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This article was taken from
http://www.jameslegge.org/section315867_105937.html as I found it quite
difficult to read being white text on a grey background.
The main site is at
http://www.jameslegge.org/
17/08/09
To claim that James Legge’s Chinese Classics set
new standards for classical translation in the last third of the 19th
century may not be too surprising to those seated here today, simply because
active translators and scholars of China generally know about the Chinese
Classics, even if they have not very often employed them in their own
studies as reference works. Describing the details about these standards may
prove to be a positively stimulating experience, however, simply because
there have been a number of major discoveries during the last two decades
dealing with Legge’s life and translation corpus, so that these standards
can now be highlighted in a concise and comprehensive manner. Yet it could
probably be surprising to some if this claim was extended further: Legge’s
Chinese Classics have set standards in the 1860s and 1870s which still carry
much insight and authority even now at the beginning of the 21st century.
His precedents for translations in canonical Ruist (“Confucian”) literature,
therefore, require some extensive preliminary explanations.
Reasons for pursuing these explanations should
be made clear from the start. First of all, under certain assumptions about
the incremental growth of scholarship across the years, many might assume
that we have long ago superceded standards of translation set over 140 years
ago, especially those set in the context of the newly established colony of
Hongkong. Not only is there a historical gap to be considered, but the
cultural climate of a colonial setting certainly, it would be assumed,
nurtured restrictive interpretive interests. Furthermore, the simple fact
that Legge was a Protestant missionary should make us all concerned about
his own personal hermeneutic orientation. How could a person whose intention
was to challenge Chinese traditions with a Christian worldview be capable of
anything close to an interpretively balanced or well-justified set of
translations?
In response, I must clarify from the start that
I would agree that there have undoubtedly been many technical refinements in
the broader area of Chinese classical translations over the past 140 years
as well as some major theoretical advances regarding the nature of
translation during the same period. Nevertheless, I do want to assert that
the grammatological event of Legge’s publication of the Chinese Classics
involved numerous principles for translating authorized texts or canonical
literature that not only went far beyond anything which had been done
previously in translations of Chinese canonical texts, but also still offers
some very salutary suggestions for those of us who are involved with
translation work in the 21st century. That there were also aspects of his
translations which are now passé and are no longer able to guide us today I
will also readily agree, and in the subsequent details will try to make some
of these manifest as well. Nevertheless, his Chinese Classics were such a
watershed event in foreign translations of Chinese canonical literature that
they do still provide insight and guidance into ways of translating these
same texts and others of similar status even in the 21st century.
As a consequence, the explanatory preliminaries I have prepared here will
include an overview of recent scholarship related to Legge’s sinological
translations in six points, and then move to discuss briefly just how much
Legge engaged the traditions of sinological translation and interpretation
known during his time. Following this, I will appeal to a Gadamerian
understanding of hermeneutics to indicate just how a Christian missionary
such as Legge might be able to do the unexpected: that is, to provide an
engaging and well-justified translation of Chinese canonical literature even
when he himself did not always agree with its claims. Having accomplish
these preliminary tasks, we will move directly into the discussion of
fifteen of Legge’s constructive standards for sinological translations as
found in his opus magnum, the Chinese Classics.
I. An Overview of Recent Scholarship related to James Legge’s Sinological
Translations
Some years ago a phrase was coined, referring to
James Legge as an “intellectual black hole”. The image was intended to
suggest that James Legge’s (???1815-1897) presence as a sinological
“heavyweight” was undisputed, but there had been no more substantial effort
to reveal what has made him so significant. During the past fifteen years I
have made it my purpose to correct this intellectual shortcoming, gaining in
the process many new understandings and insights which were previously
unknown about the man and his sinological corpus. A brief summary of these
discoveries as they relate to his sinological corpus as it is primarily
found in classical Ruist literature includes the following major points.
A. James Legge’s Sinological Achievements
1. Legge’s Multiform Translations.
Besides the well known
eight-tomes-in-five-volumes set of the Chinese Classics and the six volumes
of Ruist and Daoist classical literature translated and interpreted as the
Sacred Books of China (please see the appended chart of his major
translations). part of the much larger 50 volume series edited by Friedrich
Max Müller under the title of the Sacred Books of the East, Legge had
translated many of the same “Chinese classics” at least twice. In the cases
of the Great Learning (????) and the State of Equilibrium and Harmony (first
known as the Doctrine of the Mean, ????), Legge translated and published
four different renderings of these two works throughout his lifetime. This
made the interpretive questions surrounding the hermeneutic justifications
and his careful translation adjustments across the different versions of the
same work more complicated historically and, in terms of research
discoveries, far more interesting.
2. Two Editions of the Chinese Classics.
The two editions of the Chinese Classics – the
first set completed during Legge’s last stage of his missionary-scholar
career in Hongkong (1861-1872) and the second edition republished by the
Clarendon Press in Oxford near the end of his professorship there at Corpus
Christi College (1893-1895) – proved to be related in more complicated ways
than initially understood. The second edition is only partially revised, the
first two volumes dealing with the Four Books being the portion which had
been revised in subtle but significant ways. These revisions not only
involved corrections of certain translation tropes, but also additions and
corrections to his lengthy commentarial materials, adding new materials to
his bibliographies for those two volumes, and – easily the most significant
– radically changing his assessment of Master K?ng ??, the person he
regularly referred to as “Confucius”. In the second edition, therefore,
readers had to know that they were facing some texts not revised in the
1890s, but the same texts (with older transliterations and other problems)
published first as the Book of Historical Documents in 1865, the Book of
Poetry in 1871, and the Spring and Autumn Annals with its Zu? Commentary in
1872. Because some readers and scholars have not understood that this was
the case, they have misinterpreted or misunderstood what Legge had actually
accomplished in these two editions of his Chinese Classics.
