover eyesight and I can live an ordinary life. When I took this book in my hand in a bookstore, I am very interested in what these people who can’t see light even if they put on glasses, or can’t hear sound, write to an autobiography.
Reading this book , although Helen Keller's biography has been read when young, I turned out that I have had a big misunderstanding about her or physically handicapped persons. Reading the autobiography, Helen Keller herself betrayed my imagination splendidly. The descriptions of scenery which she wrote were the same as the senses which we took in by the faculty of sight and the delicacy of hearing, or more colorful and sparkling than that.
Abave all I feel wonderful to insight that she narrowly observed circumstance which was surrounding her with touching and smelling instead of convenience of eyes and ears.
There is a question what the sights which she saw and the voice of birds and the sound of a waterfall which she heard were. But considering that she had delicate feeling and learned hard to become a talented woman, it convinced to me. Helen who became deaf and blind at 19 months after the birth can unlocked her heart, and can devote herself to all nature by the woman Ms. Anne Sullivan who caused the miracle to Helen.
It being unable to say only Helen. I recently see a sight of the students who gather around a school bus of a visually-impaired school at the local station. Are those who cannot see physically handicapped persons truly? Of course, when you walk along a way, in the surroundings of them who can’t see there are full of danger. Probably, at the point, they have a handicap. However, other feelings become sharp and would collect other infomation more than us. In order that they may live like everybody, I think that they always spread the nerve around and have sharpened feeling well.
Helen was wise, was a hard worker and was able to enter the Radcliffe college of Harvard University at the age of 19. I was surprised at the numerousness of the books which she read by 21 years old. Japanese students of present-day who are reading a book like this are very small. The difficulty of the blind person who reads using braille and a finger language is considered, it is no easy task to study.
She greatly enjoyed the university life fully and worked with political concern not only with welfare activities after graduating (it was not worte to the autobiography). It is said that she has advanced thought, and asserted female suffrage as a critic supporting equal rights for men and women, was a racial discrimination con person, and opposed to hard youth labor, capital punishment and slaughter of World War I.
Thus, she owed all that she was in full activity like these to Ms. Anne Sullivan who met Helen when Helen was 7 years old, and taught her that there is a name to all things, also after that, stroved for instead of Helen's eyes, and had been acting as interpreter in the finger language. Although there are many people who have the mistaken idea that "The Miracle Worker" is Helen Keller in Japan, I was also the one of them, Anne Sullivan is the just person who brought Helen the miracle. When Helen studied at the college, Anne told the contents of the lecture in the finger language and had continued the self-sacrifice to Helen until Anne died. She is a flower of educator.
And it is thanks to the riches of her house for Helen to have been able to greet Anne Sullivan as a private teacher, to have met Mr. Alexander Graham Bell who were studying an auditory-difficulties child's education and the various celebrities, to have studied the learning at the college which serves sources of her deep knowledge, to have traveled to various places and had much experience. But at that time all physically handicapped persons were not able to cherish pregnant intellect. So it could be said that she was born to fortunate circumstances.
Education and welfare to a physically handicapped person which she promoted, not being related to wealth and poverty, would give the freedom of studying and getting knowledge and the hope to pure heart which tends to shut itself up in the illegal world, and bring the liberty of the heart, I prey.

和訳(原文)