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The Transparent Eye
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A publication of the SCHOOL OF HAWAIIAN ASIAN & PACIFIC STUDIES University of...
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The Transparent Eye
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A publication of the SCHOOL OF HAWAIIAN ASIAN & PACIFIC STUDIES University of Hawaii
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The Transparent Eye Reflections on Translation, Chinese Literature, and Comparative Poetics Eugene Chen Eoyang
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© 1993 School of Hawaiian, Asian & Pacific Studies All Rights Reserved Printed in the United States of America 98 97 96 95 94 93 5 4 3 2 1 First printing corrected 1993 Library of Congress CataloginginPublication Data Eoyang, Eugene Chen. The transparent eye : reflections on translation, Chinese literature, and comparative poetics / Eugene Chen Eoyang. p. cm.—(SHAPS library of translations) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0824814290 (alk. paper) 1. Translating and interpreting. 2. Chinese literature— Translations—History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series. PN241.E57 1992 495.1 802—dc20 9233366 CIP University of Hawaii Press books are printed on acidfree paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources Designed by Paula Newcomb
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To my mother and in memory of my father
Page vii Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. —Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, 3:452
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Contents
Preface
xi
A Note on Transliteration from the Chinese
xix
1 "Confound Their Language": The Mythologies of Translation
3
2 "God's Hand Is in Every Translation": The Myths of Theory
24
3 Translation across Civilizations: The Contribution of Barbarians
46
4 "Artifices of Eternity": Audiences for Translations of Chinese Literature
63
5 "Dim Emblazonings": Images of Chinese Literature in English Translation
79
6 Translation As Excommunication: Notes toward an Intraworldly Poetics
111
7 The Ship of Theseus: The Ontology of Translation
122
8 Guises and Disguises: The Epistemology of Translation
137
9 Horizons of Meaning: The Phenomenology of Translation
152
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10 The Maladjusted Messenger: Rezeptionsästhetik in Translation
169
11 Catalyst and Excavator: Pound and Waley As Translators of Chinese Poetry
190
12 Beyond Visual and Aural Criteria: The Importance of Flavor in Chinese Literary Criticism
210
13 Polar Paradigms in Poetics: Chinese and Western Literary Premises
238
Epilogue
271
Appendixes
281
Sources Cited
291
Index
303
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Preface This book is about translation, Chinese literature, and comparative poetics—yet these three rubrics are aspects of but one concern: how our observations of others reflect back on ourselves and the way we see. My explorations do not fit easily in any existing category of inquiry, although they may be subsumed in that wideranging discipline called comparative literature. In studies of translation, the case of Chinese (and other East Asian languages) has traditionally been relegated to the periphery of concern, occasionally with a note of apology about one's ignorance of this important culture. Studies of Chinese literature, on the other hand, tend to assume the hermetic, selfsufficient nature of that subject and scarcely address the problems of translation, even when the exposition uses a language other than Chinese. It is this "noman'sland" that I seem to have inhabited for some years, and it is this "twilight zone"—situated in the margins of two fields—that I find suggestive. The particular problems that confront the nonnative study of a literature are at once new to our age and yet very ancient. In the concern with world literature—defined as literature in any language read in either the original or translation—the nonnative study of a literature is perhaps a modern concern. In times past, the normal assumption was that only those most adept at one's own native language would presume to study its literature. Literature came in time to be thought of as the mark of learning and culture: in England of yesteryear, the phrase "he has literature" designated a man of learning. (The phrase has its counterpart in Chinese as well.) The acquisition of foreign languages was a mark of the social and cultural elite, the result of what constituted a liberal arts education in times past: the grand tour abroad. But in the twentieth century, particularly in America, education is no longer the
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sequestered privilege of the wealthy, and students and scholars come from all walks of life. The opportunities for intellectual, academic, or professional training are not limited to the few who have the means and the leisure to pursue such difficult areas of study. In this context, as one of the highest accomplishments of human culture, literature in any language is fair game for intellectual investigation. This studious recreation is what informs this book. Before the study of literature became an academic discipline, professors of literature were not, in fact, academics who earned their doctorates of philosophy in literature: they were its practitioners—poets, essayists, novelists. But since national literatures became established as a respectable field of disciplined study (scarcely more than a hundred years ago), there have been unsuspected cultural anomalies, not only in the study of one's own literature but also in the study of what is called ''foreign" literature. The teaching of a literature by nonnatives, for example, would have been thought preposterous, if not impossible, in the nineteenth century—except at a few outposts of learning like Oxford and the Sorbonne. Yet we now have Chinese and Japanese teaching English and English literature in their native countries, and we have Americans in the United States teaching Chinese and Chinese literature as well as Japanese and Japanese literature. What might have been inconceivable a generation ago—a native Chinese taking up a graduate degree in the study of Chinese literature outside of China—has become so commonplace (particularly in the United States) that no one is disconcerted by it. (The reverse, however, is not so familiar, for historical as well as cultural reasons: few if any Westerners have earned a degree in a European language or literature from a Chinese institution fo higher learning; even fewer Westerners hold permanent faculty positions in China.) In addition, more and more, authors are confronted with the prospect of audiences more numerous in a language not their own. Certainly, this is true of Mishima and Kawabata in Japanese; Steinbeck is read more in Russian than in English; and Jack London's books have sold better in Poland than they have in the United States. Gabriel García Marquez is probably as popular in English as he is in Spanish. All these examples seem emblematic of the shrinking globe and the growing interconnectedness of all nations
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in the world; but more than that, they point to certain unnoticed ironies. Boundaries between nations are regularly crossed by commerce; even barriers built by ideology are becoming less and less impenetrable (the Berlin Wall, the 48th parallel, the Iron Curtain). Indeed, the question of national identity has been raised in new and complex ways: with foreign ownership of American corporations; multinational conglomerates; ethnic rivalries in East European nations; clan conflicts in African countries; rival polities in the Islamic world. The insularity and oversimplifications of the past are truly insupportable in a world whose fate is bound together: the news regularly provides illustrations too numerous to enumerate. This interdependence has spawned an intellectual egalitarianism, as well as its reactionary backlash, evinced in the controversies surrounding Third World literature, feminism, and the closing of minds. Although these global concerns are relatively recent, the phenomenon of literature crossing national borders and overcoming linguistic barriers is hardly new. Nor is it unique to the modern period that literature is read as much in nonnative languages as in the language of the original (if not, in some instances, more). More people read the Greek classics in languages other than Greek than read them in the original; the readers of the Bible in the original over the course of two millennia are infinitesimal compared with those who have read it in translation. Whatever there is for purists and classicists to deplore in this situation, history has favored the impure and unclassic tendencies toward popularization through sometimes misguided and compromised translation. The conservators of culture always freeze time to their own requirements: they celebrate Homer, yet take little notice of the preHomeric oral (read: illiterate) tradition that led to the Iliad and the Odyssey as we know them; they wish to celebrate the Renaissance, yet fail to recognize the medieval contributions toward that revolutionary culmination; they wish to preserve the King's English, but take no notice of the fact that the most vital period of development in the language, the Elizabethan age, borrowed most from foreign tongues, underwent the greatest change, and produced the finest works in the language—it was, one should remember, then as now, the Queen's English, although it's an altogether different Elizabeth.
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The Elizabethan age, not so incidentally, was one of the great periods for translation. The purists of every culture rewrite history to suit their dogma. Western culture is vaunted without so much as an acknowledgment of the Arabic contribution—through Avicenna and Averroës—to the rediscovery of classical learning; nor is much made of the fact that Augustine and Plotinus, to cite only two seminal figures, were not Europeans. Terence, the master of Roman comedy, was born—a slave—in North Africa; Homer may have been a Greek immigrant in Asia Minor. Cultural exchanges are not a peculiarly recent phenomenon, even if the economic imperatives of a global economy make it appear that they are. Indeed, no culture ever existed that was not the result of cultural development and change, and the most obvious source of change has been the impact of (and interpenetration with) other cultures. But cultural identities—sometimes misconceived as cultural autonomies—need to be examined. They are categories set up by scholars and scientists to grasp the complexities of human activity, not fixed entities that have absolute and unchangeable meanings. It is all too easy to let temporary constructs superannuate into permanent constructions that impede rather than facilitate the process of inquiry. One must never forget M. H. Abrams' reminder: "The endemic disease of analytical thinking is hardening of the categories." Even terms like "native" and "nonnative" need to be scrutinized. For the notion of "native''—defined by the place of one's birth—assumes that one is brought up in the place where one is born, which is not true for many immigrants, emigrés, exiles, or their offspring. The native/nonnative paradigm is illsuited for some writers. Joseph Conrad was a native of Poland, but no one would characterize him as a Polish writer. Vladimir Nabokov, Samuel Beckett, Josef Brodsky, and Isaac Bashevis Singer are among the distinguished authors whose works are not all composed in their "native" language. Given the migrations of population over human history, it may not be farfetched to suggest that most humans are descendants of immigrants who have forgotten their forebears. Cultural chauvinists in the United States—indeed the Western Hemisphere—are only the most conspicuous instance of descendants of immigrants who claim "native" rights. (Even the Amerindians were not indigenous, according to anthropologists: they came by land and by sea from Asia at various junctures in history.)
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My concern with translation and Chinese literature highlights these issues of cultural interchange and cultural hegemony. Underlying these explorations is a greater appreciation for the complexities at fundamental levels—preconceptions, premises, paradigms. Often it appears that answers are being offered to the wrong questions, or at least to questions with ironies hardly realized. I once presented a long paper to a conference in Beijing that involved a comparison of Chinese and Western philosophical ideas (comprising Chapters 6 to 9 of the present book). The participants at the conference were divided equally between scholars from China and from the United States. A Chinese colleague had kind words to offer on the paper, but remonstrated at its length. Earnestly I asked him which parts he would cut. He said that I really didn't need the part about Chinese philosophy: we all knew that material already. (All this was said in Chinese.) Yes, I concurred, we knew it, but (pointing to the Americans in the conference) how about them? The Imagists once said that "a new cadence means a new idea"; if there is anything original in this book, it may be that it identifies a new audience—one that is incipiently bicultural, knowledgeable about both what has been called "East" and what has been called "West." The first part of the book, Chapters 1 to 5, comprises historical surveys of the background for translation in general and Chinese literature in particular. The second part, Chapters 6 to 9, presents a theoretical framework which tries to make sense of certain conundrums in translation: it attempts a parsing of the question into more manageable and, presumably, more meaningful segments. The third part, Chapters 10 to 13, exemplifies some of the semantic collisions that underlie the complexities of translation, on which the theoretical exposition in the middle part may be tested. The title of the book is adapted, in slightly modified form, from Emerson—that most provincial yet cosmopolitan of American writers. "The Transparent Eye" reminds us that the object on view is not only the vision we see but the organ through which that vision is apprehended. For most readers, who see another world— whether past or present—through translations, the eye (I?) of the translator is hardly noticeable. Indeed, the more effective the translator, the more transparent the eye through which we see the original. Opaqueness obstructs our vision; like cataracts, it prevents us from the full exercise of scrutiny. Ironically, we are most con
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scious of our faculty of sight when that faculty is most impeded. This book, however, is a look at transparencies. There is another sense in which the transparent eye is apposite to these ruminations on translation, Chinese literature, and comparative poetics. Having exposed the inevitable provincialities in all human discourse, it would be awkward for me to deny my own biases, limitations, and distortions. It is my hope that the reader will not only—constructively—see through my eyes but—deconstructively—see through me as well. The book closes with an epilogue which is set in the hic et nunc of a conference presentation at the Sorbonne in 1985. I wanted to situate this discourse in a circumstance—involving as it did a lecture in English about the image of China to a French audience—which seemed emblematic of the entire enterprise. One of the thrusts in this book is to cast doubt on the concept of "the sole creator" in any field of endeavor. Although my name appears as author, there are many who have contributed— explicitly or implicitly—to the composition of this work. The debt to those who have published on the large questions which I have addressed cannot be adequately paid in mere bibliographic citations. I can only hope that my analyses have done justice to them, even if, or particularly when, I have disagreed with them. There are personal debts as well to those who have sustained me in my efforts to publish this work. Some have even waded through the entire manuscript and made suggestions—Allen Winold, Breon Mitchell, Patricia Eoyang, the two readers for the School of Hawaiian, Asian & Pacific Studies. I offer them my thanks as much for their support as for their constructive criticisms. Others, like Winfred Lehmann, Richard Bjornson, and Sarah Lawall, as well as two anonymous readers for Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), have read and commented on selected portions of this work: I hope I have heeded sufficiently their sage counsel. To those, too numerous to mention, who have responded to my presentations at various scholarly colloquia and symposia, I express my appreciation, for they constitute the early alembic in which I tested these intellectual alchemies. To Don Yoder, who copyedited the manuscript, I want to express my appreciation: copyeditors who edit for meaning and felicity, rather than blind adherence to consistency,
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are not so common that they can be taken for granted. To Stuart Kiang, editor at the School of Hawaiian, Asian & Pacific Studies, who has shepherded the manuscript through its final phases with a sustaining stalwartness and faith, I feel a particular kinship and affection, because I was also—at one time—an editor who believed in his authors. Some of the material in this book has appeared in various journals and publications: Chapter 4 appeared under the title "Audiences for Translations of Chinese Literature" in The Art and Profession of Translation, edited by T. C. Lai (Hong Kong Translation Society, 1976); portions of Chapter 5 were first published as "The Tone of the Poet and the Tone of the Translator," Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 24 (1975):75–83; Chapter 10 was published under the same title in Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR) 10 (1988); Chapter 11 was published under the title "Waley or Pound? The Dynamics of Genre in Translation," in the Tamkang Review 19(1–4) (Autumn 1988Summer 1989); Chapter 12 was published in a very abbreviated form in Critical Inquiry 6 (1) (1979) under the same title; and Chapter 13 was slightly abbreviated when it appeared in Comparative Literature East and West: Traditions and Trends, edited by Cornelia Moore and Raymond Moody (Honolulu: University of Hawaii and EastWest Center, 1989). To my wife, Patricia Eoyang, who has sustained me in all my endeavors with enthusiasm and love, and to my mother, Ellen Eoyang, whose hardship and sacrifice made my life and this book possible, no expression of gratitude will ever suffice. My only wish is that this work be worthy of their devotion. One reader, a friend, commented that the manuscript was "very you." I can hardly argue with that, even if all the flaws in the pages that follow are ultimately my responsibility. BLOOMINGTON, INDIANA 15 JUNE 1991
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A Note on Transliteration from the Chinese In this book, pinyin is the primary form of transliteration from the Chinese. Inconveniently, however, other systems of transliteration, principally WadeGiles, persist in quoted excerpts published prior to general acceptance of the pinyin system. The traditional works of sinology (including their titles) are familiar to generations of sinologists in WadeGiles transliteration, which—despite its phonetic and phonological peculiarities—is the system used in reference libraries and in card catalogs. The pinyin system is employed in the People's Republic of China and cannot be ignored by anyone who addresses a Chinese audience. Specialists will be able to identify from the context which transliteration system is being used in this book, although pinyin will be given within brackets. It seems anachronistic to apply pinyin transliteration to scholarship which appeared before pinyin was implemented or where pinyin is not used (as in Taiwan and Hong Kong, for example). To complicate matters further, there are a plethora of transliteration systems in English. Transliterations of Chinese also vary from language to language: French, for example, has a very different system, because French pronunciation differs markedly from English and its alphabet has different phonetic values. In English alone, there are easily half a dozen or more transliteration systems—WadeGiles, Wang Yi's Guoryuu Romatzyh, Yale, pinyin, and others. Nor is it possible to be totally consistent in the use of one system, since, for example, Chinese place names are now so familiar in their nineteenthcentury forms that those unfamiliar with these arcana scarcely realize that Hangzhou and Hangchow, Zhejiang and Chekiang, Suzhou and Soochow, Gansu and Kansu, Xianggang and Hsiangkang (Hong Kong) are the same place
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names transliterated according to different systems. The confusions extend to the neighboring provinces of Shanxi (where shan is first tone and means "mountain") and Shanxi (where shan is third tone and designates an ancient place name): the "Shan" in each case transliterates different Chinese characters; nineteenthcentury sinologists quite unhelpfully distinguished these two place names by spelling the second "Shenhsi," to distinguish it from "Shanhsi,'' adding phonetic confusion to orthographic irregularity. To confuse the matter still further, some names and words are the same in more than one transliteration system: Shanghai, Hunan, and Hainan, for example. There are also instances of totally different names designating the same place: Guangzhou (Kuangchou, Kwangchow) and Canton. Those who read in Chinese will, of course, be spared these orthographic distractions.
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1— "Confound Their Language": The Mythologies of Translation In surveying the history of translation, one encounters so many traditional misconceptions, shibboleths, and halftruths that no systematic analysis is possible before these "weeds" of confusion are cleared away. Yet these "errancies" are not blatant "vulgar" errors, for they cannot be accurately characterized as weeds to be cleared away or destroyed, since each of them contains a kernel of truth that must be recognized. It is for this reason I call these anomalies "myths" rather than errors, because ''error" would presuppose a prior original "truth" that is contravened. But these myths, however encrusted in fallacy and false reasoning, represent some sustaining truths. The study of translation is necessarily an analysis of the mythologies of its theory and practice. Among the "myths" that clutter the literature on translation, myths that have gone largely unchallenged, are these: myths of originality (confusing that which is novel with that which is new); myths of authenticity (confusing that which is genuine with that which is old); and myths of fidelity (confusing that which is equivalent with that which is identical). I have used the word "myth" to examine the anomalies of theory and practice, because myth can be both true and false. One needn't believe in Greek mythology to credit the "Apollos," the "Geminis," the "Saturns," and the "Mercurys" of the space program; their effectiveness as more than names, as sustaining visions of remarkably evocative power, is in no way diminished by any skepticism about the literal truth of Greek mythology. Myths have both sustained translation and at the same time undermined a clear theoretical understanding of
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translation; any systematic consideration of translation must, therefore, begin with a critique of these mythologies, both to uncover the misconceptions they perpetuate as well as to discover the verities they convey. The Myths of Language The study of translation as a field of inquiry might best begin with a consideration of the conditions which made translation necessary in the first place. For Westerners, the biblical allegory of the Tower of Babel is only the most familiar explanation of the confusion of tongues. In this myth, human history is divided into a preBabelian world, when all peoples spoke one language, and the Babelian world, when the languages of humankind became confounded, one made mutually incomprehensible to the other. There is yet another world, a "postBabelian world," a world characterized by "panglossia" (only slightly less utopian than the one imagined by Dr. Pangloss): a world different from the preBabelian world because hundreds of mutually incomprehensible languages are spoken, not just one; and different from the Babelian world in that these languages become, through multilingualism among speakers, and through translations, mutually comprehensible.1 But before one passes to its subsequent phases, the myth of the preBabelian world is worth pondering; it might be useful to contemplate what life would be like in a monolingual world: "And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech" (Genesis 11:1; Authorized Version). The edenic image of a world that knows no misunderstanding, no mistranslations, no "misprisions," is a world consonant with the perfection of a paradise that is perfectly innocent, but also perfectly boring: it would not satisfy those who have, more than mythically, eaten of the fruit of knowledge. The biblical story makes clear that God confounded the tongues of men because of their overweening pride: "Go to, let us build us a 1.
At least three major modern fabulists have ruminated on the myth of the Tower of Babel—Kafka, Borges, and Canetti: Kafka in his brief parables, "The Great Wall and the Tower of Babel," "The Tower of Babel," "The Pit of Babel," and "The City Coat of Arms"; Borges, in ''The Library of Babel"; and Canetti in Die Blendung, translated into English under two titles, Autodafé and Tower of Babel.
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city and a tower, whose top may reac1h unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth." God's response to this overreaching ("whose top may reach unto heaven") is not only to scatter the people, but to impose a host of mutually incomprehensible tongues on them. "And the Lord said, 'Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech'" (Genesis 11:7). The "jealous" God of the Old Testament takes vengeance against man's overweening pride: "So the Lord scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city. Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth" (Genesis 11:7–9). One cannot overlook the significance of the symbol for this watershed event, for it embodies a paranomasia, a departure from words as univalent, an attack against exact language, and hence the creation of a duplicitous and ambiguous discourse that invites creative misunderstanding. One must remember the onomastics of the story: ''That is why it was named Babel, since Yahweh confounded the speech over the whole world." The word "confounded" translates the Hebrew word balal, which means "mixed, confused," a wordplay in this context on Babel and "Babylon" (see Speiser 1964:74).2 The word suggests stammering and opaqueness of meaning, incomprehensible chatter. It may be, as Derrida reminds us (quoting from Renan), that the very notion of "foreign" derives either from words that signify "to stammer," "to mumble," or words that signify "mute."3 The name not only marks the time and place at which the Lord "confounded" the language of the people, but also implies, as Speiser points out, "a stern criticism of the builders' monumental presumption" (p. lvi). The existence of mutually incomprehensible languages is presented as a biblical curse against hubris and represents a fall from grace. (The psychological legacy of this curse is, of 2.
It is apt that the very text which canonizes the origin of the profusion of different languages employs a multilingual pun: the play of Hebrew balal with the Akkadian name Babel, the etymology of which the Babylonians traced to bâbilu, i.e, "the gate of God" (cf. Gressman 1928:5). 3.
Of Grammatology, 123; cf. Zhang (1985:390).
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course, familiar in the humiliation that most adults experience trying to learn a foreign language.) One might speculate on the uniqueness of this attitude of the Bible—and hence of the Western Christian tradition—toward multilinguality as a punishment for original pride. No other world religion appears to see the existence of the Babelian world as a curse to the sin of pride: there seems to be no exact counterpart to the story of the Tower of Babel in other mythologies. And there is another characteristic of the Western Bible which may be unique: it is the only sacred text which was originally composed in more than one language: Hebrew, Aramaic, and Koine Greek. The Upanishads were written in Sanskrit; the Koran exclusively in Arabic. Although the Buddhist canon accumulated texts in Chinese, Japanese, and Tibetan, the original source text, the Tipitaka (Sanskrit, Tripitaka), which comprises the Canon of the School of Elders (Theravada), is compiled in Pali, itself a shortened version of palibhasa, meaning "the language of the canon." Indeed, translations of the Christian Bible, which involved translating from two different languages, may be an early and premonitory postBabelian act—we would now say ecumenical—invoking a congregation not bound by a single language, deriving from more than one language tradition, and directed toward a unifying pluralism where individual language identities are preserved, with texts made accessible in translation. Yet there is an aspect of the Babel myth which has largely gone unnoticed. The parable speaks of confounding "the speech over the whole world." There is no mention of any written language. If we date the invention of the alphabet, and writing, to "700 B.C. 'plus or minus"' (Havelock 1982:15)4 and the Babel story—part of the "J'' document—to the tenth century (Speiser, p. 75), one can assume that—ironically—what we have is a written record of an oral story that did not take into account the advent of writing. For the Babel story does not admit of the possibility that while speech may be confounded among the peoples of the world, writing may not be. Three instances of this postBabelian development in a Babelian world come readily to mind: in the medieval period, scholars 4.
Of a possible earlier date for the invention of the alphabet, Havelock writes: "A view that would relegate it to early in the first half of the eighth century or even at the end of the ninth is rash and unsupportable" (p. 15).
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speaking different vernaculars could, nevertheless, communicate through classical Latin, as Petrarch (an Italian), Erasmus (a Dutchman), and Sir Thomas More (an Englishman) did with their European colleagues. Medieval learning was able to proceed across linguistic boundaries through Latin (even in its oral form). The linguistic makeup of China offers a second example: Chinese is as phonetically diverse as distinct European languages: there are greater differences between some dialects of spoken Chinese than there are between different Romance languages (see Ramsey 1987). There are many Chinese dialects (as opposed to dialectically accented Mandarin) that are mutually incomprehensible to each other—yet the written language is accessible to any literate Chinese, regardless of any oral facility in more than one's own dialect. A third example is the current use of English as a world language in several sectors: in its written form, as with German and French in a previous era, English has become the language of discourse in international commerce and in science (which is not to say all significant science is published in English). Students of computer science from all over the world study the subject in English: not all of them may be able to converse with each other orally, but through the medium of written English there is an international network of mutually confounded speakers of different languages who somehow manage to communicate and make themselves understood through written communications. As the most translated work in the world,5 the Bible partakes equally of the preBabelian world (in which the word of God is accessible to all), the Babelian world (where different versions are mutually incomprehensible to the monolingual), and the postBabelian world (where multilingual readers have access to more than one version). Communicants in Christianity, conversant with the word of God, are seen by the Church as one congregation, "one people with a single language," who share a communion with each other that transcends language boundaries. Through the language of the Bible, all Christians are restored in some measure to their prelapsarian state before the revealed Word, however diverse their 5.
It is estimated that "the Scriptures have been translated, at least in part, in 1,109 languages. . . . This means that the major part of the Christian Scriptures exist in the languages of at least 95 percent of the world's population" (Nida 1975:24).
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experience, however mutually incomprehensible their discourses might be on other subjects. The irony is that the propagation of the faith has been made all the more difficult by the "curse" of multilinguality that the Lord visited on the builders of the Tower of Babel. The Babelian world is not merely a postlapsarian purgatory of discord and division, as the Genesis story intimates. The preBabelian world in which only one language was spoken, universally comprehensible, might not appeal to everyone, although the dream of a universal language persists, whether that language be English (as many Anglophiles would insist), or French (as many Francophones might expect), or Chinese (as René Etiemble recommended), or Esperanto (as L. L. Zamenhof hoped). Not everyone views the Babelian world as a burden and a curse. As Debra Castillo (1984:15) says: Yet this sense of horror before the wounded name is not universal—Babel teaches us that universality of motive or appreciation is impossible—and many writers find the plurality of tongues a joyous experience. The fall from unity into multiplicity represents a fortunate fall, a curse that reveals itself as a blessing.
But there are postBabelian as well as Babelian aspects to the world today. While it might be quixotic to hope for a totally postBabelian world, in which everyone speaks everyone else's language, intimations of this multilingual world exist even now: in such regions of the world as bilingual Canada, in trilingual Malaysia, in quadrilingual Switzerland. The supremacy of English as a world language may be political and it may be cultural, but that supremacy is not demographic: the number of native speakers of Chinese is almost double the number of native speakers of English (806 million versus 426 million as of 1987). The fact that most of the non Englishspeaking peoples of the world learn English means that they are at least bilingual. A preponderant majority of the world's population is bilingual to some degree.6 Completely mono 6.
It has been estimated that 70 percent of the world's population is bilingual: see Babel 3 (1968): 192; quoted by Milan Dimic, cf. Batts (1975:13–33). Nor should bilingualism be considered a characteristic only of civilized cultures: as Sapir says, "Primitive man is not isolated, and bilingualism is probably as important a factor in the contact of primitive groups as it is on more sophisticated levels" (1961:33).
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lingual populations are in the minority. Even the "universal language" of science and mathematics is not a strictly monolingual phenomenon, for it combines Arabic numbers, Greek letters, and the Roman alphabet, along with such iconic signs as =, , <, >, , , and such arbitrary symbols as +, , ×, ÷, , and . Indeed, mathematics may be the model of a postBabelian language, where one incorporates elements from several languages to form one composite—and universally accessible—language. A special kind of postBabelian multilingualism may define modernist writers, who share what might be called an "expatriate imagination." Bilingual and multilingual authors in national literatures are not, of course, unusual. Chaucer, after all, translated from the French and Italian; Milton read daily from the Bible in Hebrew; the Romantics favored Italian literature, as did the PreRaphaelites; the Decadents were more inclined toward French. But bilingualism, or multilingualism, from an expatriate perspective seems a modern phenomenon. Joyce's most important epiphany, by his own admission, was his departure from Ireland, a homeland which he loved. But it was in Europe, in Pola, Trieste, Zurich, and Paris, and in his confrontation with other literatures and other languages, that he saw clearly his own native culture. Joyce had studied "DanoNorwegian" (in order to read Ibsen in the original), in addition to Latin and French, prior to his departure from Ireland.7 He taught English for many years in Trieste and learned Italian and German. Unlike previous English authors, who expropriated foreign works into English, Joyce adopted a panoptically multicultural perspective. A simple monolingual Irishman may understand his Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, but only multilingual readers, or incipiently multilingual readers, can fully appreciate Finnegans Wake. Where earlier authors may have been multilingual, Joyce was multicultural. The legacy of Babel, of a world in which humans were separated by mutually incomprehensible languages, was not one he accepted: he determined to understand as many other languages as he could, in their own context of meaning. One senses that his frustration with Austria and its multicultural and multilingual world stemmed, not from a resolute monolingualism, but from a sense of futility at all the languages 7.
I am indebted to Professor Breon Mitchell for pointing this out.
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yet to be learned: "I hate this Catholic country with its hundred races and its thousand languages . . ." (Ellman 1959:192). T. S. Eliot, a fierce Francophile, studied the Upanishads, which is a subtext of his Waste Land. Hence, a strictly English background will not be sufficient for an adequate understanding of this literary landmark. Pound was perhaps the most protean of postBabelian writers, for not only did he translate actively from many languages but he incorporated what he translated, often in its original form, in his Cantos. His creative impulse was multicultural (even if his politics were reactionary and his poetic accents determinedly American); more than any other author, he tried to understand the literatures of the world in any language, to see from the perspective of another culture, and to speak, in his own voice, as many "other" languages as he could. In this perspective, one can see a marked contrast between Eliot, Joyce, and Pound—all exiles—and their elder contemporary, William Butler Yeats. Yeats's sojourn in England was a visit, not an exile, and while he experimented with ritual drama in the Noh tradition, collaborated on a translation of the Upanishads, and promoted the poetry of Rabrindranath Tagore, he was never a student of Japanese, Vedic, or Bengali.8 Since then, an expatriate imagination can be found in more than a few significant modernist writers. There are cultural expatriates: the "Lost Generation" included Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who were never more American than when seeing their homeland from the vantage point of Paris. (Henry James preceded them in this paradoxical course of discovering one's native land by leaving it.) There are "alienated expatriates": Nabokov, Beckett, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Josef Brodsky, who are estranged from their native soil for one reason or another, yet whose imaginations are anchored in their native experience. And there are "vicarious expatriates," authors who do not abandon their native culture, but who acquire the background of a foreign culture. Michel Butor, a resolutely French writer, but one of enormous international influence, is a translator of Joyce. Claude Simon was an admirer and translator of William Faulkner. Jorge Luis Borges was born in Argentina "of Spanish, 8.
Differences in literary stature aside, Thomas Wolfe was another who sought the preBabelian world: "Remembering speechlessly we seek the great forgotten language, the lost laneend into heaven . . ." (epigraph to Look Homeward Angel).
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English, and (very remotely) Portuguese origin"; he was as much at home in English as Spanish; he translated Kafka from the German. Borges' "selfcreated precursors" included William Shakespeare, Søren Kierkegaard, Robert Browning, H. G. Wells, Franz Kafka, and G. K. Chesterton; he admired the masters of American literature, particularly Mark Twain and Emily Dickinson. More recently, Josef Brodsky, a Russian transplanted in American soil, uses English as a creative tool with almost as much deftness as his mother tongue; he collaborates in the translations of his Russian poems into English.9 Brodsky is one of the writers of the modern period not only endowed with an expatriate imagination but who possesses the linguistic skills to be a selftranslator. This company would also include Nabokov, Beckett, I. B. Singer, and Czeslaw Milosz. For all their diversity, these writers have one thing in common: they are at least as recognized outside their native country as within. They are part of a postBabelian internationalist perspective; national literatures cannot confine them, and their audiences comprise more than monolingual readers in a national literature. Goethe may be not only the first exemplar of a postBabelian canon but also its first theorist—if one understands his notion of Weltliteratur not in terms of "world literature" conceived as the inherited masterpieces from various cultures, but as a contemporary literature accessible across national and linguistic boundaries, emanating from any region on earth, and shared by the world (Strich 1949:5). The popularity of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda in Germany, or the American novelist John Steinbeck in the Soviet Union, or the Japanese Yukio Mishima and the Colombian Gabriel García Marquez in the United States is part of today's Weltliteratur. The development of literary traditions is no longer confined to changes resulting from influences among cognate linguistic traditions. Since the nineteenth century, at the least, national literatures have been decisively changed by influences from cultures that do 9.
The postBabelian perspective is not merely a matter of an author's language ability. There are authors who know more than one language who are not "internationalist"; and there are monolingual authors who are. Conrad was fluent in Polish, French, and English, but his novels are definitively English; Mishima was ardently Japanese, but his fame in the United States and in English translation was for him immensely, if ironically, gratifying.
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not share a historical source: the influence of Chinese on the Imagists, of Vedic literature on Eliot, of Zen on the American Beats; or, conversely, of the Russians on modern Chinese fiction, of Nietzsche on Meiji fiction in Japan, or of the Victorians on Tagore. It is this linguistically "panoptic" view that distinguishes the modern perspective on translation. Whatever the language of discourse (which itself constitutes a generic difficulty), translation can no longer be discussed from a single cultural point of view. There can be no assumption that any native language is superior to any other as an instrument of meaning, or as a repository of insight, or as a medium of discourse. One almost needs a new language to represent this cosmopolitan perspective. There can be no final "privileging" of one language over another, only the inevitable selfawareness that the use of one language momentarily privileges it over all others. The Myths of Translation In an amusing, wrongheaded, yet revealing complaint about translation, the humorist Andy Rooney points out the disparity between a Japanese translation of one of his books and the original. As a commentator on the weekly CBS news show "Sixty Minutes" and as a syndicated columnist, Rooney specializes in ironically atavistic provincialities. What is fascinating about this critique of translation is that while Rooney does not profess to know Japanese, he has no compunctions about criticizing a translation of his work into Japanese. He asked a Japanese friend, a woman named Junko, to read parts of the Japanese version back into English. Here are the parts read by his "retrotranslator," followed by Rooney's original text in italics: You wonder who can cook a menu about a feast of newspaper or . . . I don't know how to translate. My question is this. Does anyone actually make those holiday dishes recommended in the home sections of newspapers and magazines? Often it recalls me, what I felt when you were young but nowadays you can't belong to the pure world, you felt freely . . . you tried to remember those feelings that you felt when you were young.