3. Understanding the Relationship between the CC and SBC.
Because Legge’s goal was to complete renderings
of all of the Four Books and Five Classics, it is important also to see the
interrelationship between his Chinese Classics and the Sacred Books of
China. In fact, the Chinese Classics include only the Four Books and three
of the major older canonical texts; two of these (the Sh?j?ng???? and
Sh?j?ng????) were reprinted in other formats within the first volume of the
Sacred Books of China. Only when Legge had completed and published his
renderings of the Book of Changes with its Appendices in 1882 and of the
Book of Rites in 1885 had he actually accomplished what he set out initially
to do in the late 1850s.
4. Assessing Legge’s Chinese Language Corpus.
Other factors illustrating the understanding and
transformation of Chinese classical texts within Legge’s own Nonconformist
Protestant consciousness were discovered within his publications made in
Chinese media (both in relatively more stylish standard Chinese as well as
in Cantonese demotic) during the period before and during his preparation
and publication of the first edition of the Chinese Classics. The consequent
roles of his life-long friend and colleague, whom he referred to as his
“co-pastor”, Ho Tsun-sheen ???, and his hired researcher who worked with him
for ten years from 1862 till 1872, Wáng T?o ?? – both serving simultaneously
as informants, research partners, and language teachers – proved to be a new
and fruitful way to gain a more precise comprehension of what Legge learned
from them and how he employed what he had learned.
5. Understanding Legge’s Scottish Orientations.
The extremely significant formative influences
of Legge’s religious and philosophical training in northeastern Scotland in
his home and at King’s College, Aberdeen, and then later in London at the
Congregational seminary called Highbury College, were hermeneutic gold
mines. Fortunately, recent research into Legge’s background coincided with a
surge in studies of the Scottish realist philosophers in North American and
United Kingdom philosophical circles as well as the publication of
watershed-making research tools in the history of Scottish church history
and theology, making this particular dimension of the hermeneutic
comprehension of Legge’s own assumed categories of understanding far more
accessible and much more precisely documentable. Stated more directly,
Legge’s fairly rigorous schooling as a young boy in Scottish grammar schools
was based upon a revisionary moral and religious worldview created initially
by 17th century Scottish Presbyterians deeply influenced by Calvinist
theology. This system of the theological reconstruction of life and society
was adopted in a critical manner by Scottish Christians who no longer felt
it right in their consciences to continue to be associated with the state
religion or the so-called “National Kirk” (that is, the Scottish
Presbyterian churches and its General Assembly). It formed a new style of
life which I have coined as “Sabbath culture”, a form of life Legge brought
with him to southeastern China, seeing it successfully transplanted and
translated into a Ruified Chinese Protestant form of life.
In addition, the Neo-Aristotelian Scottish
realism that emerged in the mid-18th century as a self-conscious contrast to
the extreme skepticism of their fellow Scottish philosopher, David Hume
(1711-1776), provided the intellectual categories for an understanding and
assessment of different beliefs within broad ranging groups of human beings
(what we now would refer to as “culture”) as well as the hermeneutic
principles which would help one interpret, evaluate, and argue toward a
higher level of consensus among dissenting groups of human beings. This
Scottish school of philosophy, part of a too-often-forgotten Scottish
Enlightenment which took place in the 18th century, was brought into being
by the intellectual labors of a pastor-scholar and philosopher, Thomas Reid
(1710-1796), whose student, Dugald Stewart (1753-1828), was the main
influence in James Legge’s philosophical studies while at university in
Aberdeen. Even more significant was the successful combination in the 1820s
of a moderating Calvinist theology with this “Scottish commonsense”
philosophy, epitomized in the work and writings of another famous Scottish
pastor-scholar, Thomas Chalmers (1780-1847). Armed with this ideological
panoply – one which not only left its manifest impact in James Legge’s
writings, but also shaped much of North American education (James McCosh
(1811-1894), President of Princeton University in the latter quarter of the
19th century, was a Scottish realist) and its theological and missionary
traditions – Legge expressed in his prolegomena, translations and
commentaries a well-rounded and committed viewpoint fully informed by this
theologically systematic and philosophically engaging system of “first
principles”.
6. Legge’s Involvement in Ruist Commentarial Traditions.
Finally, Legge’s preparations for translating
these ancient Chinese scriptures involved him necessarily, due to his own
philosophically informed convictions about the proper ways to understand
texts and contexts, in a wide-ranging search through related Chinese
commentarial traditions. Whenever he could do so, he tried to locate
hermeneutic traditions within these commentarial works that represented
various approaches to interpretive options, indicating where he agreed,
disagreed, or found the text and/or its related commentaries
incomprehensible. As a consequence, Legge cited more than 300 Ruist scholars
from the pre-Hàn to the Q?ng dynasty by name and by their works, creating a
completely new standard of hermeneutically justified translations which
remains a monument to his own life-long effort as a missionary-scholar and
sinological translator.
B. Initial Evidence of Legge’s Effort in
Engaging Contemporary Sinology
A more thorough study can manifest just how
unusual Legge’s standards for publishing the Chinese Classics were,
especially when they are compared to past Roman Catholic, Protestant, and
academicians’ translations. Significantly, as we will learn below, the
majority of works he cited were from missionaries – Roman Catholic,
Protestant, and Russian Orthodox missionaries – rather than from
academicians, suggesting something unusual about the cultural context of
early Chinese translation work and the distinctive role taken up by those
like himself who were “missionary-scholars”. Significantly, Legge regularly
cited these works in the bibliographic sections of his prolegomena to the
major translations, and so he certainly realized the limitations of these
previous efforts and had thought carefully about how he wanted to overcome
their deficiencies. Relevant questions involve issues such as which
languages the renderings were made in (for example, the scholarly Latin of
Jesuits or the use of contemporary languages such as French, German, and
English), whether they included the full text in translation, whether they
provided access to the original Chinese text, and whether they indicated
what different Chinese scholars had to say about difficult or important
passages. In all of these areas Legge went far beyond his predecessors, and
so also was able to produce a translation which – though questionable in
some places and awkwardly expressed in others – produced an overall advance
in both general understanding of the ancient Chinese Ruist scriptures as
well as new particular interpretive advances within texts which had
previously been overlooked or misrepresented in various degrees.
What should be added here is the additional fact that Legge not only
produced translations, but also provided interpretations sharpened by his
own Christian scholarly training and Scottish philosophical commitments. As
a consequence, we can learn very much about Legge’s motivations and
standards of judgment from not only his commentarial notes, but also from
his more lengthy and systematic treatises on “Chinese religions” and essays
on a wide variety of ancient Chinese texts. The following hermeneutic
reflections attempt to clarify how a person with his own peculiar
interpretive commitments could produce such a monumental and beneficial
corpus of sinological translations.
C. Hermeneutic Reflections on Christian Renderings of Chinese Classics
Before moving directly into listing and
explaining the new standards Legge established within sinological studies of
the canonical Ruist texts, let us reflect more about the hermeneutic
significance and the profound challenge of the whole process of translating
an authoritative text, a scripture, particularly one that is written in an
ancient foreign language previously unknown to the translator. As Hans-Georg
Gadamer (1900-2001) insightfully illustrates, it was the Continental
Enlightenment’s bias that one’s own reason should stand against all
“prejudices” created by authority and “over-hastiness”, that is, by a “blind
obedience” and an unjustified judgment made on the basis of one’s own
inadequately prepared understanding. What Gadamer sought to rejuvenate as
part of the real problem of hermeneutics was the fact that there could be
“justified pre-understandings” even within the consciousness of those just
starting to learn about foreign authorized texts that are “productive of
knowledge”, so much so that some of these pre-understandings could add to
our grasp of the message and meaning of canonical texts. Classical and
scriptural texts, then, can be a source of contemporary insight, and are not
merely “fixed” in a distant past so that they become in principle irrelevant
to the present. In them “ a consciousness of something enduring, of
significance that cannot be lost and is independent of all the circumstances
of time” is revealed. Here is the “normative sense” of the classic or the
scripture which Gadamer highlighted as a clue to getting at a deeper problem
in the process of understanding and interpreting ancient texts. In order for
a person to acquire a new historical horizon of texts written in ancient
times and in a foreign language, it is particularly necessary for there to
be a precondition that this process is assumed to be possible. In the most
general sense, this means that a person accepts a proposition of the
following sort: “I can learn about and gain an understanding of what
previously was not known and understood by myself or by anyone else among my
contemporaries.” This is a strained form of the more common assumptions
about normal dialogue, because when we share a common language and the same
historical contexts, the extent of our differences are not as pronounced.
Put into the context of Legge’s own hermeneutic experiences after he arrived
in southeastern China, he believed (due very much to the influences of
neo-Aristotelian developments of Scottish “commonsense” philosophy) that the
beliefs and worldviews of other human beings – even those of distant times
and using Chinese forms of communication -- could in principle be
approached, understood, and evaluated precisely because they were products
of human beings.
Significantly, this did not mean that he had to believe in their
truthfulness in order to understand them, for Gadamer argues to the contrary
that “the word of scripture addresses us and that only the person who allows
himself to be addressed – whether he believes or whether he doubts –
understands.” This basic comprehension of the preconditions needed for
justified translations of ancient texts in foreign languages has many times
been denied by those who argue that “one who doubts” could never truly
understand a text which is doubted. This would only be the case, however, if
the authoritative text were not approached by the translator in a manner
which subordinated her or his mind to the text’s claim of bearing an
authority to and over the reader. If one reads a text only to criticize it
from an independent point of view, that is, where one’s own knowledge
dominates the text and rejects its authority in principle, then no genuine
and justified understanding could be obtained. What is difficult for some to
imagine, and this is precisely what we should recognize as a dimension in
Legge’s achievement as a sinological translator, is that he could submit
himself to the authority of Chinese scriptures as canonical texts, even
while he carried many doubts within his mind about their claims. To reveal
and understand the claims of an ancient scripture was a different task from
evaluating and doubting its claims; a translator and interpreter (or
translator-interpreter) can clarify this difference in the act of
translation, when it is done well, even while retaining a distancing doubt.
What becomes a more profound element in this process of translation is when
new understandings of the authoritative text(s) break through one’s previous
doubting assumptions, providing a way forward into “acquiring a new horizon”
previously obstructed by doubts one held to be justified. This breaking down
of pre-understood and existentially confirmed doubts and their final
overcoming, breaking through into a new and positive synthesis of translated
understandings which enrich the translator’s ability to sympathize and
recognize the value of the foreign text, can come through the study of the
impact of the canonical texts on subsequent interpreters within its original
historical traditions. It suggests that the final goal of translation
presented by Goethe (the idealized “true interlinear”) and summarized by
Steiner in the last stage of his account of hermeneutic motion in
translation (“restitution”) may still hint at something important for at
least the aesthetics of translation, that being a disciplined turn back
toward the original text which reveals something of its otherness to both a
translator and a reader.