Page 13 Every once in a while, I'm reminded of some way I used to feel or of some simple sensation I used to have that I don't have anymore because I no longer do whatever it was that brought it on. [Tribune Media Services, 9 November 1987]
Rooney argues, with unassailable logic, "It was fun reading parts of the book with Junko but it wasn't clear to me how much of the meaning of the words really came through in Japanese." There are several problems here: not of logic, but of deixis, or deictic frames of reference. First, Rooney pretends to have no conception that a typically American locution—homespun, Mark Twainian, as his prose tries to be—might sound more unnatural and less attractive in Japanese than it does in English. Indeed, one might argue that even some speakers of English might not find Rooney's style very natural, particularly if they are British. Second, Rooney cannot conceive of the possibility that even a perfect rendering of his words (whatever that means), when translated back into English, might very well seem strange to the originator. It isn't merely a matter of a good versus a bad translation. Rooney says: "If I had let Junko study it first, her translation might have been more accurate but those would not be the conditions for the average Japanese reader so I suspect her understanding of it was typical of what any Japanesespeaking person would understand." He is clearly concerned about the typical response to his book in Japan, about how he is understood in Japanese, and he equates this understanding with an "unreflected" translation, as if comprehension on the part of the Japanese reader were tantamount to informal extemporaneous translation. Then, with inexorable logic, Rooney reiterates the point, ironically exonerating his Japanese interlocutor "retrotranslator": "Keep in mind Junko is just a bright Japanese woman who speaks English fluently in ordinary conversation. She is not a professional translator but then, neither are the people who are going to read the book in Japanese." There are so many complex provincialities in this exegesis that, like a mirror within a mirror, one's head spins to sort them out. Rooney seems to assume that it is possible to convey his individual American style in another language and culture. It is not difficult to depict Americans in Japanese, but the challenge is to sound American to Japanese the way Americans sound to Americans. Several myths are subsumed in this example. One involves the assumption that historical priority is the same as ontological super
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iority: that the original in time is also the more authentic, and must be superior in value, as well as prior, to the imitation. To be sure, this may be true in most cases. But to cite only the most obvious case, the original texts of the Old Testament were lost for two millennia and were extant only in Greek and Latin versions, only to be partially rediscovered among the Dead Sea Scrolls in 1948. Yet the number of readers of the Bible in its original languages is miniscule. How many readers of the Authorized Version of the Bible (1611) are aware that it is derivative, a recension of several previous versions (if, indeed, they are even aware that it is a translation)? Jan de Waard and Eugene Nida (Nida 1964:12) point out that, when speaking of the Scriptures, there is a tendency to use the term source in an ambiguous way . . . sometimes a writer uses source in speaking of (1) the original author of the book in question or (2) the redactor of a particular biblical document. In other instances source refers to (3) the activity of God or the Holy Spirit as the source of the inspiration. In still other instances source is essentially equivalent to (4) documentary evidence in the Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic texts. Finally, source may designate (5) certain hypothetical documents, such as the Logia or the Testimonia collection.
Behind this confusion lies what Castillo calls "the myth of the absolute text," despite the fact that Sacred Scripture "exists in various forms and is subject to the errors of chance that befall human texts" (p. 3). Even the texts that do exist are by no means definitive: it has been estimated that there "some five thousand different textual problems in the Old Testament in which there are significant differences of meaning." For the New Testament there are "more than 1400 instances of manuscript evidence in which there are significant differences that are meaningful" (de Waard and Nida, p. 12). In this respect, moderns are heirs to two presuppositions, one Romantic, the other capitalist. The Romantic notion is the one that privileges original composition over imitation: something novel preferred over something derivative. The capitalist notion, sanctioned and reinforced by the convention of copyright, confers on the ''original" author all rights to his work, which is now his "property." Imitation becomes derivativeness; and derivativeness borders on plagiarism, which is theft of intellectual and artistic "property."
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Another myth is the myth of identity, the assumption which leads Rooney to believe that there is an Andy Rooney in Japanese and that all it takes is diligent translation to discover it ("if I had let Junko study it first"). We might consider this question of identity by considering three different "modes of existence": one involving human identity, or the notion of unique individuality; the second, works of art, including literature; and the third, commodities, tangible objects of value. There is, at least in the West, an assumption that uniqueness is itself a value: we see this in our concern with endangered species; in our political ideals, which emphasize civil rights, by which we mean individual rights; and in our religion, which, in Christianity, posits a personal God, one to whom each person can relate as an individual. There is an implicit sense that exact clones of human beings would somehow diminish their humanity: if identical Albert Einsteins could be cloned, would that diminish the value of the original Einstein? If the clones are identical, would not the value of the clones be equal to the value of the original? Something vital and dynamic, however similar in some respects to something or someone else, is always seen as unique: it can never be identical with anything or anyone else without being regarded as diminished in value. If this is true of persons, it is almost as true of personalities. Andy Rooney would hardly object if one claimed that he is unique, one of a kind, not to be duplicated, irreplaceable. But if there is no one quite like him in English, why should he wonder if there is also no one quite like him in Japanese? Indeed, given the differences between American and Japanese culture, we may find a rough counterpart, but there is little likelihood that we would find his like, much less his equal, or his equivalent, in Japan. With objects of art, there is, of course, a priority accorded the original, the authentic masterpiece created by the master. But is its aesthetic value contingent only on its being the original? Are all those who appreciate Rembrandt only in reproduction wrong in admiring his genius? To be sure, an art lover who sees art objects exclusively through reproductions would be regarded as an amateur with an experience inferior to a connoisseur who had access to the originals and whose eye was constantly sharpened by viewing actual masterpieces. But surely no reasonable modernday art historian would wish to confine the audience for works of art
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only to those who could view the original. For most museumgoers, the viewing of an original does not always convey more artistic insight, beyond the particular thrill in seeing the actual object; experts and connoisseurs, however, have the training and the perspicacity to notice the differences between the original and the copies, and some of these differences may even be aesthetic—although recent discoveries of "authenticated" originals which have been exposed as forgeries at distinguished repositories of art make one wonder even about the experts. There are two points here: one, that in painting, the original is unique; two, that its value, both as a property and as an aesthetic object, depends on that uniqueness, no matter how faithful the reproductions. Even if it were technologically possible, few would countenance "cloning" original masterpieces, to ''mass produce" originals (although some entrepreneurs in art circles, particularly those promoting Salvador Dali in California, have tried).10 Aren't there copies that exceed the original in quality? There are copies by master painters of works by their mentors which are superior to the original. Is the question of originals a matter more of commercial concern than of aesthetics? If the distinctions between the original and its reproductions in painting and sculpture are fraught with difficulties, the situation with music and literature is somewhat more clearcut. Music lovers are not crucially disadvantaged by not having seen the original texts for the pieces they hear; an inability to read music may be critical for a performer, but not for a listener. The original is of historic value, and—allowing for progressive inaccuracies from edition to edition, changes in the actual instruments used, and shifts in taste—one can say that if all Beethoven's holograph scores were lost or destroyed, Beethoven would still live on.11 (Indeed, facsimiles and microfilms of archival treasures often guard against 10.
Lithographs are an instance of multiple originals, since each copy is equivalent to any other; however, the gradual wearing down of the stone with each impression limits the number of acceptable copies that can be reproduced. 11.
There are, of course, "early music" purists whose ideal is to restore the conditions that prevailed when the composer composed his piece or had it first performed (use of contemporaneous instruments, size of ensemble, etc.). That this is not even technically possible, given the latitude of the composer's score, is argued by many; cf. Richard Taruskin in a review of the Beethoven symphonies in Opus (October 1987):31 ff. I am grateful to Professor Allen Winold for bringing this piece to my attention.
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the intellectual and scholarly damage that these losses would represent.) Ingarden (1986:10) has written: "Not only can a work of music in principle be heard without the aid of a score—we do not usually 'read' musical works, though this of course does happen when we learn to play a particular work—but when we hear the work and perceive it aesthetically in the fullness of its properties and complete concretion, the score remains totally outside the work's range." Indeed, Ingarden's analysis of the relationship between the performance of a musical work and the score from which it derives is apposite to the relationship between an original text and its translation. Ingarden separates the concerns with "errors" (which are "not determined by the schema" of the score) from the potential aesthetic value of such departures: ''A specific performance," Ingarden argues, "may include variants with regard to those elements of the work determined by the score," and he concludes that "we say that the given performance is faulty, or at any rate does not recreate the work it was intended to recreate." Certainly, this judgment could apply to many translations, some of which are, indeed, admired. In fact, Ingarden, in a footnote, anticipates this very possibility: "It is possible for a performer consciously and deliberately to alter certain details of the work without lowering its value. He may even create something more perfect than the original work, but this is no longer an exact performance of a work notated in the score but of another work, albeit very similiar to the original" (p. 141). One could argue that the notion of the identity of an original is a figment, a construct of shared imagination—"a single, intersubjective, dominant aesthetic object, constituting the equivalent no longer of the opinions of one listener, but of the musical public in a given country at a given time" is the way Ingarden puts it (p. 154). The chimerical aspect of the identity of an original is possible only in philosophical analysis, which essentially refines the original out of existence. "Given such an understanding of a musical work," Ingarden concludes, "the problem of its identity disappears" (p. 151). Elsewhere he maintains "that the very problem of identity . . . is a pseudoproblem." In literature, the distinction between the "work of art" and the actual "original" is even more unequivocal. It is unlikely that the preponderant majority of the readers of Keats have ever seen the original manuscripts of "Endymion" and the Odes; they can
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scarcely be aware that Keats's holograph text reflects what might today be called orthographic spelling errors. Indeed, the authentic original has been demonstrably "normalized" in the authoritative editions that have been published in the century and a half since Keats died. Only a pedant would insist that the world read facsimiles of Keats's original text or that a true understanding of literature depends on repeated viewings of actual manuscripts. In the world of commodities, even allowing for mass production (an early form of mechanical "cloning"), emphasis is placed on what might be called multiple "originals." Brand names, limited editions, lithographs, autographed books, patents, copyrights, designer labels, confer an extrinsic value on objects not necessarily warranted by their intrinsic value. These multiple "originals" are a means of expanding the market for originals. One buys the label as much as one buys an article of clothing. Yet, even here, there is a sense of the authorized and unauthorized original. Anything that is identical in every respect, but which is not authorized, is a forgery. This goes for coins, paper currency, checks, stock certificates, certificates of any kind, and their concomitant counterfeits, as well as for the ''creations" of Han van Meegerens, the master Dutch forger, which fooled art experts for years. Note the arbitrary distinction between a replica and a forgery: one is authorized and the other is not. The distinction has nothing to do with the accuracy of the imitation, or the exactness of the reproduction, or the identity between the original and the copy— indeed, a forgery may be, often is, more accurate than a replica.12 The replica is an allusion to the original, a souvenir of having seen the original, whereas a forgery presumes to replace the original. In all three modes of existence the irreplaceability of the original—or the "authorized" version—is assumed. But there are no real identities to be had, only types or degrees of equivalence 12.
Lawrence Wechsler has detailed in The New Yorker (18, 25 January 1988) the fascinating and instructive case of J. S. Boggs, who paints paper currency with no intent to pass his "replicas" off as currency, but who nevertheless sells them at the value designated on the currency reproduced. The account raises some very problematic issues about value, about art, and about the reproduction of currency: it may be that the reproduction of currency, if skillfully accomplished and selfdeclared, may be worth more than authorized paper money of the same denomination.
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between exemplars, each with rough orders of approximation determining what is equivalent. Our citation of literary modes of existence is critical to a clear appreciation of translation, for it reminds us that the equivalence lies not in reproducing, however faithfully, the actual original (in this sense, Keats is already "translated" into modernday orthographic English), but in the approximate correspondence between an author's words to the audience in his lifetime and his words to each succeeding generation of readers. Even if there were no changes in phonology or orthography, there would be subtle shifts in meaning and nuance between the period of the author's life and the contemporary period of the reader. To take an obvious example, apostrophes and exclamations such as Shelley's "Oh! Lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud! / I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!" or Keats's ''O mortal pain! / O Darkness!" or his "O Attic shape!" are not as acceptable to the modern sensibility as to the Romantic; for moderns such apostrophes seem excessive, and would border on the ludicrous, if they were not so hallowed by the canon. No one writing today would get away with such locutions, except in irony or as satire.13 Finally, among the persistent myths of translation is the myth that an actual original exists as an integral entity. One speaks of the "original" behind the translation with equal assurance, whether the work translated is the Bible, the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Dante, Chaucer, Poe, or Frost. Yet one forgets that if one can document an original with Dante, Poe, or Frost, such a single document cannot always be found for the other works. There is no "original" Bible, which is a compendium of narratives spanning almost a millennium, from the ninth century B.C. to the first century in the Christian era, especially if by original one means a coherent work from one author. (Even the posited authorship of God does not suffice to resolve the issue: does the Almighty produce "drafts"?) Even allowing for the reliable existence of originals, one must question the notion of an ideal identity between the original in the source language and the translation in the target language. Frawley 13.
This argument against the possibility of identity should not be construed as a justification for indiscriminate license in translation. There are, in addition to different kinds of equivalents, valid judgments to be made as to the degree of equivalence within each kind that can provide a rational basis for disinterested evaluations of translations.
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(1984:163–167) considers the three main arguments for identity across linguistic codes: 1. Referential identity, which posits semantic exactness as the sine qua non, since the main premise, in House's words, "the nature of the universe . . . is common to most language communities; thus the referential aspect of meaning is the one which (a) is most readily accessible, and for which (b) equivalence in translation can most easily be seen to be present or absent"; 2. Conceptual/biological identity, which assumes that "all humans cognize their worlds in essentially the same manner, and this results from the fact that all humans have virtually the same biological apparatus"; 3. Interlingual identity, which posits universals of language, universals of coding, and assumes that there is a bedrock basis shared by all languages.
To each of these premises, Frawley offers a critique: the first he refutes by pointing out that "phenomena are not constant" and by contending that "it is useless to say that meaning ultimately resides in the phenomena"; the second he rejects not because humans may not "cognize their worlds in essentially the same manner," but because such insights are irrelevant to translation if one cannot posit a "satisfactory correlation between grammar and cognition"; the third he discards not only because a truly universal interlingual basis is far from established, but because interlingual identities would misconstrue the activity of translation, which is an activity not of linguistic competence but of linguistic performance. It is clear that in the last critique, Frawley is thinking more of literary translation than of technical or scientific translation. A third myth relating to translation is the myth of authenticity. In one's regard for the unique identity of each individual and each culture, there is a horror of "impostors," "ersatz," "kitschy imitations" of real artifacts. Indeed, many of these items attract opprobrium because they cater to the most simplistic, the most vulgar, and the most venal commercial instincts—as if a memento were, in some sense, synecdochically equivalent to a complex whole and an understanding of a culture could be had for the price of a souvenir. The reaction to these exploitations is a retreat into snobbery, whether for authentic Chinese fried noodles instead of "Chow
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Mein" (which means "fried noodles" but is nothing like the native dish) or the superannuated authenticity of "Coke, the real thing." But if we examine the notion of authenticity, we find that the valorizing principle is historical. The inauthenticity occurs when one thing or person masquerades for another thing or person. Yet in the history of culture, as in the history of cuisine, what may be an adulteration of one item may be the authenticating of another. Quebecois culture may be seen by the French as an adulteration of "authentic" French culture, but it cannot be denied its own validity as an authentic culture that happens to include certain French elements variously modified. "Cajun" and "Creole" are similar admixtures, blends, or "mongrels" that involve different elements: AngloSaxon, black, and Amerindian in the first case and Amerindian and Iberian in the second. But one can speak meaningfully of "authentic Creole'' or "authentic Cajun." They may be inauthentic insofar as they are not strictly (one tends to say, significantly, "purely") one or the other of its source constituents, and they may be characterized at first with overt or implicit condescension, as in G. M. Forster's comment on Creole: "A Creole culture that is neither Indian nor Iberian."14 There is an admirable—perhaps visceral—faithfulness to the original: most natives feel outraged when their own culture is being falsely purveyed by a pretender who knows nothing about the culture on which he or she is "expert," but whose audience is so ignorant it does not know the difference. But with the passing of time, and the inevitable confusion of memories, to say nothing of the extinctions to which we are all subject, one is forced to make a distinction between dead authenticities and living inauthenticities. Would one scrap all the Bibles being read today because there is no way to restore the authentic original? There is no doubt that the translations of the Bible are not the original, yet their authenticity, while not historical, is tenable in a viable ontological sense: they have the virtue of being current and accessible. These notions 14.
And what if an "authentic native" faithful to her culture as a lived experience, and not as a museum piece to fix for all time, decides to alter the ingredients of an "authentic" cultural element? Is that new creation "kitschy" or the beginning of a new "authenticity"? I am reminded of my mother adding Lipton tea to the "oolong" (Chinese: "Black Dragon") tea that she had a habit of drinking. When asked by guests what special blend of tea she was serving, she replied with aplomb, and a somewhat Chineseaccented English, "Liptong oolong!"
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attack very deepseated convictions—of the ineffability of the self, or the uniqueness of individual experience, or the immediacy of our own experience. We are not comforted by the thought that we will be "translated"—even "mistranslated"—to our progeny and to posterity. So in our zeal for selfpreservation, we make a religion out of authenticity. History, however, for all the order imposed on it by historians, is not analretentive, but rather chaotic, disheveled, entropic, scatological if not eschatological. Documents preserved over time are not likely to be interpreted in the same way by posterity as by a contemporary: that is the basic insight of the phenomenologist HansGeorg Gadamer and his notion of "radical historicity." In ancient Greek terms, the same insight is embodied in the Heraclitean notion that one cannot step into the same river twice. Flux is all, and the assumption that one can ever really "recapture time lost" is a chimera. Translations, good, bad, and indifferent, are part of that cultural flux: they are emblematic of the life of a work, for the least distorted original is the work that is never translated. Its historical and cultural integrity is, as a result, never violated. The ultimate fidelity may be sought in oblivion. To take but one prominent example, critics have recognized the departures from the original in Edward FitzGerald's version of the Rubaiyat, but few mention the fact that the texts FitzGerald used may not have come from the pen of Omar Khayyam—that, indeed, the question of authorship in works attributed to Omar Khayyam is far from settled. There is no original, in the strict sense of the word, behind FitzGerald's Rubaiyat, hence no meaningful basis on which to assess the fidelity of a translation. FitzGerald created a composite from stanzas attributed to Omar Khayyam, establishing his own arrangement, making his own selection, creating his own work out of derivations of, and inspirations from, a corpus that he identified erroneously, in some cases, with the Persian poet (Mas'ud Farzad, quoted by Dashti 1977:167–168). "FitzGerald called his work a translation," Farzad has written, "and certainly translation is an essential element in it; but throughout FitzGerald is carried away by his skill as a poet and his interest in the structure of his poem . . . We must recognize that FitzGerald's chief merit lay in his construction of the poem and that his work as a translator was secondary to this; this will save us the trouble of trying to find a
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definition of the word 'translation' that can be applied to this masterpiece" (quoted in Dashti, p. 170). In this testimony by an Arabic scholar, the value of FitzGerald's work is not measured by a specious fidelity to a nonexistent original. But the judgment is more evenhanded than Richard Bentley's famous denigration of Pope's Iliad: "a very pretty poem, but you mustn't call it Homer." Speaking of FitzGerald's poem, Dashti writes: "The poem is worthy of the highest praise, but it is of no help in identifying Khayyam's quatrains" (p. 170).15 In discussing translations, one must look at two kinds of authenticity: faithfulness to the original (if one exists) and faithfulness to the audience. These two kinds of authenticity coincide (or very nearly) in any historical period: the original is authentically of its own time and place, a time and place which are shared by, to some degree, the audience of the time. But as distance separates original and audience, whether in time or linguistic "space," these two kinds of authenticity will diverge—an ambivalence embodied in the dual notion of "contemporary," exploited twenty years ago by Jan Kott in his Shakespeare Our Contemporary: the notion of a time concurrent with the original work and a time concurrent with the current reader. Indeed, the "original" may mutate in time (natural with premodern oral traditions that did not permit verbal or electronic recording) and one may deal not so much with "originals,'' as in the case of the Bible and Omar Khayyam's Rubaiyat, but with recensions and versions, with textual "traditions." In this perspective, FitzGerald's generic term for the quatrains in his masterpiece, "transmogrifications," is more accurately a characterization of his enterprise than "translation." 15.
The need for an original, even when one does not exist, can be seen in the curious publication by Robert Graves and Omar AliShah, The Original Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam (1968), which adduced a manuscript dated 1153 constituting "this earliest and most authoritative Rubaiyyat." Subsequent exploration indicates that the "original" did not exist; see L. P. ElwellSutton's introduction to his translation of Ali Dashti's In Search of Omar Khayyam, as well as his detailed critique in Delos 3–4 (1969–1970): 170–190.
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2— "God's Hand Is in Every Translation": The Myths of Theory In surveying the history of the theory of translation, one is forced to the conclusion that, prior to modern insights into the nature and structure of languages, there is no theory of translation to speak of. What passes for theories are: opinions on the characteristics of individual languages; the appropriateness of translating elite discourse into vulgar tongues; the native or nonnative quality of the diction in any particular version; the interminable debate on literal versus free translation. In short, what has passed for theory is focused on the pragmatics or the techniques of translation (see Amos 1973; Kelly 1979). George Steiner (1975:269) does not overstate the case by very much when he writes: List Saint Jerome, Luther, Dryden, Hölderlin, Novalis, Schleiermacher, Nietzsche, Ezra Pound, Valéry, MacKenna, Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, Quine—and you have very nearly the sum total of those who have said anything fundamental or new about translation. The range of theoretic ideas, as distinct from the wealth of pragmatic notation, remains very small.
Louis Kelly puts the case more succinctly: "Few writers have presented a universally applicable theory of translation" (p. 1). Steiner asks why this is so, and his answer somewhat begs the question: "In the history and theory of literature translation has not been a subject of the first importance. It has figured marginally, if at all" (p. 269). The only exception, the translations of the Bible, Steiner dismisses as ''manifestly a special domain, within which the matter of translation is simply part of the larger framework of exegesis."
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Among the most persistent myths of theory is one that might be characterized as "translating by divine inspiration," an insight that derives more from faith than from theoretical speculation. According to this theory, most prominently held in regard to Bible translation, but with ramifications for later theorizers, the original book is a Bible, and the text, like the word of God, is sacred, not to be tampered with. Liberties with meaning are viewed as textual libertinism, licentious rather than licensed texts of revealed truth. The preface to the Authorized Version of 1611 reflects this attitude: it showed "a respect for the original which made the translator merely a mouthpiece and the English language merely a medium for a divine utterance" (Amos 1920:61). The trouble with this "theory" is that there is no objective basis on which to judge who is, and who is not, divinely inspired. There are institutional sanctions, of course: the imprimatur of the Catholic church will serve to authorize one version over another; its nihil obstat will serve to indicate its nonobjection, if not wholehearted approval. But, institutional politics aside, there is no reliable measure to assess who is more or less divinely inspired. The difficulty with personal claims of unparalleled access to the Almighty is that anyone, everyone, endowed with the proper zealous faith and fervor believes their claim to be valid. Any translator could protest, as Abraham Lincoln did in an apposite situation: "I hope it will not be irreverent of me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal His will to others on a point so connected with my duty, it might be supposed He would reveal it directly to me." Devoutness is, unfortunately, no guarantee of accuracy in translation. Faith is no surety for fidelity in translation. The mysticism inherent in this view of translation is not restricted to exegetes of the Bible. In the pronouncements of some of the idealistic and phenomenological philosophers, some of this mysticism persists. As Louis Kelly has astutely observed: "One of the most difficult problems in the history of translation is this mixture of mysticism, aesthetics and philosophy we find in Heidegger, Walter Benjamin and their colleagues. Part of the difficulty is that some attributes of God, including the fact that he is unknowable, have become those of language" (Kelly, p. 30). The view of art as a temple, and of artists as high priests at the temple—a notion popular among aesthetes since the nineteenth century—is but a reflection of this view. The ineffability of divine mysteries becomes the object of discourse. The burden is not to illuminate
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and explain the obscure, but to recognize the profound significance of obscurity. At its best, this notion guards against false clarity, where ersatz explanations obstruct real understanding; at its worst, it creates gratuitous and pretentious obscurantism, darkening that which was originally clear. In either case, piety is replaced by a cabalistic esotericism. The pronouncements are subject not to proof, but only to belief, tests of faith; their aim is not so much to enlighten as to mesmerize. Since the Romantic period, another myth of theory is that "none but a poet can translate a poet" (Amos 1973:165), usually cited after a particularly felicitous rendering by an acknowledged poet of a previous poet. Yet, unquestioned as this assertion may be in a given instance, one can easily overlook the general rule as misleading, if not useless: it is either a redundancy or a false generalization. Selfstyled poets are led (misled) by this dictum to believe that only they can be—generically—the "true interpreters" of poetry in another language. The assertion embodies a judgment about the original and the translation: there is poetry in the original and so there must be poetry in the translation. Therefore, as the original has been written by a poet, so the translation must also be written by a poet. Attractive as this proposition may be, it is riddled with fallacies. First of all, the status of the poet (unlike that of more unequivocal and certifiable professionals such as lawyers or doctors) is not consistently verifiable, and poetasters have been known to pass themselves off as poets. Even among poets, selfstyled or recognized, there is less unanimity today as to who genuinely belongs in their company; these poets are naturally more exigent than the general public, which concedes the role to anyone who is bold enough to claim it. Nor do even certifiable poets always produce poetry: Homer nods, Shakespeare can be bathetic, Keats can be sentimental. Even certifiable poets cannot always be relied upon to produce poetry when writing their own poetry, much less when translating a poem. If this is the case, then the dictum "only poets can translate poetry" is empty of meaning and contradicted by innumerable bad, unpoetic translations of poems by "poets." But the statement is also untrue in another way. If one considers all the effectively poetic translations of poetry, one must concede that not all of them are by acknowledged poets. To cite but the most ob
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vious example: the Authorized Version, generally recognized as the most "poetic" translation of the Bible, was composed by a committee, to which "fiftyfour persons were appointed . . . of whom seven never did anything" (Bates 1943:113). None of them were major poets of the time (although T. S. Eliot tried to raise Lancelot Andrewes' reputation). Yet, for a phenomenon so important, so vital to the development of civilization, one wonders why translations—regardless of their marginality as literature—failed to attract primary attention over the centuries. If it is true, as few would deny, that "Western Europe owes its civilization to translators" (Kelly, p. 1), then there can hardly be a subject—for historians and philosophers no less than for literary theorists—more important than translation. But the paucity of systematic thinking on translation is long standing. Kelly states it memorably: "Had translation depended for its survival on theory, it would have died out long before Cicero" (p. 219). And we, the heirs of civilization, would agree with Kelly when he writes: "Fortunately, good translation has never depended on adequate theory" (p. 4). The traditional neglect of translation from all quarters—philosophical, literary, historical—despite its importance to the development of civilization, no less in the East than in the West, is hard to explain. From a onelanguage perspective, it may be that the question of translation barely exists. From a "panoptic" point of view, however, it may not overstate the case to claim that the history of the world could be told through the history of translation. Indeed, one might even assert that, without translation, there is no history of the world. Consider the rise of certain civilizations: the Roman world, the Italian, French, English, German, and Russian, and contemplate the role of translation in the development of those cultures. Imagine the spread of Christianity and consider its history sans translation: the Christians in the world would be reduced to a handful of Hebraicists and classical scholars who could read Aramaic. Nor is the Orient, from Asia Minor to East Asia, exempt from the pervasive influence of translation. Consider the growth of the Buddhist canon through two millennia in languages other than the Pali of the earliest texts; or Hinduism, the sacred texts of which, compiled in Sanskrit, have had to be translated into Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, and Hindustani, even though the religion
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has been restricted for the most part to the Dravidian landmass, with extensions into Southeast Asia. Even with the Koran, translations of which orthodox Islam traditionally rejects, interlinear versions have been produced for use in the Muslim community. Versions of the Koran exist in Persian, in various provincial languages in the nineteenth century, as well as in Hausa and Indonesian in the present day; translations are also found in Turkish as well as Hebrew.1 The modern interest in translation, by contrast to the traditional neglect, can be traced to the nineteenthcentury German idealist philosophers, who saw language as problematic and complex, and who began to recognize that languages were not alternatively equivalent ways of saying the same thing. We might attribute the neglect of translation in traditional periods to a problem of perspective, for translations exist in the margins only if the main body of the text is in a privileged language; translations are viewed as deviant only if the ipsissima verba of the original are considered superior to any subsequent recension or version; finally, translations are considered trivial when the process of rendering a text from one language to another is seen in terms of losses and improprieties, offenses to authenticity and impediments to a true interpretation. Indeed, undergirding the disregard of translation is the assumption, natural and inevitable, that true understanding of a text can only occur in the originating language culture. After all, how can a nonnative understand a native culture better than a native? Common experience makes this notion plausible; convention makes this platitude persuasive; but it is, in any event, wrong. Implicit in this attitude is yet another myth, a myth of understanding, which equates familiarity with analytical insight. This misconception about understanding can best be illustrated by the contrast between each human being knowing how to breathe and a physiologist knowing the processes involved in breathing. The modern perspective, particularly the postphenomenologist perspective, pre 1.
An interesting contrast in this respect exists between Islam and other world religions. Christianity never insisted on the propagation of Hebrew or Greek as part of its proselytizing strategy; nor did Buddhism insist on knowledge of the original Pali in the earliest texts nor the spread of Pali along with the faith. In this sense, there is a linguistic chauvinism in Arabic toward the Koran which is markedly stronger and more persistent than in other world religions.
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supposes a radical difference between the knowledge of familiarity and the knowledge of analysis, which are often at odds in human experience. To verify this distinction with a simple demonstration, one need only run down a flight of stairs as quickly as possible, and then run down the same flight of stairs, maintaining the same speed, but this time counting the steps. Two things will happen: either one will slow down, or one will trip. One may run down a flight of steps flawlessly, yet not know how many steps were negotiated; counting the steps, however, interferes with the familiar function of the motor reflexes. The first experience symbolizes the knowing of familiarity—in which one is scarcely conscious of what one knows. The other symbolizes the knowing of analysis—which, though plodding, and sometimes unnatural, yields more transmittable abstract information. Another myth of theory stems from communication theory, which sees the work to be translated as a fixed entity that can be accurately represented by an arbitrary label—usually a box with the word "source" inside. The contents of this box are depicted as being transmitted into another entity represented by the translation— another box marked by the word "target." This visual scheme can then be modified in successively more complex models that will include such elements as "fields" marked "static" or "noise''; intermediary factors can be inserted between source and destination with such terms as "encoder" usually placed to the right of "source" and "decoder" placed usually near and to the left of "target." In the process of translating, the translator takes a message (M), decodes that message, and discovers the references (R) in the first language (A): this process undergoes a "transfer mechanism" that involves AB, which produces signs (S) in language B that can then be encoded into a message (M) in the second language (B). These depictions provide a helpful clarification of various stages in a difficult process, and diagrammatically the analysis is attractive. Here is Nida's scheme (1964:146):2
2.
Louis Kelly reproduces this diagram along with several others (1979:37–41).
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The advantage of such a schema is that it indicates (in implicitly lefttoright orientation) the sequence of the stages involved. But there are at least two problems with such a model. The lefttoright orientation suggests strongly, if implicitly, a "oneway arrow"—when in fact the process of translation may involve more of a dialectic process, in which an unsatisfactory message in the target language may cause not a "loop" (where one starts again at the message in the source language) but a dynamic backandforth process in both directions (from righttoleft and lefttoright in the diagram) that will yield possible alternatives providing better "matches" for the message in the source language. Indeed, in his diagram, Frawley explicitly attaches arrows in both directions to indicate more accurately the dynamics of translation (1984:163):
A second difficulty is more basic. These diagrams assume that all messages (M) are unequivocal and unilateral—that messages are schematizable entities. Most would suggest that messages, even the simplest sort, are not without ambiguities. (One thinks of the child's game of "telephone," where a "message," given to one person who whispers it in turn to another, and that person to another, through a sequence involving several receiver/transmitter stages, ends up in a radically different form with a totally different meaning from its "original.") If this is so with simple messages, how much more so with discourse—including literature—which is suggestive, multivalent, creatively ambiguous, and historically contingent, for both author and reader. Consider, very simply, how many people would agree on the ''message" of any significant work of literature; consider, further, how the greatest works of literature positively invite, indeed thrive on, the impossibility of any number of readers—of the same or different generations, with the same or different backgrounds—agreeing on the central message in the work. The deficiencies of schematizing the process of translation may become graphically clear if, instead of a fixed entity, we were to substitute an organic entity, one that changes over time, different from moment to moment, whose identity is neither coterminous with its physical manifestation at a particular point in time nor
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equivalent to the sum total of all such physical manifestations over all the points of time during a lifetime. This description fits human beings as well as verbal constructs. If one were to insert a human being, represented by an icon or name, in the diagram, would the schematization shed any light on the process? Since we cited Andy Rooney before, let us insert him in the diagram. Does it mean anything to see him decoded from English, his characteristic referents identified, then subject to a transfer mechanism (an "energizer" from Star Trek?), which then produces signs in Japanese that finally yield an Andy Rooney in Japanese?3 The explanatory power of such diagrams varies with the complexity of the message: where the message involves univocal communication, they will serve well enough; but where the message involves multidimensional discourse, replete with nuance and gesture and style, then the diagrammatical representations are false and misleading. Even when they may appear to be most apt—in technical translation aided by computers—these diagrams are chimeras of explanation: what they make clear does not reflect the complexities of the process. Time and again, the failures of machine translation should not be blamed on the technology, but on our inadequate understanding of the communication and the discourse which is so conveniently labeled as "message." How well or how badly this message has been transmitted might be seen in a brief survey of the systems of machine translation developed in the last generation. The Lessons of Machine Translation The development of machine translation in the last twenty years has been a subject largely ignored by literary theorists of transla 3.