For example, Legge could learn more about his own doubts about the Chinese
scriptures through studying the debates of Ruist commentators from different
ages about various troubled passages in their own canonical literature. In
this way, he had the possibility of discovering like-minded scholars
(confirming his belief in the commensurability of basic understandings of
human life and experiences) as well as more acceptable translations and
interpretations of canonical texts which were particularly difficult (due to
the use of strange or unusual terminology, distances in historical-cultural
modes of presentation, and possibilities of forgery, among other problems).
All of these problems happened to be included in Legge’s education based on
Scottish realist philosophy and his Nonconformist Christian training,
because he was groomed to understand the Bible as just this kind of
authoritative text, and had only accepted its profoundly authoritative
significance for his own life after he had graduated from university in
1835. When Legge began to consider making the translation and interpretation
of what he called the “Chinese classics” his missiological goal, he did so
under the assumption that his approach to those authoritative Chinese texts
should be taken with the same kind of rigor and thoroughness – a principled
submission to their claims even in spite of his ignorance and doubts – as he
assumed for the Bible. Notably, he did this without referring to these
canonical works as “sacred books” or “scriptures” within Chinese traditions,
a factor he reconsidered when he published six more volumes with F. Max
Müller in Oxford as the Sacred Books of China. It did not mean that he read
into them any divine authority, as he did believe was the case with the
Bible, but that he took every word, phrase, and sentence seriously, as a
text to be grappled with, and to be interpreted in the light not only of
grammatical and historical understandings of the text, but also from a
broader understanding of the whole authoritative text itself. This explains
in part why Legge, though he first conceived this massive project as early
as 1841, he did not actually produce his first volume in the Chinese
Classics till twenty years later. He sought to have a fuller understanding
of the whole text, as a text with authority within the Q?ng empire having
its own cultural history, meaning in general, a history of the impact of its
understanding on people across many ages who received its authority (what
Gadamer calls Wirkungsgeschichte). While others before him may not have been
so cautious, Legge self-consciously took up this attitude, making it
possible not only for him to establish new standards in sinological
translations of the ancient Chinese scriptures with which he worked, but
also to experience over a lengthier period of time a transition in his own
legitimation of doubts about these texts, opening doors for an Ruified
accommodationist form of missionary presentations of Christian proclamations
which he had not previously seen as possible or understood as justifiable.
The most important breakthroughs in sinological standards came in Legge’s
understandably well-attested translations found in The Chinese Classics.
There were significant and subtle differences between the first edition
(1861-1872) and its later, partially revised second edition (1893-1895), but
here below we will mostly focus on the most obvious elements which were
shared by both editions of this major work.
II. Standards Set in Legge’s Chinese Classics for Sinological Translations
Now I would like to enumerate the fifteen new
standards set by James Legge’s first edition of the Chinese Classics
(1861-1872), some being refined in his partially revised second edition
(1893-1895). In addition, I will provide brief historical comments to
explain why these standards were so significant, illustrating them with
overhead transparencies whenever possible. When relevant, I will also
indicate why they remain important for all subsequent translations of
classical Chinese literature, that is, the canonical texts of the authorized
Ruist traditions.
1. Identification and Use of a Recognized Chinese Standard Text
To begin his work on the Ruist canon, Legge
required of himself to locate the most updated and authorized version of all
of the relevant texts. These he called the “modern version”, and only in the
prolegomena to one of the later volumes of the Chinese Classics made it
explicit that these texts were culled from the larger collectanea edited by
Ru?n Yuán (?? 1764-1849), the Huáng Q?ng j?ngji? ??????. This was a
precedent of momentous importance. Previously, very few translators who were
either missionaries or academicians ever made clear the status and source of
their Chinese original, not to mention discussing the history of the
redaction of a particular text in the Ruist canon or the Chinese scholarly
consensus about which among the extant versions of text(s) should be
considered most authoritative. Among those who did, even fewer then went so
far as to print the Chinese text along with their translation. For example,
Joshua Marshman provided some Chinese text for his very early version of a
portion of the Lùnyú published from Serampore in 1809 (ironically titled The
Works of Confucius) it was neither elegant in form nor precise in
punctuation.
Legge discussed the textual history (Redaktionsgeschichte) in his lengthy
prolegomena, and then published the Chinese text above his own English
translation in all cases except in the last volume (CC5), where he published
the Ch?nqi? and the extremely lengthy Zu?zhuàn first in Chinese as a
complete text, and then followed them on subsequent pages with English
language texts of these two Ruist scriptures.
Since this time, every major translator of canonical texts has needed to
clarify the authorized Chinese text used in order to make their own
rendering. The most recent example I am aware of is Andrew Plaks publication
of his translations of the Dàxué and Zh?ngy?ng for Penguin Press; and even
just last year here in Hongkong one could find that D. C. Lau was willing to
published an edited version of the Mencius which included a standardized
Chinese text along with his English rendering. Both these examples suggest
that something very fundamental was brought to light by Legge’s insistence
in identifying an authorized version of the Chinese original and publishing
it along with his English translation.
2. Using Standardized Transliterations and Special Tonal Marks
Previous to Legge’s time, there was no
standardized romanization system which all major sinologists used
consistently for referring to the phonetic equivalents of Chinese
characters. This caused much trouble for those European readers such as
Leibniz who were very interested in early Jesuit renderings of Ruist
canonical literature, since at times they could not identify specific terms,
and were not always unable to distinguish homonyms.
Relying first on the transliteration system developed by Robert Morrison’s
Chinese dictionaries (1815-1823), which did not include tonal marks, Legge
published the whole of his first edition of the Chinese Classics, employing
Morrison’s precedent. What he did do to correct this tonal inadequacy was to
change the Chinese text itself by adding special markers where alternative
readings of characters were indicated. That is to say, if a Chinese
character had more than one phonetic pronunciation and so carried different
meanings, Legge added a small circle in one of the four corners of the
character to indicate the use of an alternative phonetic (sound and tone).
This made his Chinese text immediately take on a certain kind of
“foreignness” for a Chinese reader, since these phonetic markers were
usually only written into the text and not made part of the printed Chinese
format, but Legge justified its use because he was preparing the books for
both foreign and indigenous readers. Significantly, at least from an
existential point of view, Legge complained of being musically “tone deaf”,
and so this also apparently affected his expression of Chinese languages.
Nevertheless, in spite of this deficiency, he understood the principles of
tonal expression and explained them to his readers by relying on traditional
Chinese accounts of these matters.
By the time he began preparing versions of Ruist
classics for the Sacred Books of China (1879-1891), Legge became convinced
that Thomas Wade (1818-1895) had provided a more precise system, and so he
began employing this transliteration system for his subsequent translations.
As a consequence, in the second edition of the Chinese Classics, where he
only reedited the Four Books, one finds that Legge’s transliterations there
(CC1 and CC2) were using Wade’s system, while the latter three volumes were
reprinted with the less precise Morrison transliteration system.
Unfortunately, the later standardized transliteration system of the Wade-Gile’s
hybrid had not yet been developed by Herbert Giles at the time Legge was
working on the Sacred Books of China, and so this particular system which
was used in English language texts for much of the 20th century was not
accessible to Legge.
This unhelpful inconsistency has been overcome in later bilingual
translations of some of these texts in the 1990s, where the contemporary
standard P?ny?n ??has replaced all the transliterations of personal and
place names as well as other technical terms in the text when Legge’s
translations were employed (as in the case of the Four Books).
Translators will know that this problem of employing a recognized standard
in transliterations is still a major problem across sinological worlds,
where there are still some differences between systems employed, for
example, in French and German texts. The trend is to adopt a truncated form
of the mainland Chinese P?ny?n system, that is, one without tonal marks, but
now with the advantages of Chinese computer software, we could hope that
this also might be overcome. Fortunately, some precedents for the practice
of providing the complete P?ny?n (sound and tone) have already been set
(Australian Mark Elvin, Americans P. J. Ivanhoe and this author, among
others).
3.Adding Numbered Sectional Indicators to the Authorized Chinese Text
Readers of classical Ruist texts will know that
not all traditional Chinese texts separate the different paragraphs or
“verses” in a regular way. Many simply indicate the beginning of a new
passage by raising the scriptural text to the top of the Chinese page, or
perhaps adding a large circle (?) in front of the subsequent text. Following
precedents he knew of in both biblical and classical Latin and Greek texts
already published in England, Legge chose to add location indicators to his
renderings, including chapter numbers, paragraph numbers, and even “verse”
numbers, depending on the length and complexity of the texts involved.
As a consequence of this innovation, Legge was
able to prepare a more systematic reference system for all the Chinese
Classics, making it possible then to create several other standard features
of his translations (see below #8 and #14). That these can be seen as part
of the “Orientalist” mode of creating tools for gaining a “comprehensive”
account of the text can be considered, but it should be done also in the
light of the fact that many modern versions of these same Chinese texts
published in contemporary China now incorporate at least sectional or verse
numbers for each passage. Some aspects of the Sinological Orientalist
production of the “classical” texts, it would seem, have even had a creative
and synergetic effect on the presentation of Chinese canonical texts
themselves.
4.Bilingual texts (SL and TL) followed by Subordinate Commentarial Notes
By presenting the reader with a tri-leveled text
involving different kinds of texts related to the Chinese original – a
translation followed by commentarial notes – a special dynamic within the
translation text is grammatologically achieved. A reader by this means can
judge for himself or herself whether the rendering is appropriate, whether
it can be more elegantly expressed, and whether the justifications are
illuminating or not.
This clarification between a translation and the
commentary was not always previously done. For example, in the French
translation of the Analects presented by the French academician, Guilliame
Pauthier, he at times mixed up the translation with glosses from the
commentaries without letting the reader know, and so produced a very
different kind of text (and effect) for the reader. There was some previous
efforts presented by Legge’s missionary predecessor in Malacca, David
Collie, where he also provided commentarial notes to his translations of the
Four Books (produced in 1828, but without any Chinese text), but these were
much more limited in scope and were generally unaware or unresponsive to the
larger corpus of commentarial literature which Legge regularly employed.
That Legge persisted in presenting these extensive commentarial notes during
a Victorian period when the translator, along the lines of Matthew Arnold’s
suggestion, should “disappear from the text”, makes his self-conscious
effort all the more remarkable. Yet it remains a much more common practice
now, especially within translations of canonical Chinese literature, to have
“translator’s notes” added to portions of the text where the rendering
cloaks or camouflages certain dimensions of the original text. In this
regard, Legge’s precedent has become a boon for all subsequent translators
and readers.