Indeed, a name that is phonetically equivalent to Andy Rooney in Japanese would sound strange and unfamiliar, if not unnatural to the Japanese. A Japanese friend tells me the closest one could come would be "Antei Runin," but the name would be immediately detectable as that of a foreigner. When I asked if there isn't an "Andy Rooney" in Japanese, one who isn't afraid to speak his mind, even if it shows his own provinciality, she mentioned "Tamori," a media star who is currently very popular. But one feels confident that neither Tamori nor Andy Rooney would consider themselves interchangeable. Counterparts are not identities; they may be parallel, but they are not equal.
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tion; linguistic theorists are more responsive to developments, but their preoccupations also lie elsewhere. But scientific and technical needs, as well as political and commercial demands, have once again created a buoyant climate for the development of machine translation, either in its HAMT (humanaided machine translation) or its MAHT (machineaided human translation) aspects. While the objectives of machine translation (MT) are not as utopian as those stated by Warren Weaver in his famous 1949 memorandum, the advances of computer technology in the last decade have focused the thinking and the efforts of significant constituencies— computational linguistics, information theory, and artificial intelligence among them—on the problem of developing workable systems for translation. What is fascinating about these developments is that the limitations of automated translation systems almost always reflect a limitation not in technological capability but in our theoretical understanding of language. If for no other reason, the history of machine translation is instructive to the literary theorist as well as the general theorist, precisely because the failures reflect lacunae in our understanding of language—whether in ambiguities erased by familiar convention or in subtleties that we negotiate intuitively. The history of machine translation is customarily marked by two watershed events, one positive, one negative. The first was the Weaver memorandum which set the problem and issued the challenge in 1949: It is very tempting to say that a book written in Chinese is simply a book written in English which was coded into the "Chinese code." If we have useful methods for solving any cryptographic problem, may it not be that with proper interpretation we already have useful methods for translation? [Quoted in King 1987:6]
The key role of the notion of language as code (Weaver had been involved in cryptography during World War II) was to influence conceptions of language from Jakobson and information theorists for the next generation. Underlying this conception was the conviction, born out of the heady success of cryptographers in breaking codes under extreme pressure, that any text in one language would yield its meaning in any other language. As King puts it (p. 39):
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"Since there is a proof available in information theory that every code is decipherable, and since languages can be viewed as ciphers for each other, it follows that every text is translatable." The result of this promising opportunity was the development of machine translation projects at several sites. In the United States, the firstgeneration machine translation projects included the following: The Georgetown University (GU) project completed its first RussianEnglish prototype in 1954 and had developed initiatives in ChineseEnglish, EnglishTurkish, and RussianFrench before funding was discontinued in 1962. (See HeiniszDostent 1979:4–87; Tucker, in Nirenburg 1987:29–30.) The SYSTRAN project, which developed out of the Georgetown project, offers EnglishFrench, EnglishItalian, and EnglishGerman as well as FrenchEnglish and GermanEnglish capabilities. Since 1970 SYSTRAN has been used for RussianEnglish translation at WrightPatterson Air Force Base; since 1976 it has been used for EnglishFrench, EnglishItalian, EnglishGerman, FrenchEnglish, and GermanEnglish translation by the European Economic Community headquarters in Luxembourg. (See Tucker, in Nirenburg, pp. 29–30; Wheeler, in King, pp. 192–208.) The METAL (METALanguage) project, offering GermanEnglish translation, started in 1961 at the University of Texas in Austin, where the emphasis initially was largely theoretical rather than operational, although it has been sponsored since 1980 by Siemens, A. G., Munich. A markettested prototype appeared in 1985; translation capability from Spanish and Chinese is under development. (See Tucker, in Nirenburg, pp. 31–32; White, in Nirenburg, pp. 225–246; Slocum, in King, pp.319–350). The firstgeneration projects spurred activity in other countries as well: Canada, the Soviet Union, France, Italy, Germany, and Japan have established centers for machine translation. It is somewhat ironic (and reminiscent of international developments in other sectors) that the impetus given to machine translation was undermined in the United States, just at the time it was beginning
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to flourish in other countries, with the socalled ALPAC (Automated Language Processing Advisory Committee) report in 1966, which effectively cut off the Georgetown University project and sent a discouraging word to other machine translation pioneers. Secondgeneration machine translation projects saw both a lowering of expectations and a raising of capabilities. The ideal of "95 percent accurate, fully automated, highquality translation" (FAHQT), first championed by Yehoshoa BarHillel (in 1960) and later (in 1971) disowned by him, was largely abandoned (Buchmann, in King, p. 18). First, it was subject to conceptual difficulties: what does high quality imply? And how can one quantify degree of accuracy? (See Zarechnak, pp. 35–39; Carbonell and Tomita, in Nirenburg, p. 68.) The absurdity of the formulation is immediately apparent with literary examples: can one assign a quantifiable percentage to the accuracy, say, of Pope's version of the Iliad to the original? Second, it is vulnerable to philosophical skepticism: is translation, as such, possible? BarHillel, in his skepticism, seemed to subscribe to the "indeterminacy" thesis of Willard Van Orman Quine (1960), which suggests that the accuracy of translation is ultimately impossible to determine: Sentences translatable outright, translatable by independent evidence of stimulatory occasions, are sparse and must woefully underdetermine the analytical hypotheses on which the translation of all further sentences depends. To project such hypotheses beyond the independently translatable sentences at all is in effect to impute our sense of linguistic analogy unverifiably to the native mind. [p. 72]
Furthermore, alternative translations can be produced to accommodate the original that are different one from the other; they may even be contradictory: The indeterminacy . . . is more radical. It is that rival systems of analytical hypotheses can conform to all speech dispositions within each of the languages concerned and yet dictate, in countless cases, utterly disparate translations; not mere mutual paraphrases, but translations each of which would be excluded by the other system of translation. Two such translations might even be patently contrary in truth value, provided there is no stimulation that would encourage assent to either [pp. 73–74]
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This history of machine translation is particularly apt for the theory of translation since it reminds us to avoid overgeneralizing from limited cases. There are three areas of confusion, involving the following tenets: (1) that language is a code; (2) that languages are equivalently distinct one from the other; and (3) that languages are uniformly transparent to native speakers. The theory of machine translation was, from the outset, predicated on the notion that language was, like a secret message, a code to be broken: all that was needed was precise mathematical analysis, to which the computer would contribute enormous power. One forgets that cryptography decoded messages that were emphatically unambiguous, even when they were metaphorical or allusive (the ultimate meaning of the available responses having been predetermined). Language that needs no disambiguation may be properly regarded as a code. But most language, particularly ordinary language, is highly and meaningfully ambiguous. It should not have been surprising, then, that the results of machine translation would be better with preprogrammed rather than randomly selected or randomly created messages.4 The disappointment with the ALPAC report was with the Georgetown University project's handling of natural discourse. The early machine translation projects were effective with input when that input was a textcode; with natural language, it was far less satisfactory. With some few exceptions,5 machine translation projects have not tackled language pairs involving what Quine calls "radical translation, i.e., translation of the language of a hitherto untouched people." Hence to refute Quine's indeterminacy principle on the basis of successful transfers between cognate languages misses his point (see Kirk 1986:204–209), since an important test of equivalence in meaning for Quine is what he calls "intrasubjective stimulus synonymy." No one would contest the fact that a Frenchman and an Englishman have a greater degree of "intrasubjectiv 4.
Indeed, the Georgetown University project began with fortynine predetermined test sentences in Russian (cf. Zarechnak, pp. 22–24).
5.
Among them are the CULT (Chinese University Language Translator) project at the Chinese University of Hong Kong for the ChineseEnglish translation of mathematics and physics texts; the POLA (Project on Linguistic Analysis) project at the University of California, Berkeley, which offered ChineseEnglish capability; and the EnglishJapanese system at Kyushu University.
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ity," in shared GrecoRoman and JudeoChristian traditions, than would be shared by, say, a Frenchman and a Chinese. Finally, one should be wary of false extrapolation, which too often sets up straw men that can be disposed of all too easily: Quine does not insist that translation is impossible in all instances. He allows that "observation sentences can be translated"; that "truthfunction sentences can be translated"; that "stimulusanalytic" and their opposite, "stimuluscontradictory,'' sentences can also be recognized. He reserves his indeterminacy of translation to one case: "Questions of intrasubjective stimulus synonymy of native occasion sentences even of nonobservational kind can be settled if raised but the sentences cannot be translated" (p. 68). "Occasion sentences" are defined by Quine as those which "command assent or dissent only if queried after an appropriate prompting stimulation" (p. 36). There is in this an aspect of the ontological authenticity of meaning explored in his chapter "The Ontogenesis of Reference." Some of the successes in machine translation, particularly in secondgeneration projects, involve not so much translation between languages as transfers between sublanguages. The TAUMMÉTEO system in Canada, which has been in continuous operation since 1977, provides translations of public weather forecasts. TAUM (Traduction Automatique, Université de Montréal) essentially provides a substitution of one sublanguage code for another, from English weather terminology to French weather terminology. Weather forecasts are apt examples of Quine's "observation sentences" which are being translated on a daily basis in Canada. In other words, sublanguages in individual disciplines are more accessible than ordinary usage in different languages. There are also international "sublanguages" such as mathematics, which is why the translations of physics and mathematics in the Chinese University of Hong Kong project cannot be considered authentic translations: the "text" comprises the mathematical and scientific formulas; the "context" is the surrounding verbiage. What carries the message is the formulas, not the verbiage, and these are presumably left "untranslated" and appear in their original scientific notation. The "translation" of such papers involves principally the transference of the technical formulas, and only secondarily a rendering into the target language of the verbal explication. The scientific language is the same, whatever the natural
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language context, and provides a crucial access to the reader who is not native to the context language. This phenomenon is, of course, familiar to scientists who are able to communicate with a minimum of translation and with only modest bilinguality. The discourse being transferred is not translated but delivered whole; the surrounding text (context) requires translation, but the contextual sense can be safely inferred from the formulas themselves, since scientific exposition is not likely to indulge in willful ironies and obfuscations or gratuitous ambiguities. "Translations" of technical material, where the technical language is the same regardless of the "natural language" used, are strictly speaking not wholly translations: they might be termed "metatranslations" where portions are left untranslated. Scientific languages, technical formulas, are languages (like Morse code) that are both untranslatable and in no need of translation, since they constitute codes familiar to the technical initiates in all languages.6 Machine translation will become, increasingly, a factor in the future—whether in the actual processing of scientific and technical information across linguistic boundaries, an effort which is attracting corporate support; or in the diplomatic relations between countries, already institutionalized in the simultaneous interpretation that occurs daily at the United Nations (an idea which, not so incidentally, was conceived of by Leon Dostert, the organizer of the Georgetown University machine translation effort); or in the developing capability of EUROTRA, an automatic translation project, scheduled for completion in the 1990s, which will provide translations to and from English, French, German, Dutch, Danish, Italian, and Greek (constituting fortytwo language pairs), involving the efforts of the European universities and research units, which will service the needs of the entire European Economic Community. (See King and Perschke, in King, pp. 373–392; Arnold and Des Tombe, in Nirenburg, pp. 114–135.) The spectacular progress of computer technology in the last two decades somehow makes obsolescent the words "machine" and 6.
Computer programming languages are the fastest proliferating "universal" languages; their initiates all over the world learn one discourse, developed for the most part in English. Students from abroad are particularly adept at learning programming languages, which they often learn faster than they do English.
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"mechanical" in "machine translation" and "mechanical translation." The advent of microprocessors, the development of list processing (LISP) and LISP machines, with powerful capabilities for not only grammatical but extragrammatical parsing as well as for analyzing and generating language, the availability of massive dictionary compilers, the exploration into knowledgebased machine translation (Carbonell and Tomita in Nirenburg, pp. 68–89), advances in natural language processing (NLP)—all these resources can hardly be neglected by the conscientious student of translation. It would be foolish to ignore developments in automated translation as being of only technical interest. The fact that, despite the enormous activity in transformational grammar since the 1960s, ''no complete transformational grammar of English or any other natural languages has been written" (Raskin, in Nirenburg, p. 53) disappointed researchers in natural language processing, but there was no reason to discard the insights of linguistics altogether. It would be equally a mistake for linguists to dismiss as relevant only to computer programming the discoveries in artificial intelligence and natural language processing. The invention of powerful computer parsers has an obvious relevance to the dependency theories in linguistics; the search for an "Interlingua" as a pivot language to facilitate translation from any pair of languages bears a resemblance to Chomskian notions of deep structure.7 It is not utopian to suggest that in the next generation, linguistics will be enhanced by rapid progress in computer technology, and computer technology may be stimulated by theoretical discoveries in linguistics. The Myth of Perfect Translation If there are myths in the theory of translation, the misconceptions about the practice of translation are nowhere less numerous. Some of these myths harden into orthodoxy and, in turn, affect one's conception of theory. In English, the most persistent myth concerns the sanctity of the Authorized Version. When the Anchor Bible was first published in 1964, there was the usual hue and cry about the desecration of the sanctity of the King James Version, which, after all, was a milestone of English literature. A decade or so earlier, the 7.
As early as 1961, W. P. Lehmann saw the potential of computers for the study of the humanities as a research tool (Frawley 1984: pp. 163–170).
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Revised Standard Version met with similar abuse and was characterized as an unnecessary departure from the Authorized Version. One assumed that this towering achievement of translation immediately eclipsed all other versions. Actually, the historical facts do not bear this out. Indeed, the King James Version was as vilified as a departure and a desecration as every subsequent revision of the Bible: for three generations after its appearance, it was the Geneva Bible and not the Authorized Version which was generally accepted. "In ordinary private use the comprehensive Geneva Bible long competed with it, while scholars and preachers went on using what they would." Even Lancelot Andrewes, one of the most prominent members of the committee and a prime contributor to the Authorized Version, "commonly used the Geneva Bible for his sermons, as did other bishops" (Greenslade 1963:168). There are those who will remind us that Milton, whose Paradise Lost is the next great literary monument in English, following the Authorized Version by two generations, was in its debt.8 Such plausible, but erroneous, modernist myths about history overlook the fact that Milton was indeed familiar with the Bible, but he read the text in the original Hebrew and Greek. If he was inspired to write Paradise Lost, it was by the Bible of Abraham and Jesus, in the original languages, rather than by any translation, including the august Authorized Version. A final irony about the "Authorized Version" is the fact that, as Greenslade reminds us, it was "strictly speaking . . . never authorized." Another myth concerning the Authorized Version is that it was a unique achievement which showed such originality and imagination that it is markedly distinct from all other versions, to which it is indisputably superior. Alas, this too cannot be supported by the facts. As Bates has written, much of what we admire in the Authorized Version is the work of previous translators: ''Many of the improvements in the phrasing of the New Testament were taken without acknowledgment from the Roman Catholic Rheims version, which is only referred to in the preface 8.
These misconceptions should not be attributed merely to the amateur Anglophile. Academics, professors of English literature, have been in the vanguard perpetuating this myth. Bates (1943) cites a Yale contributor to the Cambridge History of English Literature who was "allowed by the editor to say that 'all parties and classes turned with one accord to the new version and adopted it as their very own'" (p. 114).
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with abuse. These unacknowledged borrowings go to such length that the Committee would be liable to prosecution at the present day" (Bates 1943:114). Much that is distinguished in the Authorized Version also derived from Tyndale's rendering two generations earlier. Greenslade claims that "in narrative he [Tyndale] has had no superior" and, by way of anachronistic and retroactive compliment, judges the merits of Tyndale by how much of it was borrowed by the Authorized Version: "The virtue of Tyndale's English is attested by the survival of so much of it through the intermediate versions into the Authorized Version of 1611'' (p. 144). The first words of the Bible provide another instance of the myth of perfect translation. "In the beginning," the phrase that opens the Book of Genesis, is so ingrained in the memory that it is almost impervious to challenge. Important and familiar cosmogonies have evolved from this quotation: the Christian Bible, for example, is conceived of as an account of the world from its origins (Genesis) to its end (Revelation). But as Speiser (1964) has conclusively shown, the first words of the Hebrew text say nothing of the sort. "When God set about to create heaven and earth" is how Genesis began in the original version. The sense of the first word in the Hebrew text, bereshit, is: "At the beginning of . . .," or "When," and not "In/At the beginning" (p. 12). The shift could not be more telling for understanding the differences between the Hebrew sense of their place in the universe and the Christian. The original Hebrew text indicates that the origin alluded to at the outset of Genesis was not the beginning of all creation, but merely the process by which heaven and earth were created. It presumes nothing about the relation of this event to the beginning of time, or to other activities that may have preceded it. There is no assumption that the events by which heaven and earth were created occurred at the beginning of all time. But almost all English translations9 adopt the formula, "In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," thereby placing that event high in the hierarchy of history.10 Generations of readers, wittingly or not, have read these oracular words in the belief 9.
With only rare exceptions, such as the Good News Bible.
10.
Both the Wycliffe (1380) and the Coverdale (1535) versions refer to the beginning. Wycliffe: "In the first made God of nought hevene and erthe" (A); "In the bigynnyng God made of nought hevene and erthe" (B); Coverdale: "In the begynnynge God created heaven and earth."
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that the Bible began at the beginning of time, rather than at the point in time when heaven and earth were created (the creation of humans occurring shortly thereafter). Other cosmogonies, the Buddhist for one, conceive of thousands and millions of years preceding, and succeeding, the world that humans know. The foregrounding of human evolution in history derives from a misconstruction of the original text, yet its "myth" has become a sustaining "truth" for centuries of Christians. It is not a trivial datum of lexicography that "genesis" in Homeric Greek meant "becoming'' more than it did "origin." "Ocean and mother Tethys, the becoming (genesis) of gods," Homer writes in the Iliad 14:302, a passage cited by Socrates in the Theaetetus 152E (Benardete 1986:I.15). Perhaps the most brilliant translation in the Authorized Version occurs for verse 4 in the twentythird Psalm: "Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death." Compared with this physically and metaphysically terrifying image, the original Hebrew version positively pales: a more faithful rendering would produce "Even though I should walk in the midst of total darkness" (Dahood 1966:145).11 The Hebrew word shalmawet denotes "darkness in the extreme," "utter darkness," "total darkness" (Dahood, p. 147); there are no valleys in the original, no death. Yet who, upon reading "the valley of the shadow of death," would not think of "utter darkness," "ultimate and penultimate darkness"? Who, given a choice between the two versions, would not choose the translation over the original?12 Yet this phrase, traditionally 11.
This is an instance which brings to mind Thurber's suggestively ironic comment: when informed by a French enthusiast that Thurber's stories read even better in French than in English: "Yes," Thurber replied, "I tend to lose something in the original!" (Quoted by Moura Budberg in the PEN collection, The World of Translation, p. 151.) 12.
One must be careful in one's assertions here: I am not suggesting that the original can be neglected or ignored, or that anything fanciful in the target language, provided it is vigorous and memorable, is justified. Whether these "liberties" are justified or whether they are "liberties" at all will depend on the premises one assumes about the effort to reincarnate the original in the target language. As we shall see later, from one set of premises these practices are more than justified; from another, they are indefensible. The recent case of Stephen Mitchell receiving a sixfigure contract to translate the Dao De Jing despite the fact he knows no Chinese is a case in point: as a literary project of a distinguished writer it is plausible; as a translation of a difficult work it is deplorable (deplorable as, say, a Chinese with no English "translating" Shakespeare).
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attributed to the Authorized Version, can be traced to Coverdale ("Though I shulde walk now in the valley of the shadowe of death"), who adapted it in turn from Wycliffe's version with the key substitution of one word: "For whi though Y schal go in the myddis of schadewe of deeth." One might say that the recension process involves in this case: original composition (Wycliffe), adaptation (Coverdale), and selection (KJV). If original works are not to be understood as fixed entities with unique identities, neither can translations be taken as original compositions, created ex nihilo out of the translator's imagination. Another example derives from that most modern of Old Testament books, Ecclesiastes. "Vanity of Vanities, all is vanity" (which, in turn, derives from Jerome's rhythmic "Vanitas vanitatum et omnis vanitas")13 is rendered by one modern biblical scholar as "breath of breaths'' or "a vapor of vapors." The semantic shifts between, on the one hand, the original Hebrew word hebel and Latin vanitas (or English "vanity") and, on the other, between different senses of the English word "vanity" traverse a wide semantic field that reflects not only linguistic changes but changing worldviews and emphases. The meaning of the original is clear, and smacks a little of Buddhism: everything is insubstantial vapor, fleeting: nothing lasts. In his version, published in the Anchor Bible, R.B.Y. Scott (1965:254) renders the sense as: "So [man's] dust will return to the earth where it was before. And the breath of life will return to God who gave it. A vapor of vapors!—says Qoheleth—all is vapor!" The vapor cannot be considered as merely an image of futility: vapor may be transient in this world, but in the spiritual world it is associated with "the breath of Godgiven life" which "will return to God who gave it." In the Hebrew context, the injunction is not cynical but affirmative; if it is nihilistic, it is positively nihilistic, enjoining a reunion to a higher level of being (return to God). The image of earthly futility is also the intimation of everlasting life. The outlook in Ecclesiastes is resolutely realistic: contrary to popular misinterpretation, there is no facile fatalism about it. The book stresses the limitations of life, the dubious benefits of 13.
In this instance the KJV translators rejected the Coverdale rendering of 1535, "All is but vanity (saieth the preacher) all is but playne vanite" for the tardus rhythms of the Wycliffe (1380) version: "The vanyte of vanytees, saide Ecclesiastes; the vanyte of vanytees."
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success and pleasure, yet the conclusion is palpably positive. No dithyrambic celebrations, no romantic appeals to unrealizable ideals, no wishfulfillments inducing virtue: the yeasaying is carefully measured against the temptations of pessimism; to celebrate life is not to blind oneself to its travails and tragedies. It is this hardwon optimism, forged in pain, tempered by encounters with injustice and frustration, steeled against the adversities of life, that Ecclesiastes preaches. It is this mitigated message of a transcendental realism and equanimity that the word "vanity" with its uniformly negative associations—of futility, of emptiness, of vainglory—will not admit. The image of breath in the original is beautifully ambivalent: it is at once the very essence of life and the very reminder of one's ephemerality. The specifically concrete image in the Hebrew is lost in the abstract Latin vanitas and the English "vanity."14 The Oxford English Dictionary cites as obsolete the meaning of "vanity" as "emptiness"; cognate definitions of "vanity'' as referring to something "vain, idle, or worthless" persist to the nineteenth century. In the seventeenth century, "vanity" referred more and more not to the quality of being idle or worthless but to objects emblematic of "vanity." Bunyan, in his Pilgrim's Progress, still retains a vestige of the sense of airiness in the etymological origin of the word when he writes (1678): "The name of that Town is Vanity; and at the town there is a Fair kept, called VanityFair. It beareth the name of VanityFair, because the Town where 'tis kept is lighter than Vanity." Thackeray, of course, borrows the image, but his nuance is now decidedly negative and censorious: "The last scene of her dismal Vanity Fair comedy was fast approaching." The sense of "vanity" as personal conceit is not very far; and the attribution of cosmetic folly to the appurtenances for grooming have already become commonplace. Almost all of these associations intersect in Pope's paranomasia in "The Rape of the Lock": Think not, when Woman's transient Breath is fled, That all her Vanities at once are dead: Succeeding Vanities she still regards, And tho' she plays no more, o'erlooks the Cards. 14.
I have considered the notion of vanity elsewhere in the context of apposite but distinct concepts (Eoyang 1985).
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These instances of the myth of perfect translation are offered not as pedantic remonstrations against deviant translation, but as illustrations of the complexities of translation as a whole. They show that certain timeworn assumptions about successful translation cannot be accepted without challenge. A more complex model will have to be constructed if one is to understand translation properly. If we insist on the originality of "divine inspiration," it would be hard to adjudicate between either the Hebrew or the Christian versions of the opening of Genesis. Textually, one can demonstrate that the Hebrew version is historically prior; theologically, however, it would be difficult for most Christians to defend its superiority. "Divine inspiration" is reflected in both Hebrew and Christian versions of the Bible; the difference lies in their contrastive visions of the Almighty and the relationship of the worshiper to the Almighty—in the one case, God is the distant and forbidding, the jealous and vengeful patriarchal God of the Old Testament; in the other, he is the approachable, merciful, almost personable Father of the New Testament. For a nonpartisan observer, it would be difficult to determine which version is the more "divinely inspired." And the instance of the Authorized Version reminds us of the myth of identity, for subsequent readers retroactively posit not only the wrong original but also misconceive the translation at hand: they rewrite history in light of what they regard as the innate virtues of the translation, forgetting both its provenience and its eclectic character. Babel Revisited The postBabelian world adumbrated by Goethe in his notion of Weltliteratur was hinted at two centuries earlier by John Donne in his famous meditation on death and dying. Donne's celebration of the oneness of humanity—"No man is an island"—harks back to the monolingual world before Babel; but he recognizes the estrangement and separation of souls—"Perchance hee for whom this Bell tolls, may be so ill, as that he knowes not it tolls for him." Donne depicts the alienation, the sense of foreignness, the existential loneliness that is the legacy of life after Babel. But Donne is also one of the few to reconcile the curse of Babel with a heuristically positive vision of translation, not as an imposture or an impiety,
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but as a saving grace—a saving grace, moreover, of divine authorship: All mankinde is of one Author, and is one volume; when one Man dies, one Chapter is not torne out of the booke, but translated into a better language; and every Chapter must be so translated; God emploies several translators; some peeces are translated by age, some by sicknesse, some by warre, some by justice; but Gods hand is in every translation; and his hand shall binde up all our scattered leaves againe, for that Librarie where every booke shall lie open to one another . . .
The image of every book lying open to one another evokes not merely the openness or "translatability" of one text into another language, but also the universal access to multiple perspectives, a "panglossic" world. It is significant that Donne begins with a preBabelian image of a monolingual world—"All mankinde . . . is one volume"—and he ends with a postBabelian image of multivolumed pluralism—''his hand shall binde up all our scattered leaves againe." One might contemplate the ultimate irony: the world of the future, however heterogeneous, eclectic, even secular, may be divinely inspired—the preBabelian monolingual world looks toward the utopia of a postBabelian multiverse.
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3— Translation across Civilizations: The Contribution of Barbarians The triumph of civilization is usually recounted in Manichaean terms: the forces of light overcoming the forces of darkness, divine angels of enlightenment prevailing over the abysmal, satanic forces of ignorance and brutishness. The extirpation of barbarism has often been regarded as equivalent to the spread of civilization. Yet the actual historical situation often belies this simplistic confrontational model and suggests that a dialectical model may be more apt. Logically, the notion of the "barbarian" is, of course, essential to the notion of "civilization": one presupposes the other. But what may not have been noticed is that "barbarian'' cultures have been instrumental in demonstrable ways to the preservation, and ultimately the spread, of civilization. The contribution of "barbarians" to civilization may be parallel to the story of the Phylloxera vastatrix, or vine louse, in oenology: in the nineteenth century, a shipment of American native vines containing Phylloxera vastatrix was sent as specimens to Kew Gardens, near London. By the 1870s, this pest had spread to the Bordeaux, Burgundy, and Champagne regions of France, to every vineyard of Europe and Africa. According to André Simon (1967:23), "the vineyards of Bordeaux had been wiped out, and ten years later those of Burgundy and Champagne were dead or dying." Salvation came, ironically, from the very vines that had introduced the infestation: the vineyards of the eastern states of North America. Evidently, the native American vines had become nearly immune to the pest: they provided the rootstocks on which French vines could be grafted. France's flourishing vineyards today owe their existence to North American vines.
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In a similar way, through the course of history, barbarians have posed a threat to civilization, not infrequently decimating it. Some barbarian invasions were in fact devastating, but history indicates that civilizations have survived sometimes because of, and not just despite, the intercession of barbarians. Like the North American vines that introduced the phylloxera infestation in Europe and almost wiped out its vineyards, barbarians have been anathema to civilization. The irony is a principle familiar from immunology, somewhat reversed: what destroys is also what saves. I should like to examine the historical instances in which foreign, often hostile, cultures became the instrument of survival for native civilizations; to consider the role translation plays in these ironic survivals; and to speculate on the differences between "barbarian" knowledge and "native" knowledge as a key to seeing translation as an instrument of historical understanding. "Barbarian" Contributions The notion of barbarian is, generally speaking, a generic rather than a specific term. The term "Barbary Coast" in the nineteenth century, it is true, did designate the Saracen territories in North Africa, conflating the specific nominalism of "Berber," an Arabic name for the aboriginal people west and south of Egypt, with the word "barbarian," which derives from Greek barbarikos, or barbaros. But, over the course of history, the term "barbarian''—or its equivalents—has been nonspecific, designating in succession, "a nonHellene," "a nonRoman," "a nonChristian," and "a nonItalian." Each of its uses reflects a deictic solipsism which essentially brands anyone not of the language polity, that is, the foreigner, the other, as "barbarian." The Greek references to barbaroi are familiar, though one sometimes forgets that this term in Greek included the Medes and the Persians, now regarded as civilizations in their own right.1 In each of these cases, there is a presumption that the native culture is civilized and that all others are not. The Chinese subdivided their barbarians: a different name was reserved 1.
Some Greeks, however, recognized the "civility" of the Persians: Herodotus quoted, with apparent approval, the anecdote about Darius recognizing the relativity of customs in different cultures, and, following Pindar, he acknowledged that custom is king (Mann 1986:215); Xenophon, too, admired Persian civilization (cf. Hirsch 1985).
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for barbarians in each of the four directions: in the east, they were called yi . These terms were applied to different barbarian tribes over the course of history, but the calligraph for each word is, nevertheless, suggestive: for the eastern barbarians the ideogram is marked with a combination of the radical meaning "big" and the radical for "bow"; the word for the western barbarians includes the radical for "weapon"; the southern barbarians are designated with a word that includes the radical for "worm''; and the word for the northern barbarians combines the word for "dog" with the word for "fire." The definitions of "barbarian" shift and scintillate with ambiguities. Initially, it designated that which was foreign, nonnative, with a slight tincture of cultural superiority, usually distinguishing (if that's the word) the uncultured other from the cultured self. For the Greek tragedians, barbaros comprised three meanings (Bacon 1961:10– 11): it referred to that which was unintelligible; that which was foreign, nonGreek; and that which was foreign, with some implication of inferiority. For some historians of the Middle Ages, most notably Prosper Boissonade (1927), the word "barbarian" was associated, if not identified, with rapine, massacre, and gratuitous cruelty. The contrast between the barbarians of the Middle Ages and Latin culture was captured by Boissonade memorably, if somewhat extravagantly, as follows: "The idleness, stupidity, coarseness, ignorance, credulity, and cruelty of the barbarians took the place of the wellregulated activity, the polish, culture and relative humanity of the Romans" (p. 22). Boissonade seemed to associate atavistic, primitive instincts with barbarian tendencies, tendencies which even extended exposure to civilization could not entirely extinguish. "Even among the Visigoths, Ostrogoths, and Franks, who were already half Romanized by a long sojourn within the empire," he writes, "the sudden awakening of ancestral ferocity transformed these 'guests' into unchained murderers" (p. 22). From these notions, it became natural to see "barbarian" as synonymous with the incomprehensible, the hostile, the visceral, the irrational. There is a pseudological progression in the three meanings of "barbarian." About the root meaning of the word, designating something unintelligible, "there seems to be no disagreement"
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(Bacon, p. 11n.): "It is originally an onomatopoeic word imitating any kind of unintelligible sound, whether of animal, object, or man. Boisacq and Frisk derive it from Sanskrit barbarah. Boisacq relates it to Greek Babai, Babalein, and Latin balbus, balbutio." Implicit in the pseudological progression are two syllogisms, the first confusing a subjective observation with objective attributes, the second confusing unintelligibility with lack of intelligence. These syllogisms might be stated as follows: A.
Anyone I [we] find unintelligible is innately unintelligible; I [we] find barbarians unintelligible; Hence barbarians are innately unintelligible.
B.
Anyone unintelligible is also unintelligent; Barbarians are unintelligible; Hence barbarians are unintelligent.
These syllogisms, this pseudologic, may explain the ethnocentric tendency toward cultural superiority when confronted with cultures one fails to understand. It may be more a characteristic of the generic provincialism of language than an innate parochialism in people. Yet it cannot be assumed that "barbarian" was always used as a term of opprobrium: instead of designating the uncivilized "other" in contrast to the civilized "self," the word was sometimes used to designate the "uncivilized self" in contrast to a civilized ''other." Elizabethan England, for example, is fraught with references to its own culture as crude and barbaric—compared to the Latinate cultures on the Continent. Elizabethan writers consciously sought to enrich their own language by incorporating, through translation, the literary heritage of more civilized traditions. In the context of history, the transmission of important, even canonical, texts has crucially depended on "barbarians," whether so designated by civilized cultures or selfconfessed. Walter Ong, in his Barbarian Within (1962:275), reminds us that the barbarian is not culturespecific: "We must continually remind ourselves that every culture is probably in some way barbarian with regard to every other." It would also be a mistake to assume that all barbarians are the same. The distinctions that the Chinese made are indicative: differences may be found even among barbarians, and some barbarians are not
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"barbaric." Far from being antinomian opposites which mutually exclude each other, the concept of barbarian may be merely another form of—as yet to be recognized—civilization. To borrow George S. Kaufman's famous witticism from a different context, "One man's Mede may be another man's Persian." A clearheaded analysis of the contribution of "barbarian" influences on civilization must therefore address a complex of factors: first, it must consider "barbarian" as a means of selfdefinition which confers not only a sense of personal relief but also one of personal reaffirmation, enshrined in the colloquialism "There but for the grace of God, go I"; second, it must explore "barbarian" as the outsider, which preserves parts of the native culture that, for one reason or another, disappear at home; third, it must explore "barbarian'' as the uncultivated self within, whether as a node of animal instincts to be contained and controlled or as untutored energy to be smelted and refined in the crucibles of civilization. Let us examine where certain "civilizations" would be without the contributions of certain "barbarians." The increasing emphasis on systematic and rationalistic philosophy in Europe during the late Middle Ages, inspired by the rediscovery of Aristotle, and arguably the spur to what was to become the Renaissance, stems from Arabic thinkers: Ibn Sina (Avicenna, 980–1037) and Ibn Rushd (Averroës, 1126–1189) are only the two most prominent. Although scholastics later worked from manuscripts in the original Greek (Ferguson 1972:170), the influence of the Arabic intermediaries was profound. The effect of Aristotle, as transmitted and interpreted by Avicenna and Averroës, on two of the greatest thinkers of the thirteenth century—Albertus Magnus (1200–1280) and Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274)—was decisive, despite the strong antipathies which led the writings of Aristotle to be banned at the University of Paris in 1210 (Ferguson, p. 176). Maimonides (1135–1204), the Jewish theologian and philosopher, was another nonChristian "barbarian" (read: "heathen") who contributed to the resurgence of Aristotelian studies. He represents another instance of a native civilization owing its survival to another culture. As George Sarton reminds us, Maimonides wrote his classic Guide to the Perplexed in Arabic, which was, until the twelfth century, the language of scientific and philosophical discourse among the Jews. In fact, according to Sarton (1960:149),
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"the earliest Hebrew grammars were composed . . . in Arabic, not in Hebrew." The survival of Hebrew, in other words, depended crucially upon Arabic. Indeed, the contribution of Islam to Western civilization is not as widely appreciated as it should be. Bernard Lewis (1970:23) reminds us once again: The Muslim regimes of Spain and Sicily are important not only because of the European territories over which they ruled, but also because of the influence which they exerted on the rest of Europe, on the many English, French, Italian, German, and other Europeans who went to Moorish Spain and Sicily to study and to translate, and who, by bringing ancient and eastern scientific and philosophical works into the sphere of knowledge of the Western world, started a kind of renaissance in the 12th century.