5.Renderings Based on Research into Commentarial Traditions
Most translations of Ruist scriptures previous
to Legge’s time did not reveal the commentarial texts they employed in
interpreting passages and coming to a decision for translating them. Even
less often did them manifest to readers where there were important
alternatives within the text and so translation options which should also be
considered. For example, the major 17th century Jesuit translation project
which presented one of most important earlier renderings of most of the Four
Books, entitled Confucius Sinarum Philosophus, utilized only two
commentaries. The first was the influential commentary of Zh? X?
(??1130-1200), and the second was the relatively accessible commentary
prepared by the tutor of the young Míng emperor, Wànlì ??, the
“straightforward explanations” (zhíji? ??) prepared by Zh?ng J?zhèng (???
1525-1582). On his part Legge referred to more than 300 individual Ruist
commentators throughout the commentarial notes of his five volumes,
highlighting the new level of engagement he had taken up with the past and
present Ruist scholarly traditions.
6.Handling Difficult Text by means of Critical Readings and Paraphrases
Because Legge knew that there were some texts
that had a very complicated and problematic redaction history, such as the
Dàxué and the Shàngsh? (which he called by an alternative name, the Sh?j?ng,
or the Book of Historical Documents), Legge realized that at times he would
have to provide a critical account of how he came to his chosen translation
option. His ways of handling these problem texts are still instructive for
21st century translators.
For example, where indigenous commentators
pointed out alternative readings in extant texts, he might refer to them.
Rarely did he ever offer other alternatives which had no precedent in
Chinese commentarial traditions (in opposition, for example, to the more
libertine methods of textual emendation employed by the German translator,
Richard Wilhelm (1874-1930), who nevertheless continued to cite precedents
in Chinese or Japanese commentarial traditions whenever he could locate
them).
Another kind of problem arose when the text was manifestly corrupt, or was
simply incoherent in its canonical form. What was a translator then to do?
When corruption was identified and confirmed in Chinese commentaries, Legge
employed an alternative which had also been adopted by British missionary
translators of the Delegates’ Version of the Christian Bible: Rather than
translate what would appear to be incoherent, he provided a gloss of the
text based on imperially authorized paraphrases (regularly entitled as ??
Rìji?ng or “Daily Lectures” or what Legge called “Daily Lessons”), and then
explained his use of this text in his commentarial notes.
In cases, such as the Dàxué and Zh?ngy?ng, where more than one form of the
standard text existed within the Chinese canon (as in the case of the “old
texts” of the Book of Rites and the “revised texts” prepare by Zh? X? and
authorized by the Q?ng imperial house as the standard texts for the Four
Books), Legge made translations of both texts in their appropriate canonical
context. (See CC1 and SBE28.)
Translators are often tempted at these points when redaction difficulties
arise in the text to offer a rendering without informing the reader about
the inherent difficulties. Legge’s particular ways of resolving these
issues, especially by offering an imperially authorized paraphrase of the
passage, may not seem adequate now, but it was a clever choice of
alternative readings which still reflected a high level of standardized
interpretive authority. In the cases of the Dàxué and Zh?ngy?ng, however,
his special effort to provide renderings for both forms of the text still
goes beyond what has generally been made available in contemporary
translations of these same texts, even in spite of the fact that the
problems within the redaction history of these texts are far more often
addressed in both philosophical and classical studies of these canonical
pieces.
7.Providing Alternative Renderings in Commentarial Notes
In cases where there were controversial
interpretations of important passages, Legge would first come to his own
decision which option was the comparatively better one, but then would
include the alternative(s) in the commentarial notes, often including the
Chinese statement of a representative indigenous commentator, so that the
reader could “judge for themselves” which was better.
This was a particularly bold act in the light of the mid-19th century
preference to have the translator “disappear” from the text, but I take this
to be an example of the extraordinary effort Legge took to objectify the
translation options available to an informed reader of these classical
traditions. Whatever his missionary predilections, Legge handled many texts
of this sort with a generosity that brought many benefits to interested
readers. This standard reflects his own training in classical and biblical
exegesis, but remains a fine scholarly example for translators of
authoritative texts to this day.
8. Providing Cross-References to Quoted Texts
Because Legge chose to add numbers as location
markers for each classical text, he could also make precise references to
quotations made to relatively ancient canonical passages found in the later
texts (such as quotations of the Sh?j?ng in the Lúny?). This made the
translation all the more accessible to the uninitiated reader, and provided
a facility for checking these sources.
Many traditional commentators would refer to texts by more general reference
terms, citing the chapter or poem in which the original quotation appeared,
but never anything more precise. In this regard, Legge employed standards of
cross-reference he already knew in both Latin and Greek classical studies as
well as in biblical studies to these texts in the Chinese Ruist canon, and
so set a new standard of precision in cross-referencing texts (and also
indicating when the quotations reflected an alternative textual tradition no
longer found in the authorized version of these texts. Making this kind of
information available took a lot of painstakingly precise study, but Legge
kept his standards high, and as a consequence made his texts useful for many
generations of readers, even long after the traditional form of Ruist study
had become anachronous.
It should also be mentioned that this did not always mean that Legge’s
references were correct. Since he started his translations with the Four
Books, he had not yet set his own numerical references for many of the older
canonical works until much later, and so some of the reference terms in the
first edition of the Chinese Classics needed to be revised in the second
edition. Most of the time, however, his references were accurate, and so
they became a boon for scholars. As a consequence, most later translators
also provide similar kinds of cross-references, a practice that was rarely
followed in many previous translations by Jesuit and Protestant missionary
translators, though indicated in a less precise manner in the texts prepared
by early 19th century French academicians.