The reason for this neglect, Lewis claims, is the almost exclusive reliance on Western sources; even when translations of a few Arabic works have been consulted, they are usually incomplete and inaccurate. The Role of Translation By far the most common, and least recognized, instances of the phylloxera syndrome involve translation. Indeed, it would be difficult to conceive of the continuous development of civilization without tracing its migration across linguistic barriers, thereby ensuring not only its spread but, in those instances which saw the disappearance of the text in its originating culture, its very survival. Indeed, one might suggest, without exaggeration, that translation is the prime contribution of barbarians to civilization. In all the literary histories or the global histories, little has been made of the fact that some of the world's literary and philosophical classics have been read more in translation than in the original. Arguably, world classics have been read by more "barbarian" (foreign) readers than by those in the native language. A proper understanding of history would have to take into account the nature of these translations, these "barbarian" distortions. There are readers of the Shiji that Sima Qian never dreamt of, even when he addressed
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posterity—perhaps for the first time in Chinese history—and invoked an audience that would read him after his death; but he could scarcely have imagined that he would be read in Japanese, a language that did not develop until six centuries after his life, or in English, which evolved more than a millennium after his death. Homer has been analyzed and interpreted by scholars in Latin, English, French, and German on terms of intimacy and familiarity that would have astonished his Hellenic contemporaries. Greek tragedies and Greek comedies are being read and appreciated by the very barbaroi that Sophocles and Aristophanes vilified and pilloried. Authors in the past could not have been aware that their fates would depend not only on how they were translated, but also on whether they were translated. Moderns bent on everlasting fame may have to consider not only how well they write, but also how well their works translate. Contemporary writers, from Gombrowicz to Lem to Milan Kundera to Nabokov to García Marquez to Simone de Beauvoir to Yukio Mishima and Yasunari Kawabata,2 have depended crucially on their translators for international recognition. The study of translation poses unique problems. Until the modern era, the audience for such studies was, essentially, nonexistent. Translators were merely target natives who translated works from a foreign language into their own. Few, however, were capable of (or if capable interested in) studying translations from a bipolar point of view, seeing them from both languages with as little bias as possible. As a result, translations were usually judged by their success or failure only in the target language. Sourcelanguage natives were not likely to object; indeed, they would be precluded by the language barrier from objecting. Often readers were not told that they were reading a translation, since translators were, all too frequently, considered drudges and wordmongers, scarcely deserving of equal billing with the author. These lacunae create their own 2.
Indeed, the failure of any Chinese writer to win a Nobel Prize for Literature has been blamed on the inadequate translation of Chinese works. At the 1986 International Symposium on Contemporary Chinese Literature in Shanghai, Goran Malmqvist, a distinguished Swedish scholar of Chinese literature and a member of the Nobel Prize Committee on Literature, intimated that the novelist Ba Jin might have stood a better chance for the prize if his novel Jia (Family) had not been translated so execrably.
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imperceptible distortions in onesided testimony, distortions that will be perceivable only to binocular scrutiny. The largely unwritten history of the Arabic contribution to Christian civilization has, for example, been hampered by the scarcity of scholars equally conversant in a Western language and in Arabic. In analyzing the nature of European studies of Arabic history, Bernard Lewis (1970:30–31) has written: The European Orientalist, mainly concerned with classical Islam, has generally been uninterested in the period of its decay and in its progressive subjection to European influence. The European historian who is interested in this process generally knows no Arabic, Persian, or Turkish, and remains totally unaware of the whole inner life of the area. The recent and contemporary history of the Islamic world has been left chiefly to the colonial and diplomatic historian, to the economist and to the current affairs expert. . . . The whole picture resulting from their endeavors, however, remains external.
That is why Edward Said's Orientalism is a particularly significant "binocular" book: it expresses a strong Arabic sensibility, but it is written in English. No doubt, passionately antiWestern tracts exist in Arabic, but few Englishspeakers are going to expend the effort to translate them: if they sympathize, they are likely to cherish the Arabic point of view in Arabic; and if they do not share the Arabic hostility toward the West, they are not likely to dignify what they would regard as virulent and distasteful points of view by translating them into Western languages.3 It is not enough to recognize that a language, as such, determines one's point of view; one must realize that the view is also occluded. There has not been enough analysis of the types of translation. By far the most common types include translations out of a foreign 3.
The disagreement between the coauthors of The Japan That Can Say "No"—Akio Morita and Shintaro Ishihara—with regard to translating the book in English brings this point out. Ishihara wanted the book translated into English, Morita did not. An ambitious politician in Japan, Ishihara does not care how many Americans are offended; indeed, he sought to attract more Japanese support by offending Americans; Akio Morita, on the other hand, had reason to be wary of offending the American customers of his Sony products. (Toshiba suffered a backlash in its American market some years ago when it was revealed that it had sold submarine technology to the Soviets.)
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language into a native language, which I characterize as "endotropic"; but there are also translations which translate out of the native language into foreign languages, a class that I call "exotropic." The incidence of endotropic to exotropic translations might serve as a key to the development of civilizations. In their formative stages, cultures may absorb, borrow, assimilate the writings and teachings of cultures regarded as superior; hence they may engage in endotropic translation, availing native readers of the intellectual treasures from another language. (Japan in the Meiji and early modern periods was notably endotropic.) In time, however, certain cultures that have become preoccupied with their own importance will either sanction or promote exotropic translation, that is, disseminating their own native riches to the rest of the world. One might even conceive of a ''balance of translations" index to examine a culture's tendency toward the endotropic or the exotropic. These tendencies might reveal, beyond static comparisons of global influence, or growth or decline in gross national product, something perhaps more important, if intangible: various degrees of incipient cultural dependence or selfsufficiency (McNeill 1963:502f). Even the most informal survey of cultures and civilizations with regard to the translation factor might reveal something about the rise and fall of empires. And if the future will no longer brook the language barriers of the past—reduced if not eliminated by increased multilingualism, widespread translation activity (aided by computer technology), and the use of international languages (computer programming, mathematics)—the tally sheet in endotropic and exotropic translations for each given country might reveal hidden weaknesses in superficially dominant profiles and uncover hidden strengths in developing hegemonies. Translations, of course, not only transmit; they transform. Sometimes this transformation takes the form of distortion; at other times, the transformation becomes an amalgamation, a blend, that introduces cultural alloys from other traditions. Custodianships of culture are active, not passive. The revival of Greek learning which spurred the Renaissance had an admixture of Indian mathematics and Arabic science. The Middle Ages included what, in the West, were known as the Dark Ages; but the same period saw the efflorescence of Chinese culture in the Tang dynasty, as well as the emergence of Islam. "For a brief but splendid period," Bernard
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Lewis (1970:21–22) has written, "the Islamic world was the center of scientific and philosophic progress, and its scholars—men of many races and religions—played a vital role as intermediaries, preserving and transmitting to Christian Europe something of the heritage of Greek antiquity, enriched and augmented by their own efforts and also by their borrowings and adaptations from further East." In a sense, the Greek heritage which had petered out under the onslaught of Christianity and successive barbarian invasions was simmering in the commentaries and exegeses of Arabic scholars and philosophers, to emerge half a millennium later, through the auspices of Avicenna and Averroës, as a "rediscovery" of Aristotle. The image of authentic Greek culture preserved intact and unadulterated over the centuries is, of course, misleading, even if it is the popular conception of the mainsprings of the Renaissance. Could it be that the intellectual energy, the speculative brilliance, the mathematical profundity of Renaissance thinkers stemmed as much from the Arabic and Indian admixtures as from Aristotle himself? Lacking access to the nonWestern sources, Western historians are compelled to provide a necessarily provincial account. Of the Arabic transmogrifications of Aristotle, they can know nothing. Lewis has observed (1970:16): "The historian . . . has not hesitated to deal with medieval Spain without Arabic, the Eastern question without Turkish, and the expansion of Europe without any reference to the languages and literatures of the peoples among whom Europe expanded." As a result, the recognition in the West of the "barbarian," or nonWestern contribution, to Western civilization has been undermined by the very inaccessibility of the evidence, by the very opaqueness to the Western scholar of the languages in which this evidence might be sought. The insistence on the ''purity" of Greek thought may be seen in the convolutions inherent in the following attempt to portray Averroës' interpretation of Aristotle as the recovery of the true face of Aristotle: Averroës' importance for the history of ideas lay in his stimulating effect upon Latin Christian theologians, who knew him as a fascinating and heretical, but far from negligible, thinker. Aristotle, of course, had always been known to Moslem philosophers; but his doctrine had, from late Roman antiquity, been curiously disguised by a NeoPlatonic garb.
Page 56 Averroës' great intellectual achievement was to abstract Aristotle from this alien dress, thus permitting the theologians of Paris to start their revolution of Christian philosophy from a more or less authentic Aristotelian basis. [McNeill, p. 502]
The almost imperceptible shifts in cultural reference give this account a seamless authority which passes off a hidden premise—that Aristotle can be uncovered, if that's the word, in his true form. At the same time, this account deftly obscures a glaring inference—that Averroës Arabic training might have been crucial. The strange designation of Muslim chronology with Christian terms ("late Roman antiquity"); the bizarre imputation of error to the Muslims for clothing Aristotle in "neoPlatonic garb"; and, finally, the improbable if not preposterous characterization of this "neoPlatonic garb" as "alien'' ("alien" for whom?)—all these manifest the convolutions that a Western historian must undergo to avoid acknowledging the contribution of the barbarian Arab. Averroës is credited with transmitting Aristotle more or less intact, a vessel that did not adulterate the old wine: he is viewed as a preservationist more than as a thinker in his own right. In history, as in life, one must "make do." Translations—variously accurate and outrageous, faithful and outlandish—are history's way of "making do." One needn't abnegate the responsibility of judging the accuracy of translations to recognize that translations are what saved the original from oblivion. Purists who denigrate translations in favor of the originals overlook the fact that, without translations, significant interest in the original would hardly have survived the ravages of time and obscurity. How many classicists would there be today if Greek literature had not been translated first into Latin and later into scores of nonclassical vernaculars? T. S. Eliot, refuting the notion that we know so much more than the ancients, replied: precisely, they are what we know. In reply to claims that the original is so much richer than the translation, we may likewise say: yes, and it is through translation that we discover the superiority of the original; it is by virtue of translation that our attention was first drawn to the original; and it is thanks to translation, in many instances, that we still have the original to study. Translations are imperfect expedients to the search for perfection
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in the original. Seen in critical perspective—not from the viewpoint of the unwitting reader, but from the standpoint of a practitioner—translations serve a double function: they show both how replaceable as well as how irreplaceable the original is; translations substitute for the original, but to those familiar with the original, translations betray themselves unmistakably as departures from the original. They are the "backups" in literature that will stand in when the original is lost or forgotten. Like understudies, their importance is borrowed from the luster of the star attraction. But one day stars fade, and we are left with such canonical understudies as Jerome's Vulgate, the King James Version of the Bible, and the Buddhist canon in Chinese and Tibetan. What we of course neglect is the fact that even the "originals" behind these now sanctified translations were, in their time, translations of earlier material, compilations of earlier wisdom often preserved in the mercurial, organic, and infrangible medium of the oral tradition. As Parry and Lord have shown, Homer was not an "author'' in the modern sense: he was an oral redactor in a storytelling tradition, of which he was not the sole exponent. Scholars have dated the Book of Genesis to the ninth century B.C. and the New Testament to the first century A.D. What we regard as the "original" Bible was a compilation made sometime after the death of Christ, one which included materials that were, at its time of compilation, a thousand years old. Biblical scholarship has traced portions of the Old Testament to Akkadian, Syriac, and Ugaritic sources. The New Testament, if we leave aside the interesting question of divine authorship, is a compilation of accounts from various authors. The Four Gospels tell the same story in different ways, much as ancient Greek storytellers told the story of Troy each in a different way. The authority of the New Testament account of the life of Jesus, we must remember, lies in its very lack of originality. We would believe the veracity of the accounts less if Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John were to claim that what they said was unique and original with them, that they each had "made it up." There can be no doubt that both Matthew and Luke used Mark's account, the only point of possible dispute being which "edition" he used. Modern scholarship has shown that "eleventwelfths of Mark have been incorporated in Matthew" (Kilpatrick 1946:11)—hardly an argument for the "originality" of the original
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text. One forgets that Jesus spoke in Aramaic, which had to be translated into Koine Greek for the New Testament. If we think of an "original" as an integral work composed in a moment of history, attributable to the imagination of a single author, and citable in a unique text,4 then there is no such thing as the original Bible. Indeed, ancient traditions would have disdained "originality" as a value. The thrust of true worth was not to pretend that old things were new, but rather that new things were old. The ancients were not obsessed with newness: they believed that there was ''nothing new under the sun": original thoughts, new insights, had no authority unless they were attributed to a recognized sage. Truths were not regarded as insights until they became—or were made to appear—proverbial. As a result, Solomon received far more credit than he probably deserved, and there can be no doubt that he was responsible for very few of the Proverbs attributed to him. But we would be wrong to think that the ancients believed that the historical Solomon had thought up all those sayings, no more than we moderns, in our decadent form of wisdom, believe that Confucius said all those ersatz witticisms that begin with the formula: "Confucius say . . ." Translation across Civilizations The very formulation of the topic, "translation across civilizations," embodies a modern perspective and represents a panoptic attitude. Translation is no longer viewed as the verbal commerce between a civilization and its surrounding barbarians. We are no longer restricted to the provincialities of the past, which would expect "civilizations" to produce exotropic translations, conveying a centrifugal spread of cultures, as with the translation of Greek into Hebrew, Syriac, and Latin; due account must be made of civilizations that produce endotropic translations, conveying a centripetal 4.
For example, the "original" New Testament, the composition of which spans only a hundred years (as opposed to the Old Testament which spans a thousand), may be found in over 4,000 Greek manuscripts. As Vincent Taylor (1963:2) has pointed out: "There are some 13,000 MSS of parts of the New Testament available, and, what is more significant, no two of them agree in every detail. This fact alone suggests that, while the Scriptures are inspired, they are not verbally inspired: otherwise it is difficult to think that so great a disparity would exist."
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consolidation of external influences, as with the massive translation of the Buddhist canon from the Pali into Chinese in the seventh century A.D., when Chinese culture was at its height. Might there be a relationship between the rise and fall of a culture and its exotropic and endotropic phases? Exotropic civilizations may be shortlived at the height of their cultural imperialism but incipiently in decline; endotropic civilizations may be still in their gestation phase and may enjoy an extended life. A clear case in point would be the Roman Empire, which, in its early stages, was an endotropic culture that regarded itself as barbarian compared with Greece, which it regarded as the source of civilization to the virtual exclusion of other cultures. By the Middle Ages, with the widespread eminence of Latin as the language of the literate, whatever the vernacular language may have been, Rome became exotropic, radiating out like a "fount of wisdom" but effectively closed to outside influences— despite barbarian incursions. The Byzantine Empire saw itself as the continuation of Greek culture and was essentially exotropic in nature. Runciman (1933:232–233) points out that, aside from Latin, "few other languages were studied. . . . Byzantium inherited the arrogance of ancient Greece about the barbarian world."5 Despite its central location at the crossroads, Byzantium resisted foreign influences. It was, in the words of one commentator (Baynes 1925:242), ''extraordinarily catholic in its welcome to the stranger: if he would accept the Empire's religious belief, Persian or Armenian, Slav or Bulgar, Russian or Briton, each could find a place in her service. The Empire drew its talent from many sources. But these foreigners and adventurers came as individuals, and they were merged in a system." The emergence of Islam, with its strong insistence on Arabic as the language of the Koran, as well as its chauvinistic allegiance to Arabic, encouraged the translation into Arabic of Greek and Hebrew science and philosophy. During this period, Arabic absorbed from other cultures more than it influenced other cultures. The reverse situation, translating Arabic thought into Greek, 5.
Jenkins (1953:9) puts the matter more emphatically: "At a time when in the west the germs of national selfconsciousness were sprouting from the welter which followed the collapse of the western Roman empire, the Byzantine neither understood nor cared to understand any religion, language or culture but its own."
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or Arabic science into Hebrew, is scarcely encountered. Our knowledge of the Ottoman phase of Islamic civilization is, at present, too meager to arrive at any useful conclusions on its exotropic or endotropic nature.6 Elizabethan England was perhaps the most endotropic of the European countries of its time. Translations from the Italian and the French, among contemporary cultures, and from the Latin and Greek among older traditions, abounded. Patriotism took the form not of cultural arrogance but of cultural humility (which will find its parallel with Japan of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries). "The translator's work was an act of patriotism," F. O. Mattheissen has written (1931:3), "The nation had grown conscious of its cultural inferiority to the Continent, and suddenly burned with the desire to excel its rivals in letters." By the eighteenth century, the major translations were, for the most part, retranslations, almost always of the classical canon. "The glory of the Elizabethan and Jacobean translations had passed away," Hugh MacDonald and Vivian de Sola Pinto have observed (1966:577): "In their place were many rather commonplace renderings of classical and French authors." The decline in endotropic translation would continue in England until the Victorian period when, with the significant exception of FitzGerald's rendering of some of Omar Khayyam's quatrains in the Rubaiyat, the emphasis shifts to the spread of English culture—exotropically in the translations of the English classics into scores of other languages—throughout an empire that was by then worldwide.7 Japan's history visàvis translation is perhaps unique. At the dawn of Japanese civilization, roughly the sixth century A.D., the literary language was Chinese. Not until the late Heian period, with the compilation of the imperial anthology known as the Manyoshu (Book of a Thousand Leaves) in the eighth century and the 6.
Lewis (1970:29) writes: "A great mass of records is preserved in the Istanbul Archives and is still untouched."
7.
One might cite the translations that appeared under F. Max Müller's series The Sacred Books of the East as a counterexample, but these translations hardly reflect the same spirit of earnest interest that characterized the Elizabethans; furthermore, these translations were offered for the specialist, purely for "historical purposes." They made nowhere near the impact on the reading public as North's Plutarch and Florio's Montaigne.
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masterpiece of fiction Genji monogatari (The Tale of Genji) by Lady Murasaki Shikibu around the year 1000, did the Japanese adopt their own indigenous tongue. Japan alternated between periods of intense receptivity to the outside and periods when it closed itself from the outside world. Japan was open to the Chinese during the Tang dynasty (618–906); it was open again to the Chinese during the Ming (1368–1644); and it opened up to the West following the Meiji Restoration in 1868. Through most of the Fujiwara and Kamakura periods (866–1333) and the Tokugawa period (1600–1867), Japan was virtually cut off from the rest of the world. Early in its history, when its most important contact was with China, Japan developed a special language to demarcate importations from the Chinese. They called this sublanguage kambun ("the writing of the Han [Chinese]"). A kambun text, Masao Miyoshi (1974:8) tells us, "looks like Chinese but is not pronounced like it. A kambun text, as read by a Japanese, sounds Japanese and is Japanese, although it could also be read by a Chinese and pronounced in Chinese." In the Meiji period, the vogue for things Western, and for English in particular, became so strong that a prominent minister of government in Japan even proposed the total abolition of Japanese and the substitution of English (Miyoshi, p. 5). While that radical proposal was never implemented, the Japanese did create a "translation style" specifically for the rendering of Western literature (Miyoshi, p. xiv). A more conscious thrust toward the endotropic could hardly be found. Theoretical Ramifications Our excursion into the contribution of barbarians to civilization is no mere verbal legerdemain. The recognition of the dialectic relationship between the world of the barbarian and the world of civilization is not intended to deny the many instances where the two have come into conflict. Nor is it to erase the meaningful distinctions between barbarian and civilized culture. We have used these concepts to mark the shifting points of reference, to indicate that further discriminations are necessary. It is no more a tautology to say "civilized civilizations" than it is contradictory to say "civilized barbarians." We recall the first sense of barbarikos and barbaroi, which for the Greeks designated that which was unintelligible. The
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vagaries of history, however, ultimately made Greek unintelligible to the heirs of Greek civilization: "No one in Rome even in Gregory the Great's day [540–604] spoke Greek" (Runciman, p. 232); "Greek language and literature had virtually disappeared from the Germandominated West of the socalled Dark Ages" (Geanakoplos 1966:11); by the twelfth century, for a medieval scribe, "a Greek word becomes gibberish or is omitted with grecum inserted in its place—it was 'all Greek' to him" (Haskins 1966:280). For the Middle Ages, Greek had become unintelligible and hence, paradoxically, "barbarian." "It has been said," Bernard Lewis writes (1973:22), "that the history of the Arabs has been written in the West chiefly by historians who know no Arabic and by Arabists who know no history." The history written in the future must embody both perspectives, the perspective of the barbarian as well as that of the Greek. We need to combine what the anthropological linguists call "etic" knowledge, the knowledge known from the inside, and "etic" knowledge, the knowledge known from the outside. We must learn to recognize not only the barbarian within but also the Greek without.
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4— "Artifices of Eternity": Audiences for Translations of Chinese Literature In the preface to his translation of the Iliad, Alexander Pope wrote: "Homer makes us Hearers, and Virgil leaves us Readers." That discrimination may not be so important to modern readers, among whom both Homer and Virgil find their (not dissimilar) audiences. For with the dislocations in the family, and the virtual disappearance of private group readings, audiences become readers rather than hearers. The distinction between the silent and solitary appropriation of a text and the oral presentation of a work is, for us, obscured: we use the same word, "reading," to indicate both. In academic circles, one speaks of "reading a paper," which means an oral presentation of a text (or script) written for the occasion. Perhaps the reason why so many papers at academic gatherings are delivered as if they were stillborn stems from a misunderstanding between speaker and audience: the audience expects something alive and growing, but the speaker offers a prepared text that might just as well have been distributed and filed. Too often, we are reciting texts, merely reading aloud. Is it any wonder that audiences sometimes feel superfluous? It appears to make no difference whether the audience attends or not: neither its attendance nor its attention seems to matter. The confusion of hearer and reader is manifest in language, for there is an almost unrestricted twoway traffic between words that designate audiences present and listening and words that designate audiences absent and reading. "Discourse" once meant conversational exchange: it now tends to mean serious exposition of thought developed on paper and customarily published; "dialogue" has
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assumed the elevated overtones of a philosophical treatise: the "Dialogues of Plato" are regarded as canonical statements of textual authority, the remarks of Kongzi (Confucius) become "The Analects," and the sayings of Jesus emerge as the Gospel. Yesterday's chats become today's Scripture. On the other side of the exchange, the word "lecture" has migrated from the realm of silent reading (lecture, lecteur in French) into the public displays of erudition with which one is, perhaps, all too familiar. The word "verbal" is commonly misused to specify "oral,'' even though it subsumes both oral and written forms of language. The magic motto in bookselling circles is the phrase "a good read"—suggesting that the purchaser of the book will have a pleasurable reading experience. Our terms in literary criticism are rich when describing author or work, but rather impoverished when referring to audience. Yet, as any experienced public speaker will attest, there are tangible differences between audiences. The less definable, less researchable, character of audiences has permitted literary historians—with few exceptions—to neglect not only their existence but also their contributive (if implicit) role in the productions of authors and writers. If this confusion of audience as "present attending listeners" with audience as "scattered and remote aggregates of solitary readers" affects our perceptions of literary experience within the same culture, how much more complex will these confusions be in the case of translations, where different audiences of both kinds may exist? It is these complexities that I wish to examine. The omnivorous and indiscriminate capacity of the printed book to record and to preserve the traditions of the past—to, in effect, "contemporize" all experience— makes us reluctant to accept Gadamer's notion of "radical historicism," that is, to acknowledge that the past is forever alien to the present. The audience for Homer is comprised of both the ancient Greeks who congregated around him and all those who have read him in any language since. Yet there is an "incomparability" that Homer shares with all authors bound by time and ethos. If the printed book misleads one to overlook this incomparability, then translation, with its tendency to recreate and to revive, eliminates it altogether. The reader of a translation is engaged, from the vantage point of history, in a process not so much unnatural as unexpected. The time has not yet come when an author writes with an eye to
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translatability, but his access to posterity may lie in a foreign— perhaps as yet unrealized—language: the hold and the provinciality of the present are persistent. Yet we are all heirs of the unexpected, even unlooked for, transmissions from the past: indeed, certain literatures would not have evolved without them. Chaucer, for example, is not only the first major author in English literature, but one of its first significant translators. Shakespeare was not, in any technical sense of the word, a translator: but in conveying foreign cultures to English audiences, in transposing remote experiences into contemporary meanings, his task was not unlike that of the translator. A survey of his sources (which, not so incidentally, are appropriated from translations, whether North's Plutarch, Golding's Ovid, or Chaucer's Boccaccio) indicates that one of Shakespeare's objectives was to bring to Elizabethan audiences the strange and the unfamiliar. The locale of his plays is a virtual tourist guide of foreign climes: Verona, Elsinore, Venice, Sicily, Bohemia, Vienna, Denmark, and, of course, "an uninhabited island. " Curiosity in the exotic is the mainspring not only of tourism and translation, but of the theater as well. One contemporary commented on the Elizabethan audience: With these and many more amusements the English pass their time, learning at the play what is happening abroad; indeed, men and womenfolk visit such places without scruple, since the English for the most part do not travel much, but prefer to learn foreign matters and take their pleasures at home.1
Perhaps the most salient advantage that Shakespeare had as a craftsman was that he was also an actor and had, therefore, concrete knowledge of the audience response.2 And it was with this audience, whether at the Rose, the Theatre, the Curtain, or the Globe, that he earned his successes; subsequent audiences of readers had, presumably, no effect on his creativity or his productivity. Whatever Shakespeare's later fame, he wrote for his time and, unlike Stendhal, pleased posterity only by happenstance. 1.
Thomas Platter's Travels in England (1599), quoted in Alfred Harbage (1941: 77).
2.
Among contemporary playwrights, one finds a fair proportion of actors or exactors, including Noel Coward, Peter Ustinov, Harold Pinter, Robert Shaw, Jason Miller, Sam Shepard.
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The modern translator finds himself in a situation analogous to that of an actor, for he must satisfy the scholars who check the accuracy of his rendering, and he must please the readers who will verify the effectiveness of his versions. Like the actor, the translator must see the potential of a work and know how to realize it. Critics and scholars will act as surrogate authors in the absence of an author and remind the actortranslator of potentials unrealized or meanings controverted. The importance of the criticscholar cannot be too strongly emphasized, but some are mindful only of their power, and not of their responsibilities. Critics of translation, in particular, are often betrayed by their ulterior motives: personal attacks, acts of private vengeance committed publicly, petty jealousies. Some critics seem to rejoice at repeated proofs of untranslatability—not only because they expose the inadequacies of the translator, but because they protect the cultural domain which the critic regards as his personal preserve. Pusillanimity is not unknown in academic circles, and language snobbery is endemic, but the author who finds himself in the dubious embrace of the possessive scholar ultimately suffers the ultimate neglect that Dr. Johnson judged to be the worst fate for a writer. We owe our most cherished authors an audience. Those who take as sacred their roles as high priests at the altar of literature often forget to attract a congregation. The religious metaphor is not mere analogy, for the history of religions is inextricably bound with the history of translation. The analogy may be apposite; it is surely instructive, for in both religion and translation the same pitfalls bedevil the crusading spirit: too often, "the worst are full of passionate intensity." Yet if the one extreme is characterized by mindless and benighted enthusiasms, it is not true that the absence of passion will always identify the "best." The most successful proselytizers, from St. Paul to Matteo Ricci, were full of "passionate intensity"; and Xuanzang, proselytizer and translator, was known to be an advocate with a contagious commitment to his cause. The two most enduring achievements of institutional religion may be Roman Catholicism and Chinese Buddhism, and the reasons for their longevity are the same. One is Christianity romanized, the other Buddhism sinicized: in each case, the accommodation to the locus was crucial. If the Word is to be transmitted, it must be fully transplanted in, and nourished by, the local culture.
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The uncertain fate of authors through the centuries may lie in the vagaries of translation. Pindar and Sappho have not fared well in translation, though the Greek tragedians thrive; the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe received new respectability in French. These instances suggest that we may be speaking not only of "translatability" but of something else: the power of a work to impel another sensibility to new thoughts in another language. The contextual nature of words in language persuades us that the most accurate translation of what is conventional in one tradition constitutes a new thought, with new constellations of meaning and significances, in another. For the semiologist of literature, the work most easily translated may be the least worthy of translation. In our failure lies our success, since the unavailability of words in one language to express what is sayable in another compels us to extend and enrich the language that has proved inadequate. Among some critics of translation, there is a suspicion that translation is somehow unnatural and irrelevant. Why speak of Chinese poetry in English? Why study American literature in Hungarian? Does it not bespeak some superficiality, not to say incompetence, to have to rely on a foreign language to explain the native literature? Would native speakers not have—almost intuitively—a far better comprehension of their own literature? How could a nonnative possibly compete with a native in familiarity with his own culture? The answers to these questions must not be simplistic. For while the native's familiarity with his own culture cannot be discounted, it is a conditioned familiarity, and he may not be aware of what he knows. If the native may be compared to a youngster riding a bicycle, the nonnative translator is the student of the laws of motion who understands all about moments of force but cannot negotiate a twowheeler. If there is any validity to the primacy of "natural" knowledge, intuitive rather than analytical, then translations would be, indeed, suspect. Teach all the world Chinese (as Etiemble has advocated), and who would need a translation? Yet I wonder if the establishment of a universal language might not prove a hindrance rather than a help. Babel has long been the symbol of perpetual misunderstanding and miscommunication, but may it not also be a reminder of the ultimate ineluctability of meaning, a symbol of the primacy of thought over language? In their unnatural aspect, translations
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remind me of Yeats' "artifices of eternity"; posterity has heeded the Muse, and will continue to heed her, more often in translation than in her native voice. The translator is a changeling, mediating between the world of the native and the world of the "barbarian." In the case of Chinese, for example, there have been changes even among these changelings. The forerunners of the present generation—Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound—were both "sinicized Westerners," translators who resolutely maintained their distinctly English or American profile even while they acquired (or tried to acquire) a Chinese sensibility. Since the Second World War, translators like James J. Y. Liu, D. C. Lau, Wuchi Liu, and Irving Lo constitute the opposite category: westernized Chinese. Their centers of gravity lie in Chinese traditions, though long exposure to the West has enabled them to negotiate the local linguistic currencies. This shift in perspective and background is telling, particularly with reference to audiences. Waley and Pound addressed audiences almost exclusively Western: they made their mark with Englishspeaking readers who seldom knew Chinese. No Chinese not westernized would even have had access to their work. But the translators of the later generation must respond to three audiences: first, the nonChinese Englishspeaking readers who do not know Chinese; second, the nonChinese Englishspeaking readers who know (or who are learning) Chinese; third, the Englishspeaking native Chinese readers. This situation means that fewer translations will go unchallenged, whether from the left, right, or middle. But if burdens on the translator have been compounded, still the opportunities that now present themselves should not be overlooked. For the audience that the translator addresses today comprises significant numbers of readers who command the native Chinese tradition as well as those who are "natively" familiar with English: indeed, in some cases, these qualifications may coincide in the same individual, whether sinicized Westerner or westernized Chinese. ("We have met the audience, and they are us.") Welcome as this infusion of multiple talents and different perspectives may be, a problem now arises that was formerly perhaps not so pronounced: for in the audience one finds not merely "receivers" of the Word, but also rival "transmitters." If we are to maintain our integrity as receivers and as transmitters, the roles must be kept separate, and our evaluations of the efforts of rival transmitters will
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severely test our objectivity. We will become better translators the more we learn to be better audiences for translation. Before the authors who are our masters, and the masterworks that are our inspiration, it would be a pity if all the audience saw were the petty squabbles of translators. Here the ethics of tourism and those of translation are the same. For in courting an audience, or a clientele, one should not be so influenced by the prospect of gain that one willingly and knowingly distorts the image of the attraction. In translation as in tourism, one finds the phenomenon of factitious exotica, where differences are exaggerated so that they provide better spectacles. The translators of Chinese into arty pidginEnglish or into pseudoconcrete poems are hawkers of international kitsch. There is a failure of nerve (as well as an excess): the merchants of cultural souvenirs seem to imply that the authentic fare may be too bland or too forbidding for unsuspecting foreigners. The urge to exploit the curious betrays a contempt for the familiar, and the contempt runs both ways—toward the interested as well as the objects of interest—and makes curiosities of them both. The good translator must be considerate of both audience and author. Is this conscientious schizophrenia possible? Or are compromises inevitable? Does the greater distribution of knowledgeable readers of Chinese poetry in English translation have liberating as well as inhibiting effects? Let us survey the publishing situation. Since 1945, courses have emerged in college and university curricula in which Chinese literature is taught in translation. Part of this trend is manifest in the popularity of paperback editions since the early fifties. The Jade Mountain, published by Witter Bynner in collaboration with Kiang Kang hu in 1929, went through eight editions in hardcover form by 1960;3 another three editions of a paperback reprint appeared subsequently. The White Pony, which the tireless Robert Payne compiled with many collaborators, was published in 1947 by John Day 3.
This need not indicate great quantities sold. Hardcover print orders in the 1930s were relatively small. Print runs were probably in the 1,000 to 3,000 range. Small but steady sales of a title could be sustained by general publishers then, but not now, although exceptional small presses, like New Directions, can tolerate small print runs and more modest sales. At a maximum estimate of 3,000 copies per printing, I estimate that Jade Mountain sold under 30,000 copies in thirty years, or an average of less than a thousand copies per year.
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Company and appeared in at least two hardcover editions; it appeared in 1960 in a massmarket paperback edition and saw at least three printings. The Grove Press paperback edition of Cyril Birch's first volume of the Anthology of Chinese Literature first appeared in 1967; within the first eight years of publication it saw at least three editions, eleven printings.5 Arthur Waley's selective translation of the Hsiyu chi (Xiyouji), titled Monkey, has had at least eleven printings within fifteen years after the paperback edition first appeared, under the Grove imprint, in 1958.6 James J. Y. Liu's Phoenix paperback edition of the Art of Chinese Poetry had at least five printings in the tenyear period following publication. This recital of publishing history is merely to remind us of the significant increase in interest that translations from the Chinese enjoyed during the postwar period, particularly in the 1960s. Clearly the audience had extended beyond coteries of poetry lovers or literati, and the steady sale of titles at significant levels suggests a recurrent market. "Adoptions"—assigned texts in college courses—undoubtedly account for the bulk of this annual volume. The nature of this new audience must be clearly distinguished from the general readers and bibliophiles who had purchased The Jade Mountain (in hardcover) at the rate of a thousand a year over thirty years. Translations are now bought by students at the instigation of instructors and used in the classroom. That some of these teachers are also practicing and publishing translators creates a circumstance more unprecedented (certainly at this level of popularity) than we might imagine. The translators of the past—with rare exceptions (one thinks of Herbert Giles)—did not perform this triple role of translator, marketer of books, and explicator of texts. Waley was not a professional academic, though he had students who were; Pound may have had disciples, but no undergraduates enrolled under him who used his translations. This new combination of roles presents clear dangers, but these 4.
Mentor Books issued the paperback editions, in print runs of 50,000 copies or more.
5.
This would indicate from 55,000 to 110,000 copies in print, depending on the size of Grove Press's print runs (5,000 to 10,000).
6.
Sales on this title must have picked up after 1963. Grove Press was considering not renewing their fiveyear reprint agreement with John Day as late as 1962; however, five editions have appeared since.
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must be controlled by the quality of the competition available for translations, by the limits of student responsiveness, and by the professional probity of the translator teacher. There is an inherent conflict of interest one must guard against, lest students be reduced to mere consumers for a translatorinstructor's productions. What are the opportunities in this arrangement? First, as an onthespot guide for his audience, the translator can modify and revise according to audience requirements and the dictates of scholarship. Second, the translator has the opportunity to test out his translations on different audiences, each with its own predilections and prejudices. Third, as a professional teacher, the translator can avail himself of various versions, each perhaps suited to a different level of competence in the original. Is it reprehensible to use Witter Bynner's version of the Dao De Jing, when it pretends to no scholarly familiarity with the original text? Can one with good conscience recommend (even with qualifications) Gary Snyder's free renditions of Hanshan when other, more faithful versions exist from fullfledged scholars such as Arthur Waley and Burton Watson?7 The mischief that might result from the indiscriminate use of translations can be minimized by a conscientious evaluation of the strengths and weaknesses of each version.8 There is no hiding behind elitist defenses against "uncouth audiences," for translatorteachers comprise part of that audience and have an enormous influence over the rest. There is a double challenge: not only "Are audiences getting the translations they deserve?" but also "Are translations getting the audiences they deserve?" Does the malleability of the audience, the opportunity to shape one's readers, present any special advantages to the instructor when he trans 7.
Arthur Waley, "27 Poems by Hanshan," Encounter 12 (Sept. 1954): 3–10; Burton Watson, Cold Mountain: 100 Poems by the T'ang Poet Hanshan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1970). Wu Chiyu has also provided helpful versions—with no aspirations to literature—in T'oung Pao 43 (1957): 393–450; in recent years, Hanshan has become available in two other collections: Hanshan: The White Crane Has No Mourners, trans. Jim Hardesty and Art Tobias (San Francisco: The Stone, 1978), which is a selection for the general reader; and The Poetry of Hanshan, translated by Robert Henricks (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), a more scholarly rendering intended for the student. 8.
High schools in the United States now include translations of Oriental works (most notably haiku) in their English and "Language Arts" courses and are also in need of guidance in selecting from the bewildering array of translations available.
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lates? I believe it does. First, by allowing him to acknowledge the inadequacy of any translation (including his own), he can offer a glimpse of the riches that await the diligent student willing to undertake a rigorous program in learning Chinese. If points in the translation need clarification, he can supply it as the occasion arises. The devoted translator will not feel the impossible burden to render everything, even were that possible, for one of his objectives will have been to point the way to the original. Where earlier translations replaced the original, present translations may provide incentives for exploring the original. If we accept Poggioli's dictum that "artistic translation presupposes . . . both the ideal presence of the original, and its physical absence" (Brower 1959:145), the teacher who uses translations has the obligation to point out the unparalleled advantages in having the original actively present. The philosophy of language education has emphasized for too long only the usefulness of knowing a foreign language: fluctuating enrollments in foreign language courses reflect the poverty of this rationale in motivating students; interest varies with changes in the international market. The student must also be persuaded of the values of foreign cultures expressed and preserved in language, and in no way completely transferable to another culture. "Die Grenzen meiner Sprache," Wittgenstein (1961) wrote, "bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt" (p. 49). A translation can only bring the reader to the threshold of a new experience, but one must acquire the original language if one is to avail oneself fully of that experience. The presence in the audience of professional translators and scholars for translation is, I think, a healthy corrective to the smugness and selfsatisfaction that would otherwise be rampant. A survey of translations of Chinese into English during the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth gives a clear picture of the unpoliced purveyor of culture. Chinese who could command English (few, to be sure) would have been too civil to remonstrate with Western sinophiles whose love of things Chinese was well intentioned if occasionally awry. In our day, we may have perhaps gone too far to the other extreme in our eagerness to remonstrate, sometimes publicly. This modern forthrightness may fray some sensibilities, but no deformations of Chinese works will emerge unchallenged. And the presence of informed and learned colleagues can be a positive incentive to stricter and more rigorous standards
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and may lead inductively to better translations: we will not easily accept the shabby and the halfbaked when we know that our betters will subject our efforts to the closest scrutiny. There is another way in which the presence of knowledgeable readers of translation in the audience is a positive boon. One can attempt experiments with the full assurance that miscalculations will be detected and rejected forthwith: a tentative approach need not harden into orthodoxy for lack of expert analysis. Let me offer two instances where I have translated with a certain license. Both are very familiar to the student of Chinese literature, and both present certain problems of context and form that must be resolved. My solution in each case is to take certain liberties with the text, but also to clearly indicate the extent of my culpability. The first example is the famous poem written by Cao Zhi at the command of his brother, the Wei Emperor Cao Pi, the socalled "Sevenpace Poem" . The poem revolves around the clever conceit of bean and stalk stemming from the same plant paralleling the situation in which these brothers now found themselves. Cao Zhi was challenged by his brother, on forfeit of his life, to compose a poem within the time it took him to walk seven paces. Clearly, the skill (to say nothing of the desperation) in the poem had to come out in translation; moreover, if the conceit is to be conveyed, the Englishreader had to be primed for the personification, since the poem concludes with a recrimination from the bean to the stalk. I decided that rhyme was essential, if the tourdeforce quality of the verse was to emerge: composing in rhyme is the most obvious way to demonstrate skill in versification. I also decided to omit the article before "bean" and "stalk" and emphasize the personification by using capitals—a technique not, of course, available in Chinese. This is the result:
Boil Bean to make a soup. Add pulseplants to the potpourri. Under the pot, Stalk feeds the fire; Inside the pot, Bean weeps with worry. "Once we grew from the selfsame root, I'm cooked now—what's your hurry?"
The poignance of the poem lies precisely in the rhymes, which I have tried to preserve: to convey the conceit through prose para
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phrase without some manifestation of the difficulty of the exercise ex tempore would make the poem a limp whining on the part of a brother condemned to death. Still, problems remain unsolved: ''potpourri" is not, after all, a perfect rhyme for "hurry" and "worry," but its special culinary associations made me prefer it to "paste," "broth," "juice," or "sap"; the last line—xiang jian he tai ji? without actually translating it. But when I was reminded that I had left it out, I tried once again. "I'm cooked" is literal enough, and has the virtue of being recognizable, even vivid English, but the fact that it is slang detracts from the tone of the original, which is, if anything, more literary. Still, despite these misgivings, I kept the version, and here append the appropriate apologia to interested scholars and students detailing its inadequacies. "Better a live sparrow than a stuffed eagle," Edward FitzGerald wrote in 1859; "the live Dog better than the dead Lion" was the way he would put it twenty years later. Our apologies, whether in footnote form or in informal confessions to our audiences, may be the yelps and yaps of live curs baying (Kleelike) at the moon. They show how short we've fallen, how seemingly unreachable our goal. A second instance involves a greater liberty and requires more abject apology. The text is Shiyin's verse exposition of the Daoist's "Haoliao ge" in Chapter 1 of the Honglou meng. Emboldened by David Hawkes' resourceful and ingenious rendering, I tried my hand at these verses. Hawkes had shown how important it is to preserve the rhyme. It seemed not merely inappropriate but wrong, somehow, to translate these verses without rhyme. The verses were not difficult and had a certain antic quality that would certainly be lost in a paraphrase, no matter how well written. The lines did not strike me as inspired poetry, though underneath the homilies and the conventional imagery there was a poignant philosophic melancholy. The previous versions, by C. C. Wang, by 9.
When I mentioned this problem to the noted Arabicist Bernard Lewis, he sympathized with special fervor and offered as a parallel instance the difficulty of rendering lines of Persian love poetry that, quite literally, mean: "My liver is broiled like a kebab!"
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Hawkes, by Gladys Yang and Yang Hsienyi, challenged one to strike out in perhaps a different direction: A humble dwelling, an empty hall, Once had noble plaques up on the wall. By these wisps of grass, this withered tree, People once—years ago—danced merrily. Cobwebs covered this welltooled beam, Green gauze now shades the windowseam. Why speak of powdered cheeks, madeup faces? Hair will turn white: time leaves its traces. Yesterday, brown earth covered white bones nearby; Tonight, under damasked curtains, two love birds lie. Gold in a casket, silver in a pile— A turn of fortune: now a beggar vile. Even as we sigh at someone else's death: We know we'll soon breathe our own last breath. There's a way to raise boys well, But who's to say, later on, they won't raise hell? Give girls a taste for champagne: Who'd think they'd end up in this tawdry lane? Because the silk hat is a bit too small, They'll fit you straightaway with a cangue. Once in a tattered jacket one felt cold: Now these purple robes of state: how long they hang! Helterskelter, just as you end, I begin my song. To take the "other" world for this: isn't that wrong? Oh, how silly, oh, how mad! What makes a man happy is what makes him sad.
A conscientious effort has been made to retain the feeling of the original. Others will have to judge if the version is too antic, too
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singsong. Astute readers will have noticed that I have departed in places from the literal images. The departures may be excessive, and the loss not sufficiently compensated for. One's liberties may be no more than the translator's inabilities masquerading as refinements; and, in the end, one may simply misunderstand the text or misconstrue the context.10 But the point here does not depend on the success or failure of these versions: it is that these ventures are made because there is a critical and constructive audience with access to the original. There is no attempt to deceive, for the departures are selfconfessed. As the only translation available, this practice would be quite reprehensible; but as the third or fourth alternative, it may yet be defensible. Nothing but convention prevents the sharing of constructive criticism. Our book reviews are often filled with suggestions that might have been useful before publication. The work must always be accomplished by individuals: the risks and the responsibilities ultimately rest with the translator. But the audience is an important resource: its contribution may be tacit (and too often unacknowledged), but the author who disregards his audience will, in time, have no audience. We may choose this fate for ourselves, but as translators we are obliged to find an audience for the authors we admire and whose works we render. Our own inadequacies may be exposed in the process, but our effort will have attracted the appropriate correction. Sacrifices will have proved worthwhile, even if they result in better versions from other translators. No one who has examined the faults of past translations has not (if truth be known) benefited in some heuristic way from them. Mistakes corrected—so long as they are significant mistakes—constitute a gain in insight. Successes may be more difficult to acknowledge, but if the state of translating is to develop, there must be yeasaying as well as naysaying. The motleyness of the audience for translation is not disturbing, for it ensures a corrective against the provinciality of a homogeneous coterie. No doubt there will be pedants who forget that "a poem is inaccessible to the uncultivated reader because of its 10.
At a conference in Hong Kong, D. C. Lau took pains to point out certain errors and infelicities in an earlier rendering. This version has benefited from those criticisms, but intractabilities (as well as my own obtuseness) prevent me from removing all inaccuracies.
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learning, not because of its art." And there will be philistines who insist that only selfproclaimed "poets" understand Chinese poetry (even if, in their opinion, some Chinese do not). Motleyness may be a mongrel virtue, but then translation is a mongrel art. We began with an examination of the submerged and neglected senses of "audience," with the reminder that audiences hear as well as read, that they may be actual as well as metaphorical. We have looked at the changes in the modern audience, mainly in the United States, and noted shifts in cultural and occupational constituencies. We have examined the responsibilities of the scholartranslator—to the work on the one hand and to the audience on the other. Finally, we have explored the opportunities presented by the relationships between translators and their audiences. The academic context in which the need for translations develops may be the theater in which an exchange between audience and artist may be established. It has been said that "Shakespeare could come to terms with his audience while Jonson could not" (Harbage 1941:132). In that exchange, Shakespeare's talent was developed to the full. We can do nothing about our individual literary gifts, but it would be a pity if our talents, however meager, were not developed. The audience is contributive if not creative, constructive if not deconstructive: the better the audience, the more critical, the more demanding, the greater the possibilities for inspired translation. The audience for translation cannot be merely present and passive. The original belongs to another time and another place, but the translation is the communal property of translator and audience. Translation is a willful anachronism: it revitalizes a work of the past and makes it part of the present. Translators may find themselves mirrored in Pierre Menard, the "author" of Don Quixote, of whom Borges wrote: ''Menard (perhaps without wanting to) has enriched, by means of a new technique, the halting and rudimentary art of reading: this new technique is that of the deliberate anachronism and the erroneous attribution" (1964:44). Sobriety compels us to emphasize that the "anachronism" be deliberate (that is, knowing) and that the "attribution" be clearly labeled as erroneous. But it is by these creative acts of acknowledged error and imperfection that the "halting and rudimentary art of reading" is enriched. Translation remains doubly vulnerable: its authority is always overshadowed by the original, its effectiveness
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continually undermined by the changing currencies of language. The original remains fixed in its milieu, and diligent scholarship can, theoretically, excavate its contemporaneous meaning. Its meanings for subsequent periods, different cultural contexts, are anachronisms in Borges' sense. As the meaning of any work lies in the relationships between the words chosen and the words available in a language but not chosen, so the task of translation is to approximate by its choice of words the same relationships arriving at the same or similar effects in another language. This is what Valéry spoke of when he wrote: "This is really to translate, which is to reconstitute as nearly as possible the effect of a certain cause by means of another cause" (1958:286). There is no way to measure this except on and through audiences, who collaborate on the language used by the translator, even if they do not collaborate on the translation. One observer has suggested that opposite positions on language are expressed in two famous epigrams, one from Wittgenstein's Tractatus, the other from Derrida's La voix et le phenomène.11 Wittgenstein wrote: "Wovon man nicht sprechen kann, dar¨ber muss man schweigen." ("What one cannot talk about we must pass over in silence.") If that dictum had been followed, one would have been rid of all the translations of the Dao De Jing (which might have been a blessing), but one would have also lost the Dao De Jing itself, for it speaks precisely of that about which one cannot speak. Translators may find the second epigram more congenial. "Il reste alors à parler, à faire résonner la voix dans les couloirs pour suppléer l'éclat de la présence," writes Derrida. ("It remains, then, for us to speak, to make our voices resonate throughout the corridors in order to compensate for the rupture of presence.'') The translator, knowingly or not, will have subscribed to Derrida's commitment to speech as phenomenon. And as speech cannot be disembodied, cannot exist except in a context of meanings, uttered or unuttered, translations must develop in a culture of speakers, actual or potential. We must hear as well as read. Audiences provide us with such a culture, and their participation must be solicited, if one is to avoid producing work that is not only unreadable but utterly unspeakable. 11.
Newton Garver, in his preface to Jacques Derrida (1973:xxvii–xxix).
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5— "Dim Emblazonings": Images of Chinese Literature in English Translation Among the many engaging metaphors applied to translation, perhaps the most suggestive is the one that compares it to "being kissed through a veil—exciting contact of a sort, no doubt, if one has never been kissed directly" (Parker 1966:98). The perception of the bride of one's desire through the gauze of a veil—whether chiffon or lace—underscores the sense of anticipation, and frustration, that translations instill in the reader bent on reading a text in another language. But for millions who read or who have read translations, the image connotes more than sexual frustration; one is not vouchsafed an unobstructed view of the bride of desire; one must be content to gaze at beauty forever obscured. Given this distraction, which affects every monolingual reader of translations, it is surprising that there has been no systematic study of the kinds of "veils" which are necessarily interposed between the original work and the reader whose sole access is through translation. This chapter is an attempt to address several major factors—certain valences—that affect the image of Chinese literature seen through the veil of English translation. Though many categories might be invoked to organize the discussion, three can be established as being both capacious and coherent enough to warrant separate consideration. These are, briefly: the conceptual—that which includes philosophical notions and ideas, semantic values and hierarchies, grammatical distinctions and discriminations, differences in explicitness and implicitness in meaning, emphases; the generic—that which includes modal differences between certain forms of discourse in one language with those in another, stylistic
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characteristics peculiar to certain languages, variations in tone and voice, nuances; the cultural—that which includes different views of the world, as well as different realities perceived. The Power of Babel In an earlier chapter, we discussed the decisive myth of the Tower of Babel, persistent for almost thirty centuries, which posits two premises about language: first, that there was a time when there was but one language; and second, that the fragmentation of the people in mutually incomprehensible languages was a confusion inflicted as a curse against hubris or presumption. To take the first point, accepting the assumption of prelapsarian blessedness, few question the desirability of all peoples sharing the same language and still fewer consider the improbability of a world with a common language. Both devout Christians invoking a return to a world before sin and utopians who see effective communication as the panacea to the world's ills long for a world in which everyone uses the same language. The mutual incomprehensibility of languages is viewed as an inconvenience, a begetter of misunderstanding, ultimately of conflict. Yet it is not always the case that conflicts arise between those who do not speak each other's language. Nor is it clear that—as in the case of the Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland or the English and the Americans of the Revolutionary period— sharing a common language necessarily obviates mutual suspicion and strife. But modern philosophers and theoretical linguists have called this monolithic prospect into question: is a truly universal language possible? Mathematics might be viewed as one such universal language; in the arena of international discourse, English is very nearly a universal language, just as French might have been the universal language of diplomacy in the last century. Computer languages today bid fair to becoming "universal" languages in the sense that they cut across cultural—even linguistic—boundaries. One might ask, however, if these are truly universal languages, or do they represent the supremacy of one culture over all others? Is it possible for languages to be equivalently comprehensive when realities confronted in different languages are different? (A word for "iceberg" in Arabic? For "sirocco'' in Eskimo?) Even points of reference
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ostensibly neutral and therefore universal are not always devoid of cultural bias: the polar notions of "northern" taciturnity and "southern" indolence are a bias of a Northern Hemisphere perspective: the directions would, presumably, be reversed in the Southern Hemisphere since cold and warm climates there would correspond inversely with Northern Hemisphere equations of "north" with ''cold" and "south" with "warm." "Clockwise" represents a Northern Hemisphere bias, if one credits the origin of clocks as imitating the movement of the shadow on a sundial. Had the clock been invented in the Southern Hemisphere, "clockwise" would have been its opposite. One might posit a Northern Hemisphere bias in history, because most of recorded history describes events that took place in that sector of the planet: Africa, South America, and Australia are recent additions to our Northern Hemispheric consciousness—their history is, presumably, no less hoary or venerable than that of the Eurasian landmass. The cultural events in these regions prior to the Age of Discovery are excavated through archaeology, whereas periods contemporary with that era in Europe and Asia are accessible through history. There are radical differences in what might be called cultural premises, that is, the reference points from which each culture reckons time, space, and cosmos. Eugene Nida has cited the difficulty of preserving the force of the biblical injunction, "Devil, get thee behind me!" in Bolivian Quechua, since, unlike most cultures, the future in this South American Indian culture is regarded not as something in front but as something behind, and the past is regarded not as something behind but as something in front (Brower 1959:12). Those who speak Quechua conceive of the past as known, subject to view and review, and hence it may be characterized as being in front, something we can see with our eyes. The future is unknown, not accessible to view, behind our backs; it is likened to something behind the seeing eye and therefore not available to ocular perception. In this language, then, to place the devil behind would be not so much to renounce evil as to invite it; to put the devil behind in Quechua would be to place him in one's future; to put him away as something belonging to the past is to put him in full view.1 1.
Incidentally, lest one too readily assume the perversity of this worldview, contemplate the differences between the implicit Western and the Quechua models.
(footnote continued on next page)
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On Ponape, a small island in the Pacific, the simple—and seemingly universal—notion in Ecclesiastes (2:6) that "the wind blows to the south, and goes round to the north" borders on the ridiculous because the wind on Ponape, one discovers, blows only and always from the northeast.2 The realities of provincial experience, which determine the language of a region, will sometimes contravene convictions of a meaningful universal language. As to the second premise in the story of the Tower of Babel, that it represents a curse on humanity for their presumption and their pride, one can relate to it more easily and find, conveniently enough, concrete manifestations of the Babellike effect of pride nipped. Anyone, no matter how well educated, will know the feeling of appearing to babble like a monkey in any language with which he is unfamiliar. The humiliations of language—not to say languagelearning—unsensed as a child, particularly when salved with parental love and encouragement, but wellnigh insupportable as an adult, are enough to attest to the cogency of this part of the Babel myth. The translation of Chinese literature reveals problems of language which inevitably affect, subtly and not so subtly, the attitudes of nonChinese toward China and the Chinese. This in turn will distort, favorably or unfavorably, one's image of China. Take the elliptical nature of the Chinese language, both the vernacular and, even more so, the literary: if translated word for word, and without the normal syntactic and morphemic markers conventional in English as in most Western languages, Chinese will sound either terribly dumb (like the words of a coolie) or terribly portentous and oracular (like Charlie Chan at his most aphoristic). Unfortunately, earlier translators seized upon this disparity in language texture to exploit a very dubious kind of linguistic exotica. The truth is, of course, that the Chinese are no dumber or wiser than most people. Ordinary discourse may be normalized into familiar idiomatic (footnote continued from previous page) In the Western, significantly, the implicit model is of a person in progress, walking forward, which is why the future may be right before our eyes and we are unable to see it; whereas the Quechua model assumes a person standing still: he knows the past and hence can be said to see it, but he does not know and cannot see the future, which is why it might be conceived of as being behind. 2.
I owe this information to a former student, James Abrams, who is now bureau chief for the Associated Press in Beijing.
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speech. In translation, one can apply projected cultural equivalents: what would a nobleman say in English that a Chinese junzi or literatus says in Chinese; how might peasants sound in either language; what is the idiom of the vulgar and the venal in both languages? Imaginative transposition serves in these instances as effective translation, though in very few cases would it involve a wordforword rendering—the arbitrary structure of idiom being what it is. These cases will be illustrated later. When it comes to unique philosophic or poetic language, however, no such equivalences are available, nor would they be appropriate even if they were. Confucius should not sound like Aristotle, because he does not think like Aristotle; nor Du Fu like Shakespeare. There are inherent peculiarities not only in the character of the language but in the character of the particular writer using the resources of that language. In this context, consider one of the most remarkable statements made by Ludwig Wittgenstein: "Glaube nicht, dass alles Dummheit ist was Du nicht verstehen wirst" (Do not think that whatever you do not understand must be stupid). Somehow, it is significant that this was said in German (the English is pallid by comparison) and that it was said, in the secondperson familiar form, to Bertrand Russell (letter of 6 December 1919, in connection with Wittgenstein's Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus; see Wittgenstein 1974a). The exchange is both an allusion to, and an example of, the intractabilities of language in conveying meaning. The reverence one has for "authorities," particularly if they are "classical," makes one shudder initially at the impudence of C. K. Ogden saying, in his 1932 essay on Opposition, "In view of the naive verbal basis of all Aristotle's logical work, it is not surprising that Opposition, in which the language factor predominates, presented insuperable difficulties. His complete dependence on one language, before even grammatical distinctions have been systematized, was hardly less of a handicap than the primitive state of Greek science'' (pp. 23–24). Reverence aside, however, Ogden merely points to what Structuralists and Poststructuralists, following Nietzsche, might fashionably call "the prisonhouse of language." Ogden is saying that, however profound a thinker Aristotle was, he was, nevertheless, impaired by his monolingualism. The "bars" of the prison involve several different kinds of incarceration: the restriction of things not recognized ("icebergs" in Arabic), which deny
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the existence of phenomena not recognized in the language; the restriction of distinctions "reified," a generic fallacy, in which categories are taken for the constituents in the category, when distinctions become more real than the things perceived. In the case of Chinese, I. A. Richards, in his Mencius on the Mind (1932), put it succinctly: "Chinese thinking often gives no attention to distinctions which for Western minds are so traditional and so firmly established in thought and language that we neither question them nor even become aware of them as distinctions. We receive and use them as though they belonged unconditionally to the constitution of things (or of thought). We forget that these distinctions have been made and maintained as part of one tradition of thinking; and that another tradition of thinking might neither find use for them nor . . . be able to admit them" (pp. 3–4). Take, for example, the simple and familiar distinction of "heart" and "mind." Perhaps since Galen, these two organs have been characterized in the West as the "feeling" organ and the "thinking'' organ. Modern anatomy would seem to corroborate this specialization of function. Chinese, on the other hand, uses the same word xin for "heart" and "mind." Far from posing problems of exposition, there may be something in a fusing together, not to say confusion so much as a conflation, of the two notions; for with most acts of conation, determination, will, perception, sensibility, the faculties of both thinking and feeling are engaged: it is usually difficult to determine the proportion of reason to emotion in the effusions of xin, "heartmind." "To think with the heart," and "to feel with the mind," are distinctions in English that might be suggestive; in Chinese, they would be equivalent and tautologous. Or, to take a converse example, consider the concept of "soul" in English: usually contrasted with the corporeal essence, with "body," the soul exists concurrently with the body when it is alive (either in the same place or in different places, if one accepts certain notions of telekinesis and mind transport), and it survives the body after death, to wander the earth, or to enter heaven, hell, or purgatory, or to begin a new reincarnation (depending on whether one believes in ghosts, Christianity, or Buddhism). In Chinese, however, there are two souls: po . The corporeal soul, the po, stays with the body, and it dies with the body: it might be likened to the vital force, the spirit of a person, his "élan vital," as Henri
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Bergson might say. But there is another soul, the hun, which is not bound to the flesh and which can roam at some distance from the body. One trope of Chinese poetry is the transport, across vast distances, of the hun to visit friends in dreams. If the distance is considerable, this is usually taken to be an indication of a person's death, since the hun is conceived of being able to roam further than a regional distance only with the death of the body, and only when separated from the po. A famous stanza, by one poet in the Tang dynasty who encountered another poet in his dreams, expressing concern that the friend may be dead, since his hun seems so wideranging, exploits this belief: Old friend, you appeared in a dream. It shows you have long been in my thoughts. Perhaps it was not your living soul: The way's too far, it couldn't be done.3
The opaqueness of language, as opposed to its transparency, is an aspect not often appreciated: it may be, as George Steiner maintains, that the "relevant framework is not one of morality but of survival." The camouflage of language, impenetrable to the uninitiated, but so obvious as to go unnoticed by those in the inner circle, may be one of the unappreciated benefits of Babelian language. Steiner stresses the power of language to obfuscate: "At every level, from brute camouflage to poetic vision, the linguistic capacity to conceal, misinform, leave ambiguous, hypothesize, invent is indispensable to the equilibrium of human consciousness and to the development of man in societies. Only a small portion of human discourse is nakedly veracious or informative in any monovalent, unqualified sense. . . . Human speech conceals far more than it confides; it blurs much more than it defines; it distances more than it connects" (1975:229). With his dazzling gift for aphorism, Steiner puts it memorably: ''In the beginning the word was largely a password." Quoting Velimir Khlebnikov's dictum, "Words are the living eyes of secrecy," Steiner proceeds to the characterization of language as not so much straightforward communication as hermetic intercourse combined with exogamous exclusion. Languages, Steiner continues, "encode, preserve, and transmit the knowledge, 3.
Du Fu, "Dreaming of Li Bai, 1"; translation mine; cf. Liu and Lo (1975:128).
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the shared memories, the metaphorical and pragmatic conjectures of life of a small group—a family, a clan, a tribe. Mature speech begins in shared secrecy, in centripetal storage or inventory, in the mutual cognizance of a very few" (p. 231). In the case of Chinese, these strictures have a particular and complex relevance. Literature in China has been traditionally separated between what might be characterized as a belletristic segment and a vernacular segment.4 "Literary literature" became in time literature to which access was commanded only by the educated and the learned: allusions, paranomasia, allegory, private references, all served to exclude the untutored eye, even while they admitted (and rewarded) the initiated. The vernacular audience—which one might call the "illiterati"—could understand the spoken language; they had a rudimentary reading knowledge, but they would not be well versed in the arcana of the learned. This situation, clear as it might be for any contemporary period, is confused by the vagaries of history. For the works produced for literati sometimes acquire a popularity in subsequent generations among the illiterati; and simple productions of the illiterati sometimes acquire classic status among the literati. Certainly, a more distinguished and learned group could not have been assembled by King James the First to retranslate the Bible; yet this learned production has, not without some early difficulties, become a popular classic, cited with familiarity and reverence by twentiethcentury Americans, in and outside the Bible Belt, who have no pretentions to education or learning. Lewis Carroll's fables, written for a very specialized, even private, audience, have acquired a popularity that he certainly did not envision. The converse shift—of productions for the illiterati acquiring a "classic" patina pierced only by a subsequent generation of the educated—might be seen in some of the most familiar authors: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, composed for the illiterati, as Milman Parry and Albert Lord have shown, have become "textbook" classics in schools and universities, a source work for scholars and students; Dante's Commedia, whose populist character is underlined not only by the use of the word ''Commedia" in the title 4.
I avoid the "elite"/"popular" distinction because it obscures rather than clarifies the issue: some "literary" writers with access to the belletristic tradition were very "popular."
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but also by the choice of vernacular Italian over the more literary Latin, is now the favorite of elitist academics; Shakespeare, according to contemporary sources, was a fairly popular playwright in his day, who produced what might have been characterized as "potboilers" to please the vernacular, even boisterous, Elizabethan audience, yet the least of his works is examined now by a fraternity of scholars that can hardly be characterized as "rabble." (Ironically, the "rabble" of our day seem to have no taste for Shakespeare.) In the Chinese instance, the two contrastive developments can be epitomized by two paradigmatic works, both related to Confucius. The Lunyu, usually translated The Analects, comprises conversations the master had with his disciples, certainly among the most intellectual and learned of that era. Yet, in the course of history, the Lunyu has become such a familiar part of the mainstream tradition in China that episodes, phrases, and aphorisms from the text are as familiar to the unlettered and the uneducated as to the literati. A converse instance would involve the Shijing, usually translated The Book of Songs or The Book of Odes, which Confucius is believed to have compiled, and which he recommended to his students as a text that would teach them about human relationships as well as the world around them. More than half of the poems in this collection of 305 songs are folk songs, gleaned from the traditional musical patrimony of the peasants, and involving appeals to love, complaints about war, resentments against the bureaucracy, celebrations of the harvest, and so forth. Despite these "illiterate" origins, and largely through the authority of Confucius' recommendation, the Shijing has become the staple for generations of scholars and commentators, allegorists, public officials, ministers, most of whom had sympathies for the peasants that were indirect at best. The relevance of these considerations to translation is subtle. First, for hermetic works addressed to exclusive audiences, how does the translator convey the meaning of the text and at the same time preserve its exclusiveness—in short, its transparency for the right audience and its opaqueness for the wrong audience? Second, for popular works addressed to general audiences, how does one handle references that were contemporaneously familiar at the time, but which have now been obscured by history—in short, how to remove the haziness that history has added to the transparency
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for contemporary audiences? And what about works, like Spenser's Faerie Queene, which were deliberately archaicized by the author even for his own time? These perspectives do not admit of ready solutions: they are explored in this context to elicit a sense of the ambivalent task of translation of preserving an appropriate degree of opaqueness as well as transparency. Consider, finally, differences in conceptual valuations: a notion as simple as "emptiness," "nullity," "void." In the West, the general sense of "emptiness" is negative: "My life is empty''; "That philosophy is empty of content"; "That codicil is null and void"; "There's a void in my life." Chinese notions of xukong —which may be rendered as "nothingness"—are not consistently so negative (see Abe 1985). From the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching) comes the typically concrete pragmatum which provides the metaphor for the philosophical insight: Thirty spokes converge on the hub of a wheel: it is on nothingness (wu: ) that the function of the cart depends. Clay may be molded into a vessel: it is on nothingness that the function of the vessel depends. Doors and windows are made to form a room: it is on nothingness that the function of the room depends. Therefore, turn being to advantage, and nothingness to function.