9. Willing to Explore Translation Options within Commentaries
Legge did at times find it hard to render certain passages, and in at least
one case, the title of a particular work. While choosing to render a poem in
the Sh?j?ng initially in a literal fashion (Xi?o Y? , Tóngg?ng, Hémíng;
????????), later Legge reversed his decision and provided a more justified
metaphorical rendering on the basis of Zh? X?’s interpretations, explaining
beneath in his commentary his previous hesitancy. By doing so he not only
revealed the challenges of poetic translation, but also shows how a careful
translator who continues to return to texts, especially after spending time
with other texts and commentaries, may return to a previous rendering with
more insight and more courage to provide a comparatively more suitable
rendering.
The other major problem came about in Legge’s struggle to translate the
title of the Zh?ngy?ng. Initially giving it the Aristotelian sounding name,
the Doctrine of the Mean, he was nevertheless unsatisfied with this
rendering on philological grounds, but was unable initially to resolve the
problem. Later he became convinced that it should be entitled The State of
Equilibrium and Harmony, publishing the text with this title in his version
of the Book of Rites (SBE28), and then, apparently due to editorial
restrictions denying him this liberty, reducing it to a footnote in the
initial statements to the work in the second edition of the Chinese
Classics.
Here the principle involves not only being open to commentarial options
which indicate alternative possibility with translation, but also living
long enough with these canonical texts so that one can gain a new
hermeneutic insight into their meaning, and so readdress what were
previously more or less opaque passages or terms with new understanding.
10. Pursuing Comparative Analyses with the Commentarial Notes
Here some of the broader scholarship as well as the Christian elements of
Legge’s own personal commitments came into play. The previous hermeneutic
discussion has already indicated how Gadamer would justify renderings done
under Legge’s interest only as long as he “submitted himself to the text” in
spite of his contrary interests or criticisms. I personally believe that
Legge did so, as illustrated already in a number of examples, to a degree
that was quite remarkable.
Nevertheless, one of the major “sticking points” that affects some
translators and theorists of translation is the fact that of Legge’s
preference for rendering shàngdì ??or dì ? (in only certain contexts in this
latter case) within a monotheistic framework. One particularly acrid
criticism comes from Eugene Eoyang Chen. But, as I have indicated elsewhere
at great length, Legge did have commentarial precedents for Ruist monotheism
which he was aware of in the writings of his older contemporary, the
Cantonese official and second ranking scholar, Luó Zhòngfán (???, d. circa
1850). This he indicated very clearly in his prolegomena and commentarial
notes, but it had been simply overlooked and the fact of there being a
monotheistic Ruist tradition was flatly denied by many Chinese translators
and scholars (foreign and ethnically Chinese) until new evidence of the fact
was produced in the early 1990s.
What is important here is that Legge regularly sought out indigenous support
for any interpretive position which he adopted, even when his own interests
were obviously engaged in the relevant debates. It is this special effort at
objectivity and making justified choices that marks off his renderings as
being more than casual or prejudiced translations. This principle continues
to be an edifying and challenging standard for translators to this day.
11. Searching for Hermeneutic Principles with Chinese Commentaries
On the flyleaf of every volume of the Chinese
Classics Legge highlighted a passage from the Mencius which was for him an
indication that Chinese classical scholarship already understood hermeneutic
principles that were as rationally coherent as interpretive traditions he
had learned about in European classical studies and his courses in biblical
hermeneutics. The text is Mencius 5A: 4 (2), and runs (in the rendering
Legge presents within the body of the work):
“[Those who explain the odes] may not insist on one term so as to do
violence to a sentence, nor on a sentence so as to do violence to the
general scope. They must try with their thoughts to meet that scope, and
then [we shall] apprehend it.”
The Chinese text quoted in the flyleaf does not include any reference to the
persons or texts being explained, and so Legge essentially lifts this
passage out of its context to “create” the hermeneutic principle in its more
universal form. Nevertheless, it is significant that he was searching for
these interpretive cues, and found them not only in the Mencius, but also in
various commentaries produced by Zh? X?.
In this way, once more, Legge anticipates the rigor that sinologists have
now taken to be a more justified route toward understanding Chinese
canonical texts, helping scholars to search for ways in which indigenous
commentators explained or “explained away” certain translation problems they
encountered. In this regard Legge’s standard once more remains a healthy
model and beneficial corrective to more arbitrary acts of translations.
12. Producing Annotated Bibliographies of Relevant Chinese Literature
Not only did Legge offer extensive commentarial
notes to the passages he translated, he also provided annotations to all the
main works in Chinese which he employed. This was an obvious boon to any
reader who had some access to Chinese, since Legge not only provided the
Chinese title and a translation of it, but informed the reader of the author
or editor, gave background information about that person, and then
characterized the relative importance, strengths, and weaknesses of each
text. Even to this day his textual evaluations are instructive, revealing
not only what texts he had access to, but also which ones he did not know
that are now considered more important and standard commentarial works for
various Chinese scriptures. In this way Legge’s own scholarly acumen and
intellectual access can be carefully weighed, and so also advances in more
recent translations and interpretive studies can be precisely indicated.
How one would welcome such a high standard of
objectivity in research work and translations within our own age!