The Zhuangzi (Chuangtzu) offers a recommendation that would run counter to most of the activist exhortations found in Western philosophers, reformers, and proselytizers: in the thirtythird chapter, Zhuangzi cites his master, Lao Tan (Laozi), who advocated principles promoting the Great Unity (taiyi ), of which "yielding and humility are the outward manifestation and vacancy and emptiness and nondestructiveness toward all creation its inner essence." The sources of wisdom and poetry for the Chinese were not in the intimations of the soul or the emotions of the heart but in an empty mind (to be contrasted with familiar but opposite notions of being "emptyheaded"). Of the many that might be cited as examples, three short poems of Hanshan, the "Cold Mountain" poet, are illustrative. The first reflects the admonition to "empty the mind and keep it still":
Page 89 I enjoy the way of my everyday life Among the misty vines and the rocky caves. Thoughts in the wild are so much freer. Longtime companions: the drifting clouds. There are roads, but they lead nowhere. Nothing on my mind, who can disturb me? On a bed of stone, I sit alone at night As the round moon climbs up Cold Mountain [Quan Tangshi 4686:23b]5
The symbol of perfect emptiness is the "zero" of the "round moon" climbing up the mountain, the reflection of the "nothing on my mind," or, more precisely, the state of "nomind" ( wuxin: ) : Where I dwell there is a cave, At the center, not a thing. Pure and immaculate, the empty chamber; Bright and glorious, the radiant sun. Vegetables nourish this slight frame, A cloak of pelt covers this illusory thing. Take your epiphany of a thousand saints: I have the real Buddha of heaven. [Quan Tangshi 4683:17a]
The references to the self—"this slight frame," "this illusory thing"—are not tropes of modesty or selfeffacement but descriptions of a sensibility being "refined out of existence." The vision of Hanshan in this poem reminds one of "The Snow Man" in Wallace Stevens' poem of that title, who, "nothing himself beholds / Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is." The refinement of the self to nonbeing is a prime desideratum of knowledge and 5.
Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated.
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knowing. The immanence of phenomenon is never so well perceived as when the perceiver is virtually absent, the object of perception vividly present. This is manifest in Hanshan's short poem that reads: Green rills, spring waters clear— Cold Mountain moonlight white. Silent knowledge: the spirit's selfenlightenment Contemplate the void: the world exceeds stillness. [Quan Tangshi 4679:9a]6
The characterization of void as infinity, of emptiness as plenitude, of nothingness as the source of all creation—all these are suggested in these brief lines. Elsewhere they are symbolized by the full round moon (or, in Japanese poetry, by the image of the moon reflected in a pond). But the references to the void suggest peace and calm: they bespeak no dissatisfaction or anxiety, no angst that is apprehensive about annihilation, no desperate nihilism. The generally accepted notion that translation, even without obvious faults and mistakes, is impossible, particularly when rendering poetry, may be viewed not as a source of mischief and ignorance, but as a mode of insight and understanding—even selfknowledge. What makes translation impossible are the intractable and incomparable peculiarities of different languages: no two languages embody the same experience or set of experiences, promote the same values, encounter the same phenomena, engage the same perceptions. What is an absolute failure in translation may be a relative gain in selfawareness: the strict grammarian of English equates meaning with syntax and finds it difficult to conceive that culture has developed in China—even a considerable if unsystematic science—with a language that does not conform to even the basic grammatical rules of Western languages, that does not even specify number, tense, or, on occasion, part of speech. Conversely a Chinese student, graded down for writing in ungrammatical English, might plead, with some justice: "Why do you need tenses, numbers, and all the other grammatical complications, when we Chinese have been perfectly able to express our thoughts for over three thousand years without them?" (Mish 1970:24). 6.
I borrow the last line from Gary Snyder's rendering (1969:47).
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It would be banal to decry the difficulties of translation without recognizing their indispensability. We have already suggested that the development of civilization as we know it could not have occurred without translation. The inadequacies of any language, its biases, its limitations, its peculiar genius, will rarely become as evident as through translation. Wittgenstein's critique of language (1953:47e) is clearly concrete and metaphoric: The more narrowly we examine actual language, the sharper becomes the conflict between it and our requirement. . . . The conflict becomes intolerable; the requirement is now in danger of becoming empty.—We have got on to slippery ice where there is no friction and so in a certain sense the conditions are ideal, but also, just because of that, we are unable to walk. We want to walk: so we need friction. Back to the rough ground!
The "rough ground" is traversed, marked, and mapped in translation, where relevant failures are fertile. The myth of Babel alluded to a preBabelian world where everyone spoke the same Esperanto or Interlingua: nothing—at least to the modern, secular, perhaps atheist sensibility—could be less inviting or less inspiring. The power of Babel is what fuels our continuing fascination with other worlds, with what Steiner calls "alternities"; what extends our vision beyond our own horizons (Wittgenstein's "Die Grenzen meiner Sprache bedeuten die Grenzen meiner Welt''); what, ironically, and in the last analysis, enables us to know ourselves, through the mental habit that analysis has inured us to: by contrasting to ourselves what we are not. The Socratic injunction, "Know thyself," takes on complex ramifications, for only by knowing others, and distinguishing oneself from them, can one truly know oneself. The act of knowing oneself inevitably involves an attempt to learn about the other. Blurred Melodies One of the most deplorable characteristics of many English translations of Chinese poetry is that they all sound alike. It is, I suppose, the literary equivalent of the Occidental provinciality that refuses to distinguish one Oriental from another (Eoyang 1975:76). In commenting on the translations of Chinese literature, I have taken
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exception not only to specific lapses in translation but also to the stylistic uniformity of translations by different translators, as well as by the same translator. For example, there was a time when all translations from the Chinese sounded alike, whether from the pen of Herbert Giles or James Legge. With the advent of Arthur Waley, there was an improvement. Waley's translations are distinctively his and may be distinguished from other renderings. But in translating many works from different periods, Waley's versions have the disadvantage of sounding always like Waley. It is as if the same translator "homogenized" in a target language such disparate works as Sappho's poems, Virgil's epic, Pindar's odes; imagine, to change the backdrop and narrow the scope, if not the contrast, Walt Whitman sounding in Chinese exactly like his contemporary Emily Dickinson. In a sense, however successful Waley's productions may be, they fail to convey the sheer variety of Chinese literature. He made no apologies for this tendency and openly confessed that he translated what he felt a sympathy for. The works he translated may have a greater variety than he conveyed, but it may be said that they shared a quality that attracted his attention. His principle of selection, to say nothing of his method of translation, would tend to emphasize the similarities between works that he rendered more than their differences. When one's view of other cultures and peoples is undiscriminating (as opposed to discriminatory), the most outlandish and memorable, if exaggerated, images will prevail. One is offered either the obsequious, self effacing sycophant or the sinister, inscrutable mask of evil: these images of the Chinese will be immediately familiar. In both, there is a distortion of the true lineaments of character and individuality. To see how even sympathetic regard for Chinese mores may be mischievous, let us look at a translation by Florence Ayscough and Amy Lowell in a book, titled Fir Flower Tablets, published in 1921, of the first of Li Po's famous "Changgan" poems. The original reads: qie fa qu fu o / zhe hua men qian ju ("When my hair first began to cover my forehead, / I picked flowers and played outside the house"). The reference to "my" in the first line reflects the word qie in the original. The word is a selfdeprecating reference to the self—in this case used by a wife addressing her husband. The character of the word is restrained and unobtrusive. But these lines are rendered by Ayscough and
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Lowell as follows: "When the hair of your Unworthy One first began to cover her forehead, / She picked flowers and played in front of the door" (p. 28). Note how the qie has assumed a grandeur and grandiosity in the capitalized "Unworthy One." The original word in Chinese means, simply, "I," with a suggestion of self deprecation and deference. To translate that as ''Unworthy One" is gesturally contradictory: the tone belies the meaning. It's as if one were to boast about one's humility. Next, the reference to oneself in the third person—"She picked flowers"—totally misconstrues the stance of the woman in the poem, which is selfless devotion, not imperious selfimportance. These words recall a Gertrude Stein, not a traditional Chinese woman. What is misleading about these lines is what is wrong with so many Western depictions of Chinese: they reek of ostentatious humility. Now, this code of modesty may be conspicuous in the West, but it is nowhere exceptional in Confucian China. Thus, while the translators have captured the sense of humility in the lines, they have totally misrepresented its bearing. The next line then removes any vestiges of genuine modesty left in the poem. It reads: "Then you, my Lover, came riding a bamboo horse." Taken as an earnest expression, this borders on the antic; taken as a recollection of childhood courtship, it becomes ludicrous. The Chinese is much more circumspect: there is wit and irony, and nothing nearly so heavy handed: lang qi zhuma lai . This version has tenderness of feeling without loss of distance and respect. The sense of selfimportance, so intrusive in the Ayscough and Lowell translation, is totally absent, as it is in the original. Selfeffacing restraint, in Ayscough and Lowell, turns to selfassertive pride: "At fourteen," the girl says in their version, "I became the wife of my Lord." What should have been a fond recollection of marital devotion turns out to be a reminiscence of social precocity. (Of course, the difference in the mores of contemporary Western society and nuptial customs of the Tang period creates additional distortion: the marriage of a fourteenyearold girl would be abnormal now; it would not have
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been then.) The selfimportance in the woman's tone emerges fullblown in Ayscough and Lowell's rendering of lines 23–25, culminating in a shift, within the same line, from the first person to the third: It is the Eighth Month, the butterflies are yellow, Seeing them, my heart is bitter with grief, they wound the heart of the Unworthy One.
The selfdeprecatory qie in the Chinese now assumes superogatory proportions. We now have an imperious female issuing directions to her spouse abroad— "Prepare me first with a letter," she advises, "bringing me the news of when you will reach home!" This shift in tone leads the translators to an outright mistranslation. For the last two lines are quietly touching: Xiang yin bu dao yuan / Zhi zhi Changfengsha (''Where we meet cannot be called far, / And I'd go all the way to Ch'angfengsha"). The point is that, in her eagerness to see her husband, the wife will venture out a fair distance to welcome him home. Ayscough and Lowell convert these lines into a niggardly measure of the extent to which she will travel: "I will not go so far on the road to meet you," their version reads, "I will go straight until I reach the Long Wind Sands." Strange welcome that puts limits on how far one will go! If the commentaries are correct in locating Changgan village in the district of Jiangning, a few miles south of Jiankang (presentday Nanjing, or Nanking), and if Changfengsha (Ch'angfengsha) lies in the presentday district of Guichi in Anhui province,7 then the distance would be over a hundred miles upriver on the Yangtze, a not inconsiderable distance at any time. The desiderata for a good translator were enunciated by Dr. Samuel Johnson in his essay on Dryden: "He is to exhibit his author's thoughts in such a dress of diction as the author would have given them had his language been English: rugged magnificence is not to be softened; hyperbolical ostentation is not to be repressed; nor sententious affectation to have its point blunted." In the rendering of Ayscough and Lowell, what was disarming and demure emerges as strident and bossy. 7.
T'ang shih san pai shou hsiang hsi (Taiwan: Chunghua shuchü edition, 1973), p. 44.
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One of the most critical differences between Chinese and most, if not all, Western languages is the normative omission of subject or agent in a sentence. In English, the omission of a subject has morphemic significance, indicating the imperative mood. In Chinese, both in poetry and in prose, in the literary as well as the vernacular language, the subject is often implied; it is left unspecified. The result in these instances is to give to the texture of Chinese more of the qualities of what the Soviet linguist Lev Vygotsky called "inner speech." "Predication," Vygotsky wrote, ''is the natural form of inner speech; psychologically, it consists of predicates only. It is as much a law of inner speech to omit subjects as it is a law of written speech to contain both subjects and predicates" (1962:145). Vygotsky's analysis is illuminating, even if it is ethnocentric: Inner speech is not the interior aspect of external speech—it is a function in itself. It still remains speech, i.e., thought connected with words. But while in external speech thought is embodied in words, in inner speech words die as they bring forth thought. Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings. It is a dynamic, shifting, unstable thing. [p. 149]
In this context, one might suggest that Chinese is closer to inner speech than English. There is perhaps more of the functioning of inner speech in literary discourse in Chinese than one encounters in English. When Vygotsky writes, "In inner speech, the 'mutual' perception is always there, in absolute form; therefore, a practically wordless 'communication' of even the most complicated thoughts is the rule" (p. 145), one recognizes the experience of reading Chinese literature. Part of the difficulty of translating Chinese literature lies precisely in preserving this privileged access to forms of "wordless 'communication.'" Chief among these modes of access are allusion and periphrasis. To cite but one brief yet typical instance, let us look at a short lyric by the Sung poet Xin Qiji (Hsin Ch'ichi; 1140–1207): To the Tune: "In Search of Fragrant Grasses" There are so many tears— I'm at loose ends, among so many quilt covers; The pillows aren't right, no matter where they're put. Good old times, how can I sleep?
Page 96 Still no letter? How can I bear the geese mocking me? They say there's no news, yet there's a letter's meaning— Row upon row: one word after another. [Quan Song Ci iii:1907]
A simple enough poem: the situation is clear. The persona is longing for news from a friend, perhaps a lover, but the last three lines seem farfetched, if unmistakable. Why are the geese mocking? And how do they mock? What situation would explain the paradox of the penultimate line: "there's no news, yet there's a letter . . ." The words here are clear cases in which the meaning—as Vygotsky would say—does not correspond to the sense. The last line might more literally be translated (instead of "Row upon row: one word after another"): "Formation several: 'man,' 'man' words." This, however, makes even less sense. The element of "wordless 'communication'" in this line involves the pictographic character of the Chinese written language and the Vformation of migrating geese. The Chinese word for "man" is , which schematically resembles what an Englishspeaking reader might call "an inverted V." This configuration, as anyone who has watched flying geese will attest, corresponds to the migrating formation. Hence, traditionally, the Chinese have taken to thinking of flying geese in formation as a kind of "air mail," an avian skywriting. The coincidence of a formation of geese resembling a word in Chinese—and not any word at that, but the word for ''man" or "person"— would naturally elicit a conventional conceit of "lettercarrying" geese. (In English, the coincidence of "letter" as alphabet and "letter" as missive provides an apposite pun.) The last lines of the poem now make sense: the "meaningful" configuration of the geese in formation is seen as a taunt to the persona that messages are in fact "winging over," even if the specific letter looked for has not yet arrived. The mockery of the geese is conventional; its context of meaning is wordless, unstated. Another instance involves a legend about a great king, who, when asked as a young man what he would become, merely took a stick and drew one horizontal line in the dirt. In this simple, seemingly gnostic act lie two meanings: first, as the horizontal line signifies the first ordinal (as well as the first cardinal) number in
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Chinese, the act of drawing such a line would seem to indicate that the emperortobe expected to be first in his generation; second, as the word for "earth" is two horizontal lines intersected by a vertical ( When the emperortobe draws a line on the ground, thus adding a horizontal stroke to the earth as signified, he is alluding to the grapheme for earth as signifier, and invoking the grapheme for "emperor" by topping off the grapheme for earth with a stroke. There can be no more dramatic illustration of the hermetic nature of the Chinese language nor a more apposite example of "readerresponse theory"—for someone who can speak Chinese but cannot read the language will not understand this story: the only competent interlocutor for the story is someone literate in Chinese. The use of "wordless 'communication'" in Chinese should not be construed as willful inscrutability in language. What may appear abstruse to the outsider is unmistakable (if implicit) to the insider. The omission of subject permissible in Chinese does not mean that the gender of the subject is undefined: what it means is that it is not syntactically or semantically necessary (in contrast to the first "it" in this sentence which, though unnecessary semantically, is necessary syntactically). When the subject is identified, it is for special emphasis and often marks a certain social status (see Frankel 1957). The English word for "I" is an abstract, variable, and undifferentiated firstperson reference; it even lacks the nuance of greater or lesser intimacy that French and German offer between the familiar and formal forms of the second person (tu/vous; du/Sie). The selfreference is the same—"I"—for any interlocutor in any discourse or dialogue. Novelists are confronted with this problem when composing dialogue, and they solve it by characterizing the different "I's" in such a way that the reader will know which "I" is speaking at any given moment. In Chinese, however, when the Ireference is not omitted a host of optional selfreferences is available: in the earlier discussion, we cited the "I" of a wife to a husband; there are also selfreferences for ministerofficials addressing emperors, chen . Pupils addressing teachers, juniors addressing seniors, servants
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addressing masters, can all use wansheng (the royal "we"). This plethora of terms for "I" shows how many ways there are in Chinese to refer to the self: but, clearly, though these are selfreferences, they are emphatically not "egoidentifications"—if by this term one means subjective reflexiveness. These terms reflect on the firstperson subject through the objective thirdperson viewpoint: one refers to the self in terms of how one is conventionally viewed by others; for the most part they are selfdeprecatory selfreferences. They are not pure firstperson pronouns; it would be more accurate to characterize them as firstperson nominals. Even ritualized humility can involve genuine gestures of courtesy and consideration to the person addressed. Whereas the superannuated and capitalized "I" in English (in contrast to the uncapitalized ich in German, je in French, io in Italian, and yo in Spanish) posits a generic and underscored self, the Chinese Ireferences identify themselves in terms of the specific relationship invoked. Thus a minister would address the emperor with deference, but would be addressed with deference by his wife; an older brother might expect deference from a younger brother, but give it to a superior. In this there is neither hypocrisy nor servility, merely a functional acceptance of the social hierarchy.8 By comparison, the Ireference in English is confusing and overly implicit.9 8.
Some of this has broken down in presentday proletarian China: for example, references to the wife traditionally in use—neiren ("greatgreat," a respectful reference to a woman)—have been replaced with more egalitarian and romantic references—airen ("the loved one"—shades of Evelyn Waugh!) and furen ("spouse"). 9.
English is not without its own hierarchical distinctions When a tour guide in Shanghai was explaining—in English—the background of the Zhou Enlai (Chou
(footnote continued on next page)
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Another element that is often lost in translations of Chinese literature is something that can only be characterized, intuitively, as "flavor." This concept counts for a great deal in traditional Chinese commentaries on literature,10 but it is especially important in rendering compounds that have—as part of key idioms or sentences—a sense that is more than the sum total of the meanings of each individual word. Here the generations of dictionaryjockeys who have posed as sinologists have too often rendered a grave disservice to the English reader, to say nothing of the injustices committed on the literature they were supposed to celebrate. The briefest example I can cite relates to the Chinese institution in traditional times known as the changge nu —literally, the "girl (who) sings songs." Now, this Chinese entertainer was not as glamorous and as modern as a ''songstress," and her talents were not always limited to the vocal, but she was often an accomplished musician and deft in the ways of pleasing men. For generations, ever since some closet scholiast translated this term as "singsong girl," translating accurately wordforword with the aid of a dictionary compiled, no doubt, in the Victorian era, "singsong girl" has been routinely offered as the equivalent of changge nu. No one with any sensitivity for English could possibly miss the overtones of "singsong" as "boring," "tiresome," "repetitive," "devoid of charm." A dull recitation of a Latin passage may be "singsong" but no changge nu in traditional China was ever "singsong" for very long, if she wanted to remain in the profession. To put it intuitively, who would find the nuances of "singsong girl" alluring? The verve and humor of Chinese vernacular fiction is often muted in translation. Sometimes humor is irretrievable from one language to the next, especially when the context of meaning is unique to one culture. At other times, however, with situations more nearly universal, the point of the joke can be preserved. A certain verbal ingenuity must be tapped to capture the brevity of the punchline, and modest successes can be achieved. In Anthony C. Yu's masterly fourvolume translation of the ver (footnote continued from previous page) Enlai) exhibit, he referred to Chou Enlai's wife in the genitive: as "Chou Enlai's madam." I remonstrated with him afterwards that it was a matter of some importance whether the "madam" occurred before or after the name. When it occurs before, it indicates respect; when it occurs afterwards, it indicates something else altogether and, presumably, someone else altogether. 10.
See Chapter 12.
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nacular classic tale of Buddhist pilgrims in search of scripture, the Xiyouji (Hsiyu chi, The Journey to the West), there is a scene full of high jinks and irreverence in which Pilgrim, Bajie, and Sha Monk ("Monkey," "Pigsy," and ''Sandy" in Arthur Waley's version, titled Monkey) find themselves caught in a Daoist temple with no means of escape. They decide to hide by standing in place of the Daoist icons in the temple, but first they must dispose of the statues. The following scene (11:315– 316) is both an earthy joke and a scatological critique of Daoism: Oh, Pure Ones Three, I'll confide in thee: From afar we came, Staunch foes of bogies. We'd like a treat, But nowhere's cozy. We borrow your seats For a while only. You've sat too long, Now go to the privy. In times past you've enjoyed countless good things By being pure and clean Taoists. Today you can't avoid facing something dirty When you become Honorable Divines Most Smelly!
Bajie carries the statues to their ignominious fate, but he does not accomplish his menial task totally unscathed. When he comes back, he reports: " . . .some of the filth stained my robe. It still stinks. I hope it won't make you retch." "Never mind," Pilgrim says, laughing, "you just come and enjoy yourself. I wonder if we could all make a clean getaway." How much of "flavor" may sometimes be lost can be seen in a comparison of two versions of a short paragraph from the vernacular novel Shuihuzhuan (Shuihu chuan), translated variously as The Men of the Marshes (in the threevolume translation issued by Gladys and Hsienyi Yang), Water Margin (in the twovolume translation by J. H. Jackson, published in Shanghai in 1937), and All Men Are Brothers.(Pearl Buck's twovolume version, which appeared in 1933). A hale and hearty bravo named Wu Sung, who is to win fame by subduing a tiger singlehanded, comes upon an
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inn at the foot of a ridge. There he encounters a banner which reads: "Three Bowls: Not Cross Ridge." The banner is a warning that anyone who imbibes more than three bowls of the local brew will be in no shape to climb the ridge. When Wu Sung is denied a request for a fourth bowl of wine, the innkeeper explains the characteristics of the local vintage. In Pearl Buck's version, the scene goes like this: The wine shop keeper said, "My wine is called 'Smell of It Leaks Through the Bottle' and is so named. And it is named also 'Wine That Makes a Man Fall Outside the Door.' When it is first taken into the mouth it is mild and fullflavored, but in a little while it makes a man fall down drunken." [I:380]
In Jackson's rendering, the passage reads like this: "Our wine is called 'T'ou Ping Hsiang' (the aroma penetrates the bottle), and also has another name, which means 'upon leaving the door you will fall down.' While drinking, it has a fine flavor, but in a short time afterwards you will fall down." [p. 304]
Buck's version presents a few stylistic problems: "it makes a man fall down drunken" does not sound like idiomatic English (one would say, rather, "makes a man fall down drunk"), but the major difficulties are semantic. A wineshop keeper does not run an establishment where food is served, and the preceding passage clearly indicates that this is an inn, not a wineshop, as the keeper offers more meat even while he refuses to serve more wine. The notion of a penetrating "smell'' in the wine leaking through the bottle is awry for two reasons: "smell" is a word that is no longer neutral; it connotes negative rather than positive fragrances;11 and there is no "leak" in the Chinese, nothing wrong with the bottle: the sense is that the wine is so strong, its fumes so powerful, that it penetrates the vessel itself, whether made of glass or, as is probably the case here, of earthenware. "Smell of It Leaks Through the Bottle" suggests an unpleasant odor emanating out of a defective vessel. Jack 11.
Contrast the usage in Dr. Johnson's time:his retort to the woman in the train who complained that he "smelled": "You are mistaken, Madam, you 'smell,' I 'stink'."
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son's version is more apt, though one wonders about the need to provide the transliteration for one name and not for the other. In the original, both are threeword (threesyllable) labels, customarily brief and catchy for proper names of goods for sale. Literally, the first means "Penetrating BottleFragrance," while the second means "OutDoorCollapse." In any event, neither the glosslike equivalents provided by Buck and by Jackson nor the succinct literal version provided here quite captures the soul of wit in these wine labels. I have tackled this scene in a translation, and while I cannot claim to have captured the verve of the original, perhaps a certain idiomatic flavor has been preserved: The innkeeper said: "This wine that we serve is called 'BottleBruising Brew.' And because, when people drink it, they fall down drunk once they are out the door, we also call it 'OutandOut.' When it first goes down the gullet, the taste and the aroma are delicious, but in a few seconds, you're out like a light."
When the sense lies in sentences and in contexts, and not in the composites of meanings for individual words, the flavor of the work must be captured intuitively, not analytically. Poems in translation must not read like scholarly glosses, and common words in one language must not present themselves in uncommon guises in another. Here the sense of the entire phrase—whether musical or verbal—must be recreated. Notefornote melodies will seem, ironically, blurred when not properly "phrased," whereas those unblurred, those which capture what I have called flavor, are "sweeter." Words and Worlds Apart In an amusing poem, published in the Atlantic of November 1974, entitled "How to Know Where You Are," William Walden wrote, in part: The forms of onomatopoeia Do not agree from land to land. In Oshkosh, Hollywood, and Nutley The sound of breaking plates is "crash!";
Page 103 In Helsinki, it changes subtly To "kratsu!" suggesting scratch and gnash; A tingletangle "kling!" is Denmark's; In Rome, a raucous "ugatatrac!"; In China, a cartoonist's pen marks "Hualala!'' for cracking crock. In Portugal, when platters shatter And scatter all about a room, They smack of elephantine clatter Or bongo drums:"catrapuzboom!" In Budapest, extremist factions, Surmounting politics, concur That dishes fracture into fractions With double sibilants: "chirchurr!"
Nino LoBello, commenting on European versions of American comic books, writes in The New York Times Book Review: The door shut with a PLOCH. The rock fell and made a noise, SDOK, SBENG, went the pistol, and SPRAK went the barrel of gunpowder. Water splashes PLUFF, a whip lashes ZAFF, and swords clash SCLENG. The ringing bell does not go TINGALING but DLIN DLIN, whereas a coin falls to the ground not with a PLINK but with a SVIMM. . . . Europe's comic books . . . have their own interpretation of such familiar sound effects as WHAM, BANGBANG, WHOOSH and ZING, all standard noises in the American comics. . . . The European artists who hear in their mind's ear the same sudden sounds that American cartoonists hear come up with a vocabulary that is enough to baffle phoneticians and devotees of the funnies alike. [30 March 1975, p. 27]
Behind all these verbal versions of sounds perceived, there are, presumably, identical sounds: the crash of plates sounds no different in Denmark than in Dallas. Yet the onomatopoeia must be linguistically "conventionalized," made phonetically familiar, restricted to the palette of syllables available in a particular language approximating particular sounds. There is no such thing as "correct" or "incorrect" onomatopoeia, only conventional or unconventional onomatopoeia. A horse can only "neigh" or "whinny" in English, however eccentric his snorts may be. Inevitably, any language that lacks the comprehensiveness of a sound synthesizer will be unable to capture the sound accurately in its onomatopoeia:in a sense
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obscured by the definition of onomatopoeia ("formation of words in imitation of natural sounds"), onomatopoetic words are abstractions represented by a limited range of phonemes in any given language. When we read the onomatopoetic word, we may either use it as a mnemonic of the actual sounds we hear or, conversely, by an act of willful imagination, we may allow the linguistic convention to affect the way we choose to hear the actual sound. The sound effects of comic books on television replace the actual sounds with onomatopoeia. "Pow!", "Thwack!", ''Zonk!" are probably not very accurate sound portraits, but they consist of satisfying, pronounceable, and vivid phonetics in English. This discussion of similar phenomena subtly altered by language and by convention may serve to typify a problem in translation that could be labeled "cultural static." Often a translation avails itself, but the translation equivalent comprises not only the desired meaning but others less appropriate. Where these other meanings are repressed or dormant, there is no difficulty, and the reader may be relied upon to elicit the correct sense, implicitly blocking out all other, inappropriate senses of the word. Of the score or more meanings for the word "run," it is unlikely that there will be any confusion between the one meaning selected and the others implicitly repressed; but where a word with somewhat limited denotations and connotations, like "moth," is involved, difficulties arise. One conventional trope in Chinese poetry is to describe the charms of a woman in terms other "mothlike eyebrows"—o mei . As one dictionary has it, the image refers to the "long slender eyebrows arched like the antennae of a moth"; beautiful eyebrows, by synecdoche, have come to designate a beautiful woman. Now, a literal translation of the Chinese might be "mothy eyebrows"—meaning eyebrows that have the characteristics of a moth, specifically the arched antennae. While Chinese might find this image alluring, the reader of English will be hard put to dispel notions of ruined clothes and the smell of naphtha. What is, in Chinese, a delicate image of beauty becomes in English a ratty reminder of disintegration. In these instances, the phenomenon remains the same. But different cultures emphasize different aspects of reality: the modern Westerner sees the effect of moths on clothes; the traditional Chinese, the delicate outline of the moth's antennae. There is, presumably, no difference in the reality that evokes these images:
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moths ruin clothing in China as well as in the West, and lepidopterists in America can appreciate the arch of the moth's antennae as well as traditional Chinese poets. But a translator insensitive to differences in cultural value and association for the same phenomenon may be broadcasting on a frequency that offers nothing but static. Earlier we considered onomatopoetic words for the same sounds found in the world and noted how they differ from language to language: we found, on occasion, disparities between the nuances for words in different languages referring to the same phenomenon. We have now to consider the converse situation: in which the phenomena described by equivalent words in different languages are themselves different, where, in a sense, the words correspond but the worlds do not. Another attribute of a beautiful woman often celebrated in Chinese poetry is a woman's smooth, cool, lustrous white skin. The usual adjectives used to describe these qualities are "jade (like)" and "icy"—as in the phrase "flesh of ice and bones of jade" . Now, this should hardly be construed to reflect a perverse aesthetic in Chinese appreciation of the fair sex. Chinese women who are frigid (in more than the Freudian sense), and who are ''greenish" like jade in any part of their body, are as likely to repel Chinese men as anyone from the West. It is the qualities of coolness in the flesh, skin smooth as ice, and color as milky as white marble—qualities that might attract admiration from the opposite sex in most cultures—that the Chinese have in mind when they speak of "icy flesh" and "jade bones." The coolness and smoothness of ice are easily enough recognized. And when other attributes of ice, such as frigidity and hardness, are subordinated, the relevance of "ice" to a beautiful female body may be accepted. But what is one to do with the "greenish" flesh and bone—unappetizing, no doubt, in any culture? Here the nonspecialist public must be reminded of what the dealer in jade knows well: that jade comes in more than one color. The best jade is, in fact, white, with a "warm," hazed, pearly soft sheen. When the Chinese mention jade, it is this "higherquality" species they have in mind, not the pale green jade so familiar in the West. The trope—of comparing the color of a woman's flesh to jade—is not only accurate in Chinese, it is a more extravagant image than one might imagine in
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English. An example of the "static" that could occur from the disparity of Western and Chinese jade may be seen in the following poem by Du Fu (712–770), who wrote a poemletter invoking his wife: Tonight, under the Fuzhou moon, My wife at home just looks out alone. From a distance, I long for my little children, Who don't understand my being in Ch'angan. Fragrant mist, cloudlike tresses, are wet, Clear moonglow, jade arms, are cold. When will we stand together before the window, Until the tears on both our cheeks are dry?
There is a forlorn feeling about "fragrant mist" and "cloudlike tresses" being "wet" and of "clear moonglow'' and "jade arms" being "cold," but there is certainly nothing in the Chinese that is unappealing in these images, which reflect Du Fu's longing to be back with his spouse. The predominance of the color green in the associations of jade in English ("a tough, compact, gem stone, commonly green; the color jade green") imposes a semantic burden that images involving white jade cannot sustain.12 More complex and farreaching complexities arise, however, when such decisive abstractions as religions and cosmologies are involved. The presentation of Chinese literature during the Victorian period introduced uncounted distortions that have bedeviled the study of Chinese in the Englishspeaking West. The Victorian period was, arguably, the worst era in which to introduce Chinese literature into English: its ornate and verbose style, its weighty and portentous tone, its lumbering, often inverted syntax—nothing could be further from the quicksilver, mercurial, and allusive nature of much traditional Chinese literature. The rhetoric of Victorian language aside, the gospel of colonization, blending peculiarly 12.
Another, less consequential, example occurred in the popular television series Shogun, in which "pillowing" was used as a disarming euphemism for sexual union. Charming as this image is—particularly if the doubled "l's" turn liquid in the cleartoned voice of a beautiful Japanese actress—the object denoted in "pillowing," "pillow," is far from the soft, fluffy, innocent item of the boudoir that readers of English imagine. For "pillows" in the Orient, until modern times, were hard, shaped like a block, and made of wood or porcelain.
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Western notions of material progress with Christian meliorism, could not be more inhospitable to a clear and unobstructed view of certain Chinese ways of thinking. The nineteenth century was dominated by the masterly but misguided translations of James Legge, an English missionary whose view of China and the Chinese was tinted (if not tainted) by his failure to see them on their own terms; this shortcoming was especially evident in his definitive and influential renderings of the Confucian canon, which emerged from his translation as highly civilized but fatally secular versions of Christian dogma. To cite but a few instances, let us look at Legge's commentary (1894) on the Confucian classic Zhongyong (Chungyung , The Doctrine of the Mean). After some consideration of the sages who are "absolutely perfect, full of knowledge and righteousness," whose existence Confucius acknowledges, Legge is offended at the impious suggestion that anyone but Christ could claim to be a perfect sage. And when he contrasts the views expressed in the Zhongyong with those in the Bible, he is not making a comparative study of religions but, rather, a clear refutation of heathen teaching using the undisputed authority of Christian revelation: I need not say that these sentiments are contrary to the view of human nature which are presented in the Bible. The testimony of Revelation is that "there is not a just man upon earth that doeth good and sinneth not." [p. 51]
The passion of the missionary overwhelms the scrupulousness of the scholar in such passages as these: It is a rude awakening from its complacency of centuries which China has now received. Its ancient landmarks are swept away. . . . Disorganization will go on to destroy it more and more, and yet there is hope for the people, with their venerations for the relations of society, with their devotion to learning, and with their habits of industry and sobriety;—there is hope for them, if they will look away from all their ancient sages, and turn to Him, who sends them, along with the dissolution of their ancient state, the knowledge of Himself, the only living and true God, and of Jesus Christ whom He hath sent. [p. 108]
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Still, what may be forgiven as excessive proselytizing zeal cannot be excused when it involves racism of the kind evident in the following passage assessing Confucius and his influence: There has been a tendency to advance, and Confucius has all along been trying to carry the nation back. Principles have been needed, and not "proprieties." The consequence is that China has increased beyond its ancient dimensions, while there has been no corresponding development of thought. Its body politic has the size of a giant, while it still retains the mind of a child. Its hoary age is in danger of becoming but senility. [p. 107]
However plausible some of these remarks may be (and similar sentiments were expressed by Chinese intellectuals of the nineteenth century as well as Maoists of the twentieth), the frame of mind behind these remarks is hardly one which is likely to understand, much less represent accurately, philosophies and sentiments foreign to its experience. This wellintended but wrongheaded patronage of Chinese culture and cosmology sometimes took on more vicious and outrageous forms, as in the outcry in 1879 by no less a scholar than F. Max Müller, whose Sacred Books of the East was decisive for generations in presenting the culture of the Orient to the West: "It cannot be too strongly stated," Müller wrote, "that the chief and, in many cases, the only interest of the Sacred Books of the East is historical; that much of them is extremely childish, tedious, if not repulsive, and that no one but the historian will be able to understand the lessons which they teach." (See Müller 1879:xliii; quoted by Dawson 1967:57; see Chaudhuri 1974:352ff.) This Christocentric, Eurocentric perspective somehow viewed China as a culture that was lacking in reason, with a language deficient in syntax, a cosmology diminished in grandeur, a metaphysics impoverished by excessive preoccupation with the trivial, the nominalistic, and the concrete. Of logos, either in its Greek form or in its New Testament version, this view maintained, the Chinese knew nothing. Happily, contemporary translators are not all Christian apologists, or even nativeborn Westerners: their approach is, for the most part, admittedly personal if not subjective; many are transplanted Chinese, others have valiantly sought to immerse them
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selves in Chinese culture—even when they have never set foot in China (Arthur Waley, for example). The modern wave of translators is generally without religious or ideological bias; their interest is in the work primarily for its own sake. The Tower of Babel and the House of Cards The twentieth century has witnessed the emergence of philosophy as, at base, a critique of language. Foremost among these explorers of meaning and logic is Wittgenstein, who provides us with a text from his Philosophical Investigations (1953:48e) for our concluding remarks: Where does our investigation get its importance from, since it seems only to destroy everything interesting, that is, all that is great and important? (As it were all the buildings, leaving behind only bits of stone and rubble.) What we are destroying is nothing but houses of cards and we are clearing up the ground of language on which they stand.
The image of languages as buildings, of stone and rubble, recalls the decisive biblical myth of the Tower of Babel. The destruction of this edifice, its reduction to "bits of stone and rubble," is the central enterprise of much modern philosophy. In a sense, each translation may be viewed in the same perspective: as a house of cards Its mode of existence is contingent—on the priority of the original; its validity is compromised—by the numerous intractabilities of language, its integrity is undermined—in the shifting contexts and nuances of human experience. Yet this frail vessel, like Plato's notion of artistic imitation twice removed from reality, has been indispensable for the development of human culture itself. This compromised form of discourse, translation, far from being an aberration and an imposture, turns out to be a decisive medium of what the anthropologists call acculturation. Yet, despite its importance, we know very little of its special laws and its critical vagaries. It may be that a study of translation is the next quantum leap for progress in philosophy: if philosophy is, at bottom, a critique of language, a universal philosophy may have to be a critique of translation. An examination of our image of China through its literature in
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translation will reveal as much about ourselves as about the Chinese: the lens through which we observe is not entirely transparent, for it reflects our own image even while it admits the object in view. The disparities between the image reflected and the image projected must then be differentiated as to whether the differences are those of perception or those inherent in dissimilar objects. In a real sense, the "dim emblazonings" of Chinese literature seen in English translation are intimations of a strange object made familiar, as well as of something familiar made uncannily strange.
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6— Translation As Excommunication: Notes toward an Intraworldly Poetics Let us begin with two very famous quotes, one ancient, one modern. In Chapter 22 of the Zhuangzi (Chuangtzu), the Yellow Emperor says:
"Those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know. Therefore the sage practices the teaching that has no words." [Watson 1968:235; Zhuangzi, SPPY 7:23b]
It is not insignificant that the Yellow Emperor's interlocutor is "Knowledge."1 The primacy of existence beyond words, indeed before words, is a recurrent refrain through Daoist literature. But its attack on language is, nevertheless, through language. Note, also, that the colloquy between Knowledge and the Yellow Emperor is between equals of like mind: Knowledge has just said to the Yellow Emperor: "You and I know . . ." In the preface and at the end of Wittgenstein's Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus (1961), the now famous declaration occurs: "Und wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muss man schweigen."2 The 1.
The phrase "those who know do not speak; those who speak do not know" also occurs in the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching) in Chapter 56; the phrase "the sage practices the teaching that has no words" occurs in Chapter 2. 2.
" . . . And what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence," Tractatus, pp. 2–3; the final sentence in the Tractatus substitutes sprechen (speak) for reden (talk), pp. 150–151.
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immediately preceding contexts for these virtually identical statements, however, vary. In the preface, Wittgenstein summarizes in one sentence the entire Tractatus: Mann könnte den ganzen Sinn des Buches etwa in die Worte fassen: Was sich überhaupt sagen lässt, lässt sich klar sagen; und wovon man nicht reden kann, darüber muss man schweigen.3
At the end, one encounters surely the most curious and ironic formulation from a logical positivist: Meine Sätze erläutern dadurch, dass sie der, welcher mich versteht, am Ende als unsinnig erkennt, wenn er durch sie—auf ihnen—über sie hinausgestiegen ist. (Er muss sozusagen die Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinausgestiegen ist.) Er muss dies Sätze überwinden, dann sieht er die Welt richtig.4
The emphasis on clarity in the preface relating to that which can be said—"Was sich überhaupt sagen lässt, lässt sich klar sagen"—is reminiscent of another passage in the Zhuangzi: the discussion is on the dialectical contingency of words, the mutual presumption of opposites, where the one elicits the other; at the end, the appeal is for "clarity" or ''enlightenment": ming is, in Chinese, ambivalent, for it may elucidate what is already known or it may illuminate with a higher understanding.5 The reference at the end of the Tractatus to the ladder which must be thrown away after one has climbed it—"Er muss sozusagen die 3.
"The whole sense of the book might be summed up in the following words. what can be said at all can be said clearly, and what we cannot talk about we must pass over in silence"—Tractatus, pp 2–3. 4.
"My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them—as steps—to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright"—Tractatus, pp. 150–151. 5.
"But if we want to right their wrongs and wrong their rights, then the best thing to use is clarity"—Watson, p. 39. Wingtsit Chan renders ming as "the light (of Nature)": "But to show that what each regards as right is wrong or to show that what each regards as wrong is right, there is no better way than to use the light (of Nature)"—Chan (1963:182). The word "elucidations"—Wittgenstein's erläutern—might also translate ming.
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Leiter wegwerfen, nachdem er auf ihr hinaufgestiegen ist"—recalls a passage from Chapter 26 of the Zhuangzi, which offers analogies not from house construction but from fishing and hunting:6
My purpose in comparing these passages from two philosophers at different ends of the historical and cultural spectrum, and at seemingly opposite poles of the philosophical universe, is not to prove or even to suggest that Zhuangzi influenced Wittgenstein.7 Rather, it is to focus on two aspects of language central to a discussion of translation: one, the disposability of language which is a function of its utility; two, the ineffability of meanings which establishes the limitations of discourse. That the formulation of these notions also provides us with texts in which we can examine these aspects is both fortuitous and inevitable. It seems to me that Zhuangzi and Wittgenstein are approaching the same insight from opposite directions. Zhuangzi's understanding of the world is intuitive, anecdotal, concrete; Wittgenstein's is analytical, aphoristic, abstract. Zhuangzi persuades by the rhetoric of familiarity and by psychological verisimilitude. What he says convinces us (if it does convince us) by the degree to which we recognize the circumstances he describes. Wittgenstein persuades by the logic of propositions and by analytical clarity. What he says convinces us by the degree to which we see the consistency of what he asserts. What is similar about both postulations is the depen 6.
SPPY 9:6a. "The fish trap exists because of the fish; once you've gotten the fish, you can forget the trap. The rabbit snare exists because of the rabbit; once you've gotten the rabbit, you can forget the snare. Words exist because of meaning; once you've gotten the meaning, you can forget the words. Where can I find a man who has forgotten words so I can have a word with him?"—(Watson, p. 302). 7.
The question remains open. German translations of the Zhuangzi were available in his lifetime. Richard Wilhelm published his translation of Zhuangzi, under the title Tsi—Das Wahre Buch vom Südlicher Blütenland (Jena: Diedrichs), in 1912. Wittgenstein may have had access to this edition. Herbert Giles published his Chuangtzu: Mystic, Moralist, and Social Reformer in 1889; James Legge completed his version for The Sacred Books of the East in 1891.
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dency on analogy and example, the emphatic declarativeness of statement (not to be underestimated as a rhetorical device), and the intimation not only of what is understood but also of what is not understood. "Alle Philosophie ist 'Sprachkritik,'" Wittgenstein wrote (1953:37); and the two philosophers who have left the most profound critiques of language are Zhuangzi and Wittgenstein. Because their critiques originate from opposite poles of the cognitive continuum, one might not unreasonably expect both analytical and intuitive validation on those points where they agree, or where their lines of speculation intersect. The disparity between meaning and words that elicit meaning is apposite to a consideration of translation, for the validity of translation as an object of epistemological (not merely historical or cultural) study is what I should like to establish as one of the cornerstones in the field of comparative literature. Translation is one area which this discipline shares with no other.8 In another passage from the Tractatus Wittgenstein writes: "Language disguises thought. So much so, that from the outward form of the clothing it is impossible to infer the form of the thought beneath it, because the outward form of the clothing is not designed to reveal the form of the body, but for entirely different purposes" (pp. 36–37). The metaphor comparing language to thought not only as expression but as disguise can be easily transposed to the relationship of a translation to its original.9 A translation, allowing for 8.
The study of influence and the reception of authors across linguistic borders is part of the burgeoning "Comparative History of Literatures," a project sponsored by the International Comparative Literature Association. But even language studied within its own cultural context may be comparative: the AngloSaxon and Norman influence on the development of the English language and English literature, the influence of Buddhist canons in Pali and Sanskrit on Chinese; the decisive role of the Hebrew Old Testament and the Greek New Testament on a host of European literatures—all provide examples of comparative approaches in an intracultural context. The study of the relations of literature with other forms of human expression may also be undertaken within a national literature, and while they may involve different semiotic systems, they need not refer to phenomena outside one culture. The still to be developed field of comparative poetics constitutes another discipline that can be addressed only from the use of comparative approaches. 9.
Consider Renato Poggioli's characterization: "Translating . . . endeavors to give the verbal composition a strange clothing, a changed body" (Brower 1959:139).
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variable competencies of individual translators and for various factors of translatability, both discloses the original and keeps it hidden. The reader encounters the original through translation, yet the translation is, in some measure, an impediment to the original. (In this sense, a bad translation can be both a blessing as well as a catastrophe: for if the reader dismisses the original as of no worth on account of the translation, it precludes the original and consigns it to oblivion;10 but if it entices the reader, despite [or because of] its failings, to confront the original, then the net effect may be enhanced access to the original.) A good translation has the converse difficulty: it will more nearly replace the original to which it is superior in accessibility (for the foreign reader), yet it will, in some measure, preserve the original, though in modified form. Examples of catastrophically bad translations are difficult to certify, since the catastrophe consists of the original never being approached again by a translator; examples of "beneficial" bad translations will yield the identity of the original, whereas the translator will often be lost to memory: the Travels of Marco Polo and The White Pony, edited by Robert Payne, comprising translations of classical Chinese poetry from many hands, are two examples of wellknown translated work where the translators are scarcely known at all. Yet the seeming contradiction of language disguising as well as expressing thought, and of translation conveying the original yet replacing it, has a familiar analogue in the operations of the human intellect. In his Philosophical Investigations (1953:143–144), Wittgenstein posed the following scenario, familiar in every language: We speak of understanding a sentence in the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same; but also in the sense in which it cannot be replaced by any other. (Any more than one musical theme can be replaced by another.) In the one case, the thought in the sentence is something common to different sentences; in the other, something that is expressed only by these words in these positions. (Understanding a poem.)
The act of translation, then, is an activity parallel to the act of 10.
Qian Zhongshu (Ch'ien Chungshu) made the same point many years ago in Wenxue yanjiu jikan, Vol. 1 (1964); cf. "Lin Ch'innan Revisited," Renditions 5 (Autumn 1975):10.
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understanding—which is, in brief, the theme of George Steiner's first chapter in After Babel, "Understanding as Translation." But Wittgenstein's parable of language being at one remove from thought reminds one of two other formulations, each from ancient philosophy. In the Chinese classic, the Yijing (Iching , The Book of Changes), there is a phrase which reads in translation: "Speech does not exhaust meaning; writing does not exhaust speech."11 In the Yijing, written discourse is at two removes from meaning. A comparable formulation, one recalls, involves not meaning, but reality, and not discourse, but poetry; the author of the critique is, of course, Plato. For him, poets were prevaricators who give a false imitation of phenomenal reality, which, in its stead, is a false image of noumenal reality, the realm of Ideas, a world which—being unchanging and eternal—is the only true Reality. The transposition of these three relations—of language and thought in Wittgenstein, of meaning and written discourse in the Yijing, of poetry and reality in Plato— suggests the distrust provoked by articulate expression or discourse, whether oral or written, narrative or poetic. "Those who know do not speak, those who speak do not know." It is also reminiscent of the distrust of translators embodied forever in the Machiavellian formulation: traditore traduttore—"The translator is a traitor!" The translator stands in danger of excommunication because of his transgressions on the original and his betrayals of the original language. Yet aside from the vulnerabilities to which every translator is subject—ignorance, lack of talent, lack of ability—there is, even in the perfect translation, a sacrilege being performed on the original text. In each language, the function of excluding, of labeling as the other, of betraying the outsider—in short, of "excommunicating," leaving out of the discourse—is as important a function as conveying meaning, as communicating. Like a laser, language is not light diffuse and dispersed but light targeted, concentrated on a group of language cohorts, and uncommunicative for anyone else. To intrude on this solidarity is to invade a private cultural space, to infiltrate the cabal. Language is esoteric, translation 11.
For the sake of fluency, I have translated as "exhaust," but one intends by it "comprehensive transmission without loss." Another rendering might be: "Speech does not fully express thought; writing does not fully express speech."
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exoteric. One communicates to those within; the other communicates to those without. An instance of the hermetic deictics of language occurred a few years ago when I was consulted by a Chinese teacher of English in Beijing about some texts that were published in a "primer" for foreign students of English (in this case Chinese).12 Though these teachers had been teaching English for many years and had a superb command of the language, there were still a few passages in the excerpted texts that eluded their understanding. Many of these passages involved poor writing; others, obscure or difficult concepts unfamiliar to students unacquainted with English culture. (One piece was a wryly amusing snippet of Max Beerbohm which only cultivated English readers could be expected to enjoy.) One "problem passage," however, puzzled me, for it came from the pen of Harold Nicholson, whose prose is a model of clarity and suppleness. When I looked at the text, a disquisition on the attitude toward truth among the Victorians, it hardly looked like a passage that would present difficulties: the writing was limpid and graceful, the exposition clearly articulated, the topic of universal interest and application. "Truth, therefore, is an attitude of the mind," Nicholson wrote. ''It is important, if one does not wish to inconvenience and to bore one's friends, not to tell lies" ("On Telling the Truth," in Small Talk; see Alexander 1967:123). Certainly nothing here that can't be easily understood. The passage concludes: "Spoken lies are invariably tiresome and may actually be dishonest. But continuous lying in the mind, a disease to which the AngloSaxon is peculiarly exposed, spells the destruction of human thought and character" (p. 124). These sentences are obvious in meaning and can hardly be thought opaque. Whether one agrees with the statements is something else, but there can be no difficulty, or so I thought, with understanding what Nicholson is trying to say. "What's the problem with this passage?" I asked the Chinese teacher of English. "What don't you understand about it?" "Well, is Nicholson saying that the AngloSaxon character is particularly inclined toward lying?" "Yes," I replied, tentatively, still unclear as to the problem. 12.
The book was Fluency in English: An Integrated Course for Advanced Students, by L. G. Alexander, in the "New Concept English" Series, published by Longman in 1967.
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"Then, is he also saying that other races tell the truth more than the AngloSaxon? For instance, that the Chinese tell the truth more often than the AngloSaxon?" "Well, yes and no," I temporized, finally realizing what the dilemma was. In Nicholson's passage, there is no ambiguity of meaning, but there is ambiguity of phenomenal context. In addressing an English readership, his critique of "continuous lying in the mind" is a trenchant indictment of the AngloSaxon character. The knowledgeable reader cannot help but be influenced by both the correctness and truthfulness of the style, and (if he knows it) the patrician English background of the author. Nicholson's statement makes no comprehensive survey on the penchant for lying in other cultures: there is no claim of comparativeness. "Lying is a disease to which the AngloSaxon is peculiarly exposed": the use of ''peculiarly" stops short of "uniquely" or "particularly." The sense of "peculiarly" suggests "characteristically." Yet the difficulty of the passage lies not in the complications of syntax, or even of semantics, but in the deictic restrictedness of discourse, in the passage's "here and now." Surely, if Harold Nicholson had realized that among his readers would be Chinese learning English, who might take his point as implying a greater honesty among the nonEnglish cultures, he might have added a disclaimer restricting the bearing of his comments to those cultures where the point may apply; he might have disavowed any comparisons with cultures with which he was unacquainted. The deictic context of discourse delimits Nicholson's meaning; once the discourse departs from this context, however, confusion is inevitable and not to be dispelled by more detailed analyses of grammar, syntax, or semantics. One of the meanings violated by the transposition of context is the sense of deictic identity: the "here and now" is falsely translated. The implicit presumption of a deictic frame of reference, of a language defining the center of consciousness, is as familiar to the Occidental West as to Oriental China. Indeed, the presumed deictic "centers" in the English language embody a disparity between actual and semantic distance. In the United States, as in England, the terms "Near East" and "Far East" designate the same two parts of the world. Yet these relative markers of distance preserve a deictic aptness only for the Englishman (or the Englishspeaking
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European) that does not apply to Englishspeakers in other parts of the world. The countries of Asia Minor are nearer than China and Japan only for Europeans. For those in the Western Hemisphere speaking English, Iraq and Turkey are further away—in geographical distance—than the countries of the "Far East." Californians, for example, find the "Far East" closer by far than the ''Near East." Yet for Americans reading English, the countries of the Levant appear semantically closer than the countries of the Extreme Orient—despite the actual distances involved. Nor can this disparity be dismissed as a mere triviality of historical etymology— for, as Edward Said has contentiously shown, the prejudiced, Eurocentric view of the Orient has determined not only what the Western student learns about Asia, but also how he feels about it. Said (1978:39) cites but one of countless examples (which might be juxtaposed ironically to Harold Nicholson's just cited observation about AngloSaxons): Orientals are inveterate liars, they are "lethargic and suspicious," and in everything oppose the clarity, directness, and nobility of the AngloSaxon race.
Said is quoting from Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer's Modern Egypt, published in 1909: the "Orientals" in the passage refer to Egyptians. Incidentally, this passage provides another instance of deictic delimitation, for though the passage is written by Said, embedding a quote from Lord Cromer, the context makes clear that these are not Said's sentiments; his commentary paraphrases Cromer with explicit and emphatic disapproval. His most telling points are often those in which he merely cites the blatant Eurocentric declarations without authorial comment. Misinterpretations of language taken out of context are familiar enough, but they are possible precisely because it is possible to take the esoteric aspect of language exoterically. 13.
This is implicit in the phrases "ExtrêmeOrient" and "ProcheOrient" in French and "das Ostasien" in German. "Das Morgenland" in German (the land of the morning, the land of the rising sun) preserves a deictic premise that will seem odd to the resident of the "Western" Hemisphere, who looks west to the lands of the "rising sun," looks west to East Asia, and for whom the "Far East" is nearer than the "Near East."
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These examples do not, however, address the question whether all languages are esoteric to the same degree. Few would deny that Chinese, particularly literary Chinese, is a more contextoriented language—more elliptical and allusive—than many other languages and can therefore be considered a more esoteric language than, say, Latin, which has been adapted selectively out of the exclusively Roman, or Romanic, context for use in such modern disciplines as law, botany, religion. Greek still provides much of the technical terminology in fields that are, in effect, detached from classical Greek culture. Japanese has clearly exoteric features, symbolized and perpetuated by the incorporation of katakana syllabary, which marks foreign terms in Japanese. Every language is, of course, to some degree esoteric and exoteric,14 but the exchange of meaning through translation is not equal: translation is communicative but not commutative. Translating a work in language A to language B is not equivalent (in either difficulty or significance) to translating the same work from language B to language A. The effect of the different degrees of esoterica in various languages, and their effect on literary and cultural history, will be dealt with later. Only in translation, and through the process of transposing a work from one linguistic medium to another, can the nature of a culture as well as its deictic and esoteric emphasis be disclosed. The native of a culture will know its literature firsthand, and with a habitual familiarity that will blind him to some of its characteristics, but the outsider, limited though he may be in his unfamiliarity, but with the perspective of a broader vision, will have a better idea of what that literature is and how it compares. In another context, D. H. Lawrence (1930:2) made the following observation: Man is a changeable beast, and words change their meanings with him, and things are not what they seemed, and what's what becomes what isn't, and if we think we know where we are it's only because we are so rapidly being translated to somewhere else. 14.
There is a connection between my designations of languages as "esoteric" vs. "exoteric" and Edward Hall's characterization of cultures as "highcontext" and "lowcontext." English and German cultures he characterizes as ''lowcontext"; French as "highcontext."
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Whether translated well or badly "to somewhere else," a study of translations—focusing on the failure of bad translation as well as the failure of good translation—has much to tell us about the nature not only of the work being translated but also the language from which the work emerges. In these preliminary notes toward an "intraworldly poetics," I have explored the richness of translation as a field of study, not as techne but as episteme. Inevitably, I may have generalized, perhaps excessively, but I remain convinced that the subject deserves the attention of those whose gifts in language and literary analysis commend them to this pursuit. For translation indicates where we have been and where we are to go; it has been the "subversive" element in the currents of history. As such, it has not always attracted major attention within each culture and has been relegated to expatriates, exiles, emigrés. But we now live in a postbiblical exilic age, between a largely Babelian and a primarily postBabelian era; in the existential sense, we are migrants, terrestrial—not extraterrestrial—aliens. In order to carry out Socrates' admonition to ''Know Thyself," we must learn to know not just ourselves but also the other, even to know the other as the self, and the self as the other. In the century to come, technology will unify the world as never before, but it will not extinguish the differences between us, it will not erase our individual character. Technology will, in effect, eliminate the physical distance between us, but psychological distances will remain; it will provide us with a new perspective, where there will be no East or West that's "Near" or "Far," no factitious "Abendland" to designate the West, no "Morgenland" to specify the East: "twilight" will not connote the Occident nor "dawn" the Orient. There are no absolute markers of deictic direction: the center of civilization, to paraphrase Augustine, is everywhere. Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes saw the West literally as an "occident of history." Outlandish as this pun might sound, it is etymologically sound, since "occident" derives through Middle English and Middle French ultimately from Latin occidens, from occidense, present participle of occidere, to fall, go down. A new day will dawn. But it does not dawn only in the East, for the east is everywhere, and so, evidently, is the west.
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7— The Ship of Theseus: The Ontology of Translation In his Philosophical Explanations, Robert Nozick considers the puzzle of "the ship of Theseus," which raises questions that seem relevant to a consideration of the ontology of translation: What is a translation? What is its mode of being? "The planks of a ship," Nozick writes, "are removed one by one over intervals of time, and as each plank is removed it is replaced by a new plank." Gradually all the planks are replaced. The ship remains the same ship, even if some parts are replaced. However, the story, the puzzle, pursues the matter further: ''It turns out that the planks removed had not been destroyed but were stored carefully; now they are brought together again in their original shiplike configuration. Two ships float on the waters, side by side. Which one, wondered the Greeks, is the original?" (Nozick 1981:33). To apply the analogy, let us consider the Bible: in the case of the Old Testament, the original ship was written (built) in Hebrew; the New Testament, in Aramaic and Koine Greek. Both languages—like the boards on the deteriorating ship—were worn by age and had to be replaced with new languages (planks). First, there was the translation into Greek, which produced the Septuagint. Then, there was the widely accepted translation of St. Jerome in the fourth century, the Latin Vulgate.1 Translations into contemporary vernaculars included Italian, French, English, and German; of the 1.
The vernacular character of the languages in the original was not overlooked by Jerome's Vulgate, which, though a classical and literary language to moderns, was in its own time a vernacular.
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scores of English translations and versions, the best known is the King James Version of the Bible, the Authorized Version of 1611. It was not until the twentieth century, with the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the 1940s, that the "old planks" of the original were discovered. The puzzle that the ship of Theseus presents is the ontological question: which version is the real Bible? What was the Bible? What was the ship of Theseus? The actual ship, with the original planks, which in time deteriorated into disuse as languages died and became extinct? If so, the Bible died with them, and the ship could not "float" ("would not hold water"). Or did the Bible survive through its many transmogrifications, through Jerome's Latin, the King James Version's English, Luther's German? Does the Bible remain the Bible, with new planks built according to the specifications of the old ship? In trying to solve the puzzle of the ship of Theseus, Nozick applies what is called "the closestcontinuer schema," which he reminds us "does not, by itself, answer the question"; it only ''helps to sort out and structure the issues" (p. 33). First Nozick identifies, in the case of ships, "spatiotemporal continuity with continuity of parts, and being composed of the very same parts (in the same configuration)." Even this initial definition creates problems with the Bible, because the Bible is not always composed of the same parts nor does it always appear in the same configuration. Catholic versions of the Bible exclude portions that are to be found in the Protestant versions; there are "Pseudepigraphal" books that belong to certain editions and not to others. Let us, however, lay aside this troublesome untidiness in biblical indeterminacy. Nozick suggests that if one ship exists and the other does not, then, by existential default, the extant ship, the extant Bible, is the closest continuer of the lost original. In his analysis of the closestcontinuer schema, Nozick points out a factor that particularly applies to translation: To say that something is a continuer of x is not merely to say its properties are qualitatively the same as x's, or resemble them. Rather it is to say they grow out of x's properties, are causally produced by them, are to be explained by x's earlier having had its properties, and so forth. [p. 35]
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That all translations may be said to relate to their originals as effect relates to cause, few would deny, but there may be an insistence that, of the various versions of the original in various languages, the closest continuer should be that which is most faithful to the original. But faithful for whom? Let us assume that, in a polyglot world where everyone speaks not just one universal language (say, Esperanto), nor even many languages, but all languages, then the closest continuer would be that version which most resembles the original, or could show the most spatiotemporal continuity with the original, or were composed most nearly of the same parts, in the same configuration. The lost texts of the Bible, in forgotten languages, would no longer be "our" Bible; its closest extant continuer would be that Bible. But, in the world after Babel, there is neither one language nor universal polyglot command over all languages. For each speaker of the languages in which a translation exists, that translation (if there is only one) becomes, in effect, the closest continuer. (The case of differing translations within the same language will be considered later.) With this analysis, we posit a concept of translation (in the case of a lost or forgotten original) that is less subordinate, less contingent: the translation replaces the original in a valid ontological sense. The translation, faute de mieux, becomes an original. To return to the ontology of the ship, it would appear that the ship of Theseus was not the exact construct of the actual boards that went into it, but an entity that embodied certain properties and conformed to certain configurations. Whatever it was, it is clear what the ship of Theseus is not: it is not the remnants of the original, nor the original boards of the ship disassembled.2 Translation is like the closest continuer of the original: in the case of lost originals—either 2.
Nozick indicates that the "closest continuer theory . . . need not involve temporal continuity" (p. 35), but he designates "y as the same . . . as x" at one point, "only if, first, y's properties" at a subsequent point ''stem from, grow out of, are causally dependent on x's properties" at the first point, and, second, that "there is no other z" at the second point that stands in a closer (or as close) relationship to x at the first point than y does at the second. An exact replica, it seems to me, fits this scheme: where the original for the replica still exists, it is the closest continuer; in the absence of the original, the replica would, presumably, be "the closest continuer."
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because the text is lost or because the languages in which the text was recorded are no longer active—translation takes the place of the original, which is not to say that it is identical with the original or an equivalent. The properties of the ship of Theseus can be identified: it has a certain form; it performed a certain function (one of which was to float); it occupied a certain space. The original ship was a functioning ship. What translation tries to do, then, is to transpose the properties of the ship of Theseus in another construct, another vessel, perhaps in other seas. One may ask, then, not only what translation 0is, but what does it translate? The words of the original? Then the exact words must be replaced in their exact configuration. Or is it a different construct using different planks (languages) to realize an entity with the same properties as the original ship? In a sense, translation becomes a transposition mutatis mutandis of the experience of the original, embodying in a different context, and in another spatiotemporal field, the same properties as the original. In that sense, translation may be regarded as a complex metaphor; indeed, in some languages, it shares the same etymological sources as the word for metaphor. The word "metaphor," the dictionary tells us, derives from the French metaphore, from the Greek word metaphora, which derives from the word metapherein, meaning "to carry over, transfer, from meta, beyond, over + pherein, to bring, bear." The English word "translate" derives from the Latin translatus, used as a past participle of transferre, to transfer, but from a different root. This notion of "carrying beyond,'' of "transferring," is clear from the German word übersetzen, literally, to "cross over," to "ferry over." There are two principal similarities between translation and metaphor: the existence of two comparable fields of meaning and the positing of a relationship in one realm to elucidate the relationship in another realm. A metaphor is traditionally defined as "a trope of transference in which an unknown or something imperfectly known is clarified, defined, described in terms of a known" (Preminger et al. 1965:490). A translation may be similarly defined as a "technique of transference in which an unknown or imperfectly known is clarified, defined, described in terms of a known." Metaphors take the form of "A is [like] B" or "A is as B." What is crucial about the
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metaphor is the aptness, appropriateness, validity of the A/B parallel. If we use metaphor itself as a metaphor for translation, then we may suggest that a translation posits a relationship in the same way a metaphor posits a parallel between A and B. A translation may be viewed as a metaphor of the original in another language. The A in the proposition is itself the relationship of the original to the language context from which it emerged; the B is the relationship of the translation to its language context. If the A/B comparison is apt, appropriate, valid, then the translation may be said to be good. The translation may be judged in the same way that a metaphor might be judged. To adopt a clearer analysis implicit in the metaphor, let us posit a field of cultural meaning for the source language, X, and a field of cultural meaning for the target language, Y. If A is the original and B the translation and if X and Y are the contexts of meaning in the source and the target languages, respectively, then the process of translation (as opposed to the actual translated work) may be characterized as recreating, not the work (A), but rather the relationship of A to X in a new relationship: B to Y. We can establish the attributes for translation in the same way we might for metaphor: following Wayne Booth, we may suggest that a metaphor is contextdependent; like other deliberate rhetorical deviations, in metaphor "more is communicated than the words literally say"; in metaphor, "what is being compared are two things, not just two words; in this case, they are two situations which could be unpacked as an elaborate analogy" (Sacks 1979:51–52). If metaphor and translation are, to this extent, homologous,3 then one can apply the same criteria in judging good metaphors as in judg 3.
The Mexican poet Octavio Paz has remarked: "Every translation is a metaphor of the poem translated. . . . In this sense, the phrase, 'poetry is untranslatable' is the exact equivalent of the phrase 'all poetry is translatable.' The only possible translation is poetic transmutation or metaphor. But I would also say that in writing any original poem, we are translating the world, we are transmuting it. Everything we do is translation, and all translations are in a way creations"—quoted by Alastair Reid, New Yorker, 8 November 1976, p. 176. See also Paul Valéry, quoted in Brower (1959:74): "Writing anything at all, as soon as the act of writing requires a certain amount of thought and is not a mechanical and unbroken inscribing of spontaneous inner speech, is a work of translation exactly comparable to that of transmuting a text from one language to another."