13.Providing Bibliographic References to Relevant European Studies
Here Legge’s contributions to a historically
self-conscious account of the state of sinological translations and
interpretations in the mid-19th century is instructive in a number of ways.
Unlike the case with the Chinese works, Legge did not provide evaluative
annotations here, even though he regularly evaluated specific passages from
these works in his commentarial notes. What is more significant here,
especially for the more precise understanding of the nature of Sinological
Orientalism and the new stage of sinology which Legge created, was the fact
that most of the texts were prepared by missionaries. Though nearly half of
all the foreign language texts mentioned in this section of his
bibliographies (from CC1 to CC5) were in English, he also included 13 in
French, nine in Latin, and two in both German and Russian. These represented
19 works by academicians and 26 works by missionaries (including nine by
Catholic and two by Russian orthodox authors). Obviously, Legge’s concern
was to sum up previous scholarship in both Chinese and foreign settings, and
at the very least to set a new standard for sinological comprehensiveness,
if not also to establish a more justified rendering for each classical
text.
This kind of recapitulation of previous
scholarship is now considered standard fare for translators and
interpreters, and so once more Legge becomes a much appreciated forerunner
of this academic tradition.
14.Creating a Dictionary for “Classical Chinese Terminology”
Not only did Legge provide a vocabulary list, he
also indicated where the terms appeared in the particular classical text,
employing his system of more precise reference numbers to facilitate the
reader’s access to alternative renderings. Though a final version of a
Classical Chinese dictionary was never produced, due to a large degree
because of the extensive work Legge would have had to give to this project
in relationship to the massive text of the Zu?zhuàn, nevertheless, it
stimulated precedents which have led to the creation of just this kind of
dictionary in other languages within the 20th century.
This precedent also stimulated further philological work in Hongkong which
added much that was helpful for later sinologists. After Legge had produced
these preliminary materials, John Chalmers (??? 1825-1899), his younger
colleague in the London Missionary Society in Hongkong and Gu?ngzh?u,
produce English versions of the K?ng X? Dictionary and some translations and
philological interpretations of portions of the Shu?wén Dictionary. These
breakthroughs in philological study were directly related to Legge’s
influence on Chalmer’s life, and so they became well known in sinological
circles during the last decades of the 19th century.
15.Adding Indexes to all the Classical Texts
These included indexes to personal and place
names as well as to the subjects handled within each Chinese classical text.
These indexes were published by Legge, but were actually prepared by his
younger missionary colleague, John Chalmers, the person who provided very
important translations of other philological tools mentioned in the previous
paragraph.
In a day and age when computer technology simultaneously makes some things
easier and others things more difficult (as any editor and publisher will
readily testify), these indexes are regularly seen as a “user friendly” tool
of great importance. None of Legge’s predecessors in sinological translation
presented anything like these thorough indexes, and perhaps it is not so
surprising that most of them did not even have indexes attached to their
works. In this way, once more, Legge set a standard for modern texts of
canonical translations that can still be honored, and did so without the
technical advantages we now employ. He worked at each text without the aid
of typewriter or computer memory, saving up his notes in large piles, and
keeping them categorized and accessible so that they could be made available
whenever they were needed. However we do so today, our filing systems and
our means of organizing vast amounts of data is always an indication of the
level of comprehensiveness we have (and can) achieve. Legge’s example is
remarkable in this regard, a true model of patient, thoughtful, and
disciplined translation.
III. Concluding Remarks
These fifteen standards were all found in the first edition of the Chinese
Classics, and were in most cases so far above and beyond the precedents set
by other missionaries’ and academicians’ renderings that they were given the
high honor of receiving the first Julien Prize for Chinese Literature
presented in Paris in 1873. If I have achieved my stated purpose, I would
hope that listeners here would now agree with me that Legge’s Chinese
Classics did in fact set a remarkable set of standards for sinological
translations, standards which remain, in most of the cases, important
precedents for classical translation even in the 21st century.
Electric Scotland Note: I've tried to
find some of these Classics but it's not easy trying to figure out which is
which so here is the best I've been able to do...
This is the list of books...
(1) Thi Yi King, or Book of Changes
(2) The Shoo King, or Book of History
(3) The She King, or Book of Poetry
(4) The Li Ki, or Book of Rites
(5) The Chun Tsiu, Spring and Autumn Record
(6) The Lun Yu, or Analects of Confucius
(7) The Ta Hsio, or The Great Learning
(8) The Chung Yung, or The Doctrine of the Mean
(9) The Works of Mencius
And here is what I have found...
chineseclassics00legggoog.pdf
Vol IV The She King or The Book of Poetry
chineseclassics01legggoog.pdf
Vol V (Part I) The Ch'un with The TSO Chuen
chineseclassics03legggoog.pdf
Vol I Confucian Analects, The Great Learning, and the Doctrine of the Mean
chineseclassics04legggoog.pdf
Vol V (Part I1) The Ch'un with The TSO Chuen
chineseclassics05legggoog.pdf
Part I - Confucious
chineseclassics06legggoog.pdf
Vol IV (Part II) The second, third and fourth parts of the She King
chineseclassics07legggoog.pdf
The Life and Teachings of Confucious
chineseclassics08legggoog.pdf
Vol III the Shoo King
chineseclassics00chingood.pdf
Vol II Life and Works of Mencius
There may be others but they are not well
indexed and hence it's going to take some time to identify them.
There is another page for downloadable books by
Legge at
http://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/webbin/book/lookupname?key=Legge%2C%20James%2C%201815-1897
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