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ing good translations. If we adopt selectively those proposed by Wayne Booth, we have the following: 1. Good metaphors . . . are active, lending the energy of animated things to whatever is less energetic or more abstract. 2. Good . . . metaphors are concise. . . . [A metaphor] says more with less. 3. Good metaphors are appropriate. 4. [Good metaphors] . . . must be properly accommodated to the audience. 5. Finally . . . metaphor should build a proper ethos for the speaker. [Sacks, pp. 54–55] The premises behind the need for metaphor seem to apply as well to the need for translation: that which is significant but inaccessible to the interlocutor is presented in terms that are accessible. The function appears also to be the same: to transpose into a context of understanding, a familiar field of meaning, something that is "foreign" and eludes understanding. If it can be claimed that "the development of civilizations is essentially a progression of metaphors" (Doctorow 1977:62), how much more persuasively might the same claim be made about translations, "that the development of civilizations is essentially a progression of translations." The consequences of the transfer of meaning through metaphor, and of culture through translation, involve a progression, not an equation; what is being transposed, even if exactly rendered in its constituent details (the planks of the ship of Theseus), will be set in a different context (float on a different ocean). The process of translating reconstructs as well as possible the relationship of a work in the context of the original language into another language. The objective of translating is not to produce a replica but to reenact a relationship—just as metaphor chooses different referents to establish similar or parallel relationships. The ontology of translation is further complicated by a confused sense of the "original." One recognizes that "originals" do not spring ex nihilo, that they are, ontologically, one work in its contemporary period and another work in subsequent periods—the ancient folk songs in the Shijing were, at some point, "natural" expressions of human feelings; they became arcane political allegories
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to centuries of Confucian commentators. The establishment of the canonical biblical texts is fraught with uncertainties, however definitive later exegetes have claimed to be about the "canon."4 We can now return to the two warrants that Wittgenstein posed for understanding a sentence: "the sense in which it can be replaced by another which says the same" and "the sense in which it cannot be replaced by another." Translation provides both kinds of understanding; it manifests understanding by replacing the original, at the same time it shows that the original is irreplaceable.5 The ontology of translation is thus twofold: contingent and sui generis. The two senses of understanding a sentence respond to the dual aspect of language itself, to its esoteric and its exoteric impulse. That this double aspect is embodied in the Old Testament, which is both "intracommunicative" and "excommunicative," can be seen in a passage from 2 Esdras 14 (roughly contemporary with Josephus, A.D. 37?–100): Ezra prayed for the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, so that he might rewrite the text of the scriptures which had been destroyed by fire. He subsequently dictated to five amanuenses, during a period of forty days, what had been revealed to him, amounting in all to ninetyfour books: twentyfour for general publication and use, seventy to be reserved for "the wise among your people." The smaller group of writings . . . were accepted as forming the authoritative scriptures of Judaism (five books of the Law, eight books of the Prophets, and eleven books of the Writings). The larger group, being esoteric in character, must presumably have consisted of apocalyptic books, read and understood only by the initiated. [Greenslade 1963:I, 115] 4.
Consider Peter R. Ackroyd on the Old Testament: "The search for origins must be undertaken if we are to understand the literature as it developed within Israel; but the discovery of origin does not by itself explain the nature of the context and the use to which it is put must be considered"; on the New Testament, C. F. Evans: "The history of the development of the New Testament Canon is the history of the process by which books written for the most part for other purposes and from other motives came to be given this unique status"—The Cambridge History of the Bible (Cambridge, 1970), vol. 1, pp. 67, 235. 5.
"Gabriel García Marquez insists that he prefers the English translation [Gregory Rabassa's version of Cien Años de Soledad, "One Hundred Years of Solitude"] to the original— which is tantamount to saying they are interchangeable"; cf. New Yorker, 8 November 1976, p. 199.
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The translator must respectfully render both the transparent (exoteric) and the opaque (esoteric) part of the text. For in the first, the message must be transmitted through words that replace the original, and in the second, a just degree of elusiveness must be preserved. The appropriate degree of opaqueness precludes the unwarranted resort to merely citing the foreign original verbatim, for the esoteric parts in the original would not be as esoteric as a foreign language would be to the reader of the translation: the meaning must be opaque, but not impenetrable.6 Translation, as a process, reproduces a relationship between a work and its field of meaning; translation, as an entity, is the closest continuer of a work in another language. We have not yet addressed the question of various kinds of translation within the same language. Clearly, what is the closest continuer within one language will be superior in accuracy to all other attempts to translate the work. But who is to judge the degree of accuracy? The speaker of the target language? The speaker of the source language? Clearly, neither. For the determiner of the closest continuer of the original must be neither the speaker of the source language nor the speaker of the target language, but both. For only the inhabitant of both fields of meaning can properly assess the fidelity with which the relationship of the original to its field of meaning is preserved in the relationship of the translation to its field of meaning. Yet even translations may be characterized as belonging to different genres: some are "literary" productions; others "scholarly" renderings; still others "exegetical." Some are even "metatranslations," providing the text along with the translation (as with some editions of poetry in translation). One is often asked which translation is better for which purposes. For the student, a translation like David Hawkes' A Little Primer of Tu Fu, which translates the selection of Du Fu (Tu Fu) in the Tangshi sanbaishou, with text, translation commentary, pronunciation guide, and assorted aids, 6.
This injunction does not preclude the use of the original word or term, when that term has assumed a special currency in the target language; such words as "savoir faire," "weltanschauung," "sprezzatura," are less opaque in the target language than totally foreign terms and are their own best translation. However, such terms as "soidisant" and "gungho'' are treacherous; they mean one thing in the original and something different when quoted in another language.
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is enormously accommodating. It is, however, clearly intended for the outside initiate; a native would find much of the apparatus superfluous. Then there are other translations, replete with the densest exegeses, where the diction is arcane (even if it is in the target language); the foreign native will find such a text incomprehensible, and the neophyte will find it tediously unapproachable. In the first instance, the Hawkes, one has a translation that is both esoteric and exoteric in its own right (whatever the nature of the original or target language may be): that is, it addresses itself both to the outsider who has access to the explanation (even if he doesn't command the original) and to the insider, who has access to the text portions provided (even if the explanations in the target language prove elusive). In the second case, one has a translation which is neither exoteric (explanatory to those outside) nor esoteric (explanatory only to the initiated), for the discourse is neither accessible to someone who knows only the target language nor necessary for someone familiar with the source language. What these translations achieve is a pseudo esoterica that is irrelevant to the source language or the target language: a new sublanguage has been created with its own initiates, which excludes both the native familiar with the original texts translated and the nonnative who has not received the requisite specialized training. This form of exposition, far from exposing, makes even more obscure; what it communicates is the "foreignness" of the foreign language. It creates a greater delusion than one encounters facing a foreign language: there, one is never deceived that one understands, because the language is foreign. Here, because of the arcana that one has mastered, the illusion of understanding is strong—even though that understanding corresponds neither to the native's experience of the original nor to the uninitiated nonnative's access to a meaningful translation. In other words, the "expert's" understanding of the original cannot be understood by those who speak the original nor by those who don't. With pseudoesoterica a double delusion occurs: the exegete thinks he understands because of the complexity or intricacy of his exegesis (whereas the native understands without such factitious complications); as for the uninitiated, he is misled into thinking that the original text is more remote, more inaccessible, than it
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really is, because he can't even understand an explanation of it in his own language! I would distinguish these cases from mistranslations, which are errors in transmitting the text: these pseudoesoterica may be accurate in their constituents, yet misguided as a whole. They are untranslations: they do not attempt the transposition, the metaphoric leap, which is involved in every attempt to understand something not immediately accessible. What these untranslations do is to substitute a different obscurity, an artificial difficulty, for a natural but superable obstacle. Whereas one did not understand a text in a foreign language because one did not know that language, now one finds one does not understand the scholarly exegesis even though it is written in one's own language. A fundamental error in the A/X, B/Y relationship has been made. The original is accessible to the foreign native; the translation should be as accessible to the speaker of the target language. But what happens with "untranslations" is that the work in translation is more difficult to read in translation for the user of the target language than the original ever was for the native in the source language. Translations of this kind are notably cliquish and loyal to each other, partly because they are defensive toward critiques from natives (who find them superfluous) and from nonnatives (who find them, at the least, unhelpful and unnecessarily abstruse). But they soon develop into their own esoteric group and speak a metalanguage only to and for each other. In their company, neither the native nor the nonnative has anything worthwhile to say, for they are not initiated into what is regarded by insiders as a privileged form of discourse. Indeed, far from being a bridge between two cultures, this language comprises an additional obstacle to overcome; far from improving communications between speakers of two languages, it interposes a third language that must be mastered before access to the foreign language can be achieved. This situation has been exacerbated in the Chinese case by the hiatus of relationships between the West and the majority population of Chinese in the People's Republic of China that lasted almost thirty years. With the break in contact, the interposition of an intermediary range of discourse was made historically convenient and inevitable, since direct communication was effectively impractical if not impossible. The study of Chinese—more, say, than the study of Japanese—was in escrow during this interregnum, and it
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was largely through the efforts of these intermediaries—sometimes referred to as sinologists—that the academic and intellectual pursuit of knowledge about China was sustained.7 The phenomenon of "Japanology," by contrast, seems more limited, the interchange between Western and Japanese scholars having been enhanced by significant exchange activity during the very period when interchanges between China and the West were obstructed. Indeed, the interchange between Japanese and Western scholars has taken the form of actual collaborations or has assumed a generic dialogue: one thinks of Earl Miner's longterm project of translating Jin'ichi Konishi's multivolume history of Japanese literature or the ToynbeeIkeda Dialogue, published in book form by Kodansha in 1976. It is by now axiomatic to recognize that translation involves interpretation; in that sense, it is a generically hermeneutical act. "That translation is an interpretive art," writes Renato Poggioli, "is a selfevident truth" (Brower 1959:138). "For translation is by its nature interpretation," Joseph Lau insists, "because one cannot convey a foreign message without making a critical comment'' (1979:229). Gregory Rabassa, perhaps the most faithful of contemporary translators, has admitted the interpretativeness of even the most devoted attempts at preserving the original meaning: "There is a situation in which the translator cannot follow the original at all in its linguistic intent, but must accede to his own experience and feelings in his mother tongue" (1974–1975:34). The question of interpretativeness in translation must be divided into two concerns: those within the medium of the original and those in other media. Perhaps the most insightful consideration of various types of interpretation is offered by Poggioli. Some interpreters are performers, Poggioli tells us: as dancers, actors, singers, instrumentalists, they enact the original. Others are decorative (Poggioli's term, though "complementary" might be less pejorative): as scene designers, composers of incidental music, book illustrators, they support the medium with subsidiary efforts in another medium. Poggioli is suggestive when he writes that "the translator 7.
No categorical judgment is being made here about the quality of scholarship by sinologists. As in any category, whether native scholars, foreign popularizers, or bilingual expatriates, some exponents are better than others; however, to prefer a William Hung on Du Fu to David Hawkes, or vice versa, is not a preference as to the quality of scholarship but to the approach.
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. . . is the only interpretive artist working in a medium which is both identical with, and different from, that of the original he sets out to render in his own terms" (Brower, p. 137). Translation involves both performance and decoration. But interpretation between languages suggests that the process of understanding a translation of a foreign text is not generically or categorically different from understanding discourse in a host language: as Steiner says emphatically—"inside or between languages, human communication equals translation" (1975:47). The process of understanding cannot but involve a process of interpretation—Wittgenstein's first sense, in which a sentence can be replaced by another which says the same. Yet there are fundamental differences between Chinese and Western conceptions of language. We encountered the statement from the Yijing: "Writing does not fully express speech; speech does not fully express thought." The thrust of the insight is that from meaning to speech there is a loss, and from speech to writing there is a further loss. Meaning is not nearly so well represented by writing as by speech; both are inadequate, but writing—particularly in phonetic scripts—is even less adequate for conveying meaning than speech. Contrast this view with the statement in the first chapter of Aristotle's De Interpretatione: "Now spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of spoken sounds."8 Whatever the inadequacies of either formulation may be,9 the thrusts of the two formulations are pointing in opposite directions. The Yijing emphasizes the ineffability of meaning, the quiddity of experience; Aristotle emphasizes the expressibility of meaning, the abstractability of meaning through symbols. The Chinese view points to concreteness, the Greek to abstraction. The Yijing stresses the inadequacy of language, what cannot be communicated, while Aristotle focuses on the effectiveness of language and how meaning is represented. In the two points of view, contrasting emphases rather than contradictory propositions, one can see meaning viewed as esoteric (Yijing) and as exoteric (Aristotle). The challenge of translation is to preserve in just proportion this 8.
Ackrill (1963), the translator, indicates that "affections of the soul" are called "thoughts" later in the work; cf. p. 113.
9.
Ackrill writes: "This account of the relations of things in the world, affections in the soul, and spoken and written language is all too brief and far from satisfactory. . . . There are grave weaknesses in Aristotle's theory of meaning" (p. 113).
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dual aspect of language. The adequacy of a translation may be judged—aside from individual lapses—according to whether it preserves that which is communicable in language as well as that which is not. Simplistic popular translations erase the uniqueness of the original; complex, specialized translations exaggerate its inaccessibility. Some translators convey what they view as the original meaning with the exact equivalent, yet the equivalence is merely nominalistic: while the two words designate the same reality (or set of realities), they do not, as words, affect the reader with the same sense or feeling; they do not, to put it as a Chinese might, "bear the same fragrance."10 In that sense the act of translation is to create a nexus of meaning within which the original can be realized. The object to be translated is not the original text, but the construct represented by the original text in the original culture; what must be transmuted is not a series of words, but a context of causes and effects. As Paul Valéry put it: "This is really to translate, which is to reconstitute as nearly as possible the effect of a certain cause . . . by means of another cause" (quoted by Mathews in Brower, p. 75). This process is not unlike the process of original creation, as we have seen, and one is reminded of Eliot's famous dictum on poetic composition, focused on the concept of the objective correlative: "a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked" (1920:100). To modify this concept across language barriers, one might conceive of translation as an implicitly objective correlative that is made explicitly subjective. It is the internalizing in one's own language (assuming one is translating into one's own language) of the external, or foreign, objective correlative. The notion of subjectivity and nonsubjectivity in original com 10.
To translate bi as "cerulean empyrean" would be equally an abomination. Attempts such as these betray the dust of desiccated learning: it shows familiarity with dictionaries, but not with language.
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position is, of course, a familiar one; one encounters it in Keats, whose famous letter to Richard Woodhouse has often been quoted: As to the poetical Character . . . it is not itself—it has no self—It is everything and nothing—It has no character—It enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—it has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet. . . . A poet is the most unpoetical of anything in existence, because he has no identity—he is continually in for—and filling some other body.11
Basho, the Japanese poet, said something similar, but he extended the poet's chameleonic powers beyond even the limitations of human experience: his disciple, Doho, recounts his position: The Master once said: "Learn about pines from pines, and about bamboos from bamboos." What he meant was that the poet must detach himself from his will. Some people, however, interpret the word "learn" in their own ways and never really "learn." ''Learn" means to submerge oneself within an object, to perceive its delicate life and feel its feeling, out of which a poem forms itself. [Ueda 1965:38]
The only difference—and a significant one—is that the English Romantic projects himself into other characters, whereas the Japanese poet projects himself into other beings. Poggioli's portrait of the translator as artist is not unlike: Yet the translator is not an inhibited person; he is rather an uninhibited artist, satisfied only when he is able to lay the burning ashes of his heart in a wellwrought urn outside of himself. Or one can say that he succeeds in overcoming his repression only in his têteàtête with a foreign poet; and that he ends by sublimating his inhibitions through the catharsis of an alien form. Translation is up to a point an exorcism, or, if we prefer, the conjuration, through another spirit, of one's self. [Brower 1959:142] 11.
Letters, edited by Maurice Buxton Forman (1952:226–227). The phrase "in for—and filling" is orthographically uncertain, but there is reason to think that since Keats wrote "in" and "for" close to each other, he might have had in mind the sense of "informing"; cf. p. 227.
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Poggioli provides us with a definition of what a translator is, rather than what translators, different and indifferent, have been. One notices a duality: the translator, extending Keats's factor of "negative capability," is not himself; nor is he the original, "negatively capable" author. We may say that the translator is twice negatively capable. (Some may be, of course, twice negatively incapable.) But this negative capability involves not merely a suppression of one's self and a deference to the original work (or to the original author if that author is bilingual): the translator has a dual allegiance: to the original work and to the language into which he is translating. But, as we have observed, languages are not equivalent means of communicating experience; to the extent that they embody culture, the degree of overlap between languages will vary to the extent that the cultures share a common heritage, or to the extent that they embody universals, in the case of cultures with little or no historical connection. Literal accuracy will sometimes violate contextual fidelity in those cases where an overlap does not exist between the fields of meaning covered in one language and the fields of meaning covered in another. The act of translating is the act of imperfect preservation in another cultural context which will allow the "original" to survive the passing of the context from which it emerged. It requires a projective imagination not unlike the poet's—whether Keats's or Basho's—an ability to populate the authorial self with other, even alien, selves in order to realize these remote originals in a host language and a native culture, so that the "original" might be apprehended ambivalently in "ghostlier demarcations, keener sounds."
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8— Guises and Disguises: The Epistemology of Translation I was once consulted on a translation into Chinese of some English nursery rhymes and had to check the rendering of: Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick.
A simple enough assignment, to be sure. But when I saw the translation, I noticed an anomaly that had never troubled me before in English: "candlestick" was translated as jutai . My immediate response was that this was literally correct, but it was, somehow, also wrong. In Chinese, the nursery rhyme became absurd— more absurd than would be appropriate even for a nursery rhyme: who would be so foolish as to jump over a candle holder? Yet that is what the rhyme said. In remonstrating with the Chinese translator, I indicated that the word "candlestick" in the rhyme is interpreted by every speaker of English as a candle holder with a lighted candle. Contemporary speakers of English will, in reading "candlestick," unwittingly supply the candle and the flame, along with the candlestick.1 Traditional interpretations place an even greater emphasis on the flame, if the following etymology can be credited: ''For centuries, jumping over a candle has been both a sport and a 1.
The following selection of illustrated nursery rhymes all included a lighted candle: The Tall Book of Mother Goose (New York, 1943), p. 35; The Real Mother Goose (Chicago, 1916, 1944), p. 16; The Sesame Street Players Present Mother Goose (New York, 1980, p. 82). Richard Scarry's Best Mother Goose Ever (New York, 1964, 1970), p. 3, shows the candle in the candlestick, but with no flame.
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way of telling fortunes in England. A candlestick with a lighted candle in it was placed on the floor. The person who could jump over it without putting out the flame was assured of having good luck for a full year" (BaringGould 1962:194). The use of the word "candlestick" in the nursery rhyme was, of course, dictated by the exigencies of rhyme, but the meaning was unmistakable, even if implicit. Yet what interests me about the example is that only an outside perspective is likely to shed light on what an insider sees through and, seeing through, fails to notice. A second case involves a reverse instance: translating a contemporary Chinese poem, involving the character of a peasant woman, whose life was so arduous that she had to rinse vegetables in an icy pond, and the turnips she had to cut were frozen hard by the cold. The line read: ) frozen turnips."2 When I showed this problem line to an Americanborn "foreign expert" in Beijing, I mentioned how unavailable the phrase "frozen turnips" was in English, conjuring up, as it must for most readers of English, visions of "Bird's Eye'' and "Snow Crop" brands in the freezer compartments of American supermarkets. Frozen foods are all too familiar, and symbolize convenience, not arduousness. My interlocutor, who had not been in the United States for nearly a generation, but was unaware that she was out of touch with her own culture, insisted that I was too biased in favor of urban experiences (though I live in a small town of 50,000 that is chock full of supermarkets) and that I was overly cautious. I was on the verge of pointing out that frozen foods were—alas!—all too familiar even in the rural regions of the United States and that the phrase "frozen turnips" would suggest prepackaged, precut, and precooked vegetables, but I decided not to remonstrate with her. Although she was a native speaker of English, and American English at that, she was no longer an active user of the language, nor had she registered the cultural changes in the United States which affected the language. Indeed, many "foreign experts" in China, I discovered, are using 2.
My final translation was not very satisfactory: " . . . sliced the turnips frozen through and through." I had opted to convey the sense of arduousness in the action, and I finessed the onomatopoeia of xisuo, which referred to the cutting action of the knife (the best I could do was "chop chop," which clearly wouldn't do)—Eoyang (1982b:28, 248).
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a version of English that strikes contemporary speakers as arch and archaic, reminiscent of what might have been current over a generation ago, but which is seldom encountered today even in pretentious speech. It is not a question of correctness but currency. Unless translations are deliberately archaic for effect, the object of effective translations is to render them in the linguistic species of the day. Many renderings of Chinese texts into archaic English are irksome to the contemporary ear. These examples show the kinds of knowledge that a study of translations can yield: in the first instance, it's a case of an exoteric perspective, where something is revealed when it is seen from the outside; in the second instance, it's a case of esoteric perspective (in this case involving the target, not the source language, as is usually the case), where one's familiarity with the culture (even for a lapsed expatriated native) is insufficient unless it is current and partakes of inside knowledge. These two kinds of knowledge are implicit in a question that Socrates poses in Plato's dialogue, the Theaetetus: "Is it possible for a person, if he knows a thing, at the same time not to know that which he knows?" (Fowler 1952:89).3 However futile the discussion at arriving at a satisfactory definition of knowledge, Plato's Socrates toys a bit with Theaetetus's impetuous rejection of the proposition that a person can know a thing and at the same time not know that which he knows. What if an adversary, Socrates speculates, were to put his hand over one of your eyes and ask if you could see his cloak with the eye that is covered? Theaetetus' reply: "I shall say, I think, 'Not with that eye, but with the other.'" To which Socrates retorts: "Then you see and do not see the same thing at the same time?" Despite an attempt at evasion by Theaetetus, Socrates persists: "Now manifestly you see that which you do not see. But you have agreed that seeing is knowing and not seeing is not knowing'' (Fowler, p. 91). Stereopic knowledge—knowledge that has threedimensionality and depth—involves seeing both with the esoteric and the exoteric eye, knowledge that is informed with content, and knowledge aware of context. The study of cultures and the literatures in various cultures cannot dismiss either 3.
Ultimately the dialogue considers, and rejects, the definition of knowledge as (1) perception; (2) true opinion; (3) true opinion with reasoned explanation.
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form of knowledge, its communicable content as well as its incommunicable spirit. In The Genesis of Secrecy, Frank Kermode (1979:125) begins his concluding chapter, entitled "The Unfollowable World," with the following disquisition on interpretation: I have been considering, under different aspects, some of the forces that make interpretation necessary and virtually impossible, and some of the constraints under which it is carried on. I have spoken of deafness and forgetfulness as properties not only of texts, but of history, and of interpreters. . . . And I have suggested that interpretation, which corrupts or transforms, begins so early in the development of narrative texts that the recovery of the real right original thing is an illusory quest.
The illusory quest to recover "the real right original thing" is also the futile effort to render a text in translation. We have seen instances of "deafness and forgetfulness as properties not only of texts, but of history, and of interpreters." And we are familiar with accusations that translations transform when they do not corrupt the original. Frank Kermode is not the only major critic to address the question of interpretation and hermeneutics with a focus on the Bible: Northrop Frye explores the same territory in The Great Code (1982). Aside from the appropriateness of this return of hermeneutics to its historical source in the tradition of biblical interpretation, the Bible, as a literary work, offers perhaps the most versatile and comprehensive test case for hermeneutical insights: it has spawned not only hundreds of translations, but the differences between interpretations have affected the history of at least the Western world: conflicting readings of the Bible have resulted in sectarian disputes, in the schism of the church represented by its division between Protestant and Catholic. Indeed, antipathies between sacred and secular visions of the Bible continue to rage, particularly in the United States today. Much of the disagreement, present and past, may be characterized not by those who know and those who are ignorant of the biblical text. (Some atheists know the Bible as well as many clerics and seminarians while some socalled Christians are only superficially acquainted with the work.) Rather, the dispute seems to involve the way in which the text is to be read: as allegory, as myth, as literal truth, or as fiction.
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The early history of the Bible already involves considerations of exoteric and esoteric language, for the Old Testament was, clearly, written within the native Jewish tradition; yet the New Testament was composed in a nonnative linguistic medium. As Northrop Frye observes: "The New Testament was written in a koine Greek unlikely to have been the native language of its authors, and, whatever the degree of familiarity of those authors with Hebrew, they tended to make more use of the Septuagint Greek translation in referring to the Old Testament" (p. 3). Yet the Bible presents an ambivalent paradigm of meaning: it has been translated into more languages than any other work; it has attracted adherents through its translated versions in far greater numbers than the text in the original language; it has converted believers even from cultures outside the JudeoChristian tradition. Perhaps, more than any other work in human history, it is an exoteric work, characterized by a remarkable capacity to relate to the foreign reader with a message on his own terms.4 Despite this eminent transmittability, this clarity of meaning, the kerygmatic character of the Bible, its tenaciously withheld meaning, remains. There is a Bible for "insiders" and a Bible for "outsiders." Kermode designates these two kinds of meaning as "carnal" and ''spiritual,"5 and focuses on the use of parables in the Bible: When Jesus was asked to explain the purpose of his parables, he described them as stories told to them without—to outsiders—with the express purpose of concealing a mystery that was to be understood only by insiders. So Mark tells us: speaking to the Twelve, Jesus said, "To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand; lest they should turn again and be forgiven."6
Kermode contrasts the version of the same scene in Mark with the one in Matthew. The key sentence involves Mark's use of the Greek 4.
I am making no brief for the valorization of Christianity as a religion over other religions, merely citing its linguistic history.
5.
These terms are particularly disconcerting in the Christian tradition, since "carnal" seems somehow reprehensible and weak (as with "the flesh") and "spiritual" is considered superior. As I read it, Kermode intends these terms to be neutral. 6.
The text is Mark 4:11–12; cf. Kermode (1979:2), Kermode's emphasis.
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word hina, "so that" or "in order that," yielding: ''To you has been given the secret of the kingdom of God, but for those outside everything is in parables; so that they may indeed see but not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand." The sense, which is contested by some biblical exegetes, may arise from Mark's misreading of a lost Aramaic original with a somewhat different meaning. Mark's interpretation is, however, clear: Jesus is willfully excluding "those outside"; the parable is to put them off the scent, to deny them "the secret of the kingdom of God." Matthew, on the other hand, is more accommodating in his version (13:11–13): he uses the key word hoti, Greek for "because," which yields the sense: "I speak to them in parables because they see without perceiving" (28–33). Skeptics of translation subscribe to Mark's view of the "secret," that it must be withheld from "those outside," who could not possibly understand the original; adherents of translation adopt the more charitable view of Matthew and pursue translation because "those outside" simply cannot read the original. Parable is yet another paradigm for translation. For an insider's story is being told to outsiders, an irreducible core is at once conveyed and withheld from the outsider; translators and readers of translation are like those who "indeed see but do not perceive, and may indeed hear but not understand." The notion of parable involves, as Kermode suggests, "comparison," "analogy," and "riddle" (p. 23). These tropes all apply to translation: comparison between the original and the translation; analogy between the translation and the original; and riddle as the essence of the original, which forever eludes the translation. (Frost's "poetry is what gets lost in the translation.") Kermode touches on a point of epistemology in our understanding of "carnal" and "spiritual" knowledge: "We find it hardest to think about what we have most completely taken for granted" (p. 65). Elsewhere, invoking Heidegger, Kermode remarks: "For Heidegger indeed, it is the very fact that one is outside that makes possible the revelation of truth or meaning; being inside is like being in Plato's cave" (p. 39). The study of translation yields both the truths of the insider and the insights of the outsider. The native familiar with a work knows what it is; the foreigner who reads the translation appreciates what it isn't. For those who are not among the initiated, translation is a surrogate for the original and its
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"closest continuer"; it conveys the meanings of the original, if not its truth. The translation achieves, therefore, two objectives: it announces the work, and, to a certain extent, it renounces it. For a native, a translation will be, as the parables of Jesus were for the disciples, redundant; for the foreigner, a translation will be a "dark saying," with the fascination of mystery, a riddle; and for those who are both insiders and outsiders, translation constitutes a stereopic form of knowledge that sees and perceives, that hears and understands. Like parable, translation ''may proclaim a truth as a herald does, and at the same time conceal truth like an oracle": the study of translation must combine both analysis and divination. In the theory of literature, one of the most seminal notions defining the "literariness" of verbal art is Viktor Shklovsky's concept of "defamiliarization" (ostraenie), which designates a process by which the illusory permanence of the present is dispelled and the particularity of life and experience restored. "Art is in this context a way of restoring conscious experience," Fredric Jameson writes, "of breaking through deadening and mechanical habits of conduct . . . and allowing us to be reborn to the world in its existential freshness and horror" (1972:51). This impulse to capture in words the mundanity of life in anything but a mundane way may be seen implicitly or explicitly in most literary fictions: perhaps its earliest expression occurs in Murasaki Shikibu, in the eleventh century, whose Genji defends the art of the novel in precisely the terms of defamiliarization: . . . It happens because the storyteller's own experience of men and things, whether for good or ill—not only what he has passed through himself, but even events which he has only witnessed or been told of—has moved him to an emotion so passionate that he can no longer keep it shut up in his heart. Again and again something in his own life or in that around him will seem to the writer so important that he cannot bear to let it pass into oblivion. There must never come a time, he feels, when men do not know about it. . . . Thus anything whatsoever may become the subject of a novel, provided only that it happens in this mundane life and not in some fairyland beyond our human ken. [Waley 1960:501– 502]
Proust's obsession with the fragrance of the madeleine dipped in tea as well as Joyce's search for epiphanies spring from the same impulse. The reader is compelled by art to pay more attention to
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the portrayal of life in art than he does to life itself. Art is, therefore, reflexive as well as reflective; it is at once selfreferential and mimetic. Translations of literary works of art adopt, in a complex relationship, the opposite thrust—at least for its first, foreign reader. It makes familiar that which is initially strange; it subsumes in the experience of the target language the events described in the source language. The defamiliarization does not constitute a "recognition" of reality lived through yet overlooked, but the confrontation of a new and unexpected experience. For a translation to "make sense," it must relate unfamiliar experiences in familiar ways; it must remove the veil of foreignness in the text. Yet the transposition will not be totally successful, for what may be familiar in one culture will often prove less familiar in another, and there will be an element of the fantastic in any reality that is exotic. It is the psychology of human nature that the mundane experience of others, particularly those in remote countries, far removed from one's own, may seem "some fairyland beyond our human ken.'' Translators—Arthur Waley the most notable instance—may never set foot in the culture of the original and yet manage very well the task of "familiarizing" a totally foreign experience or setting. For a bilingual native (or expatriate), familiar with the target culture, reading a translation out of his or her culture constitutes a bifocal perspective: he or she will be reading myopically with respect to the original, distracted by the minutiae of comparison and the disparities between the translation and the original he or she knew; and he or she will be reading hyperoptically, seeing clearly things at a distance, and relishing the new worlds created by the translation, the new life that has been given the original.7 The reading of translations as literature presents a different set of 7.
One instance would be Joseph Lau's comparison of the translation of The Dream of the Red Mansions, by Gladys and Hsienyi Yang, with the version of David Hawkes, published as The Story of the Stone. For Lau, the version by the Yangs "offers no sparks of intelligence which may set a Chinese reader, whose vision is blunted by linguistic familiarity, on his way to critical discoveries. For this reason, a translation as distinguished as Hawkes' is perhaps more useful to the bilingual Chinese readers than to those who read Chinese as a foreign language"—Tamkang Review 10 (1 & 2) (Fall—Winter 1979):238. Another instance would be Wailim Yip's predilections for Ezra Pound's version of Chinese poetry, even while he recognizes their errors; cf. Yip (1969).
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problems: if one considers the work of translation its own literary achievement, with no appreciable reference to any other work, then the test of a good translation is whether it effectively "defamiliarizes" the mundane. But whose "mundane"? The reader in the target language, exclusively. These versions we may call surrogate translations. If one considers the work of translation as a reliable introduction to the original, but not intended as its replacement, then its value is conditional, its audience is at least potentially bilingual, and the test of its quality is whether it effectively familiarizes the supramundane: it must be judged on how accessible it makes a foreign text to a student of that text. We may call these contingent translations. Finally, if a translation is to be considered as a correlate to the original, to coexist with it, neither as its replacement for those who do not read the original, nor as an aid for those who wish to approach the original, but as its possible rival (and in the event of the disappearance of the original, its replacement), then its audience is equivalently bilingual, its readers a more cosmopolitan polyglot tribunal. We may call these coeval translations. Of course, these categories are analytic constructs, not arbitrary compartments with mutually exclusive contents: some works may serve all three functions at one time or another; others may start out as a surrogate translation and evolve over time into a coeval translation. Arthur Waley's translation of the Genji started as a surrogate translation; it became a contingent translation for a generation of Western students of Japanese literature; and as it attained a popularity among Englishreading Japanese, it became a surrogate translation, even for the Japanese, with a wider audience than the original, since Heian Japanese was more foreign to the Japanese today than English would be. For the scholar of Heian literature who can read the Genji monogatari in the original, Waley's translation assumes coeval status. Other Waley efforts seem less versatile: his Chinese Poems (1917) were clearly surrogate translations, presented as his work more than as reflections of the originals; his 1937 version of The Book of Songs is a contingent translation, clearly intended for students of "comparative literature, folklore, or the like."8 His translation of the Xiyouji , titled Monkey and published in 1943, constitutes only a third of the entire novel; but 8.
The preface to the second edition (1960) directs the reader to consult Bernhard Karlgren's Glosses on the Book of Odes, published in 1942, 1944, and 1946.
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for Western readers who are put off by the arcana of Buddhist and Daoist terms (so conscientiously detailed by Anthony Yu in his comprehensive translation, The Journey to the West), it may constitute a coeval translation. The progress of translations from the surrogate to the coeval phase is a progress toward a true mutuality of cultures, toward a condition of equipoise between source and target language, toward an ultimate cosmopolitanism. It might be argued that coeval translations are, or would be, redundant in a comprehensively multilingual world, which is neither the state of a single world language before Babel, nor the state of mutual incomprehensibility after Babel, but a new syncretic polyglot mundus linguarum which preserves the individual species of language even while it fosters commerce between them. If one assumes the nonequivalence of a translation to the original, then no translation can ever be redundant. Each translation provides a different perspective, not only on the original, but on the process by which we know our place, native or foreign, in the world. In its failures and false transmutations, its misbegotten alchemy, even in the alembic of the best practitioners, converting gold to dross, every translation assays the true mettle of the original language. Translation can be the epistemological tool by which the deictic we is defined: by providing the outsider's perspective, by seeing the self as the other, by seeing the other as the self, translation can, in Husserl's terms, "bracket" cultural experience, see it neither from the false perspective of an unattainable total objectivity nor the solipsisms of onanistic subjectivity. It is usually said of wide reading, as of travel, that it extends one's horizons, widens one's perspective: but what is also gained by this extended horizon, this widened perspective, as every traveler knows, is an insight into, and a clearer demarcation of, the self. Socrates' question in the Theaetetus, which Plato left unanswered, is not absurd. It is possible to know something and, at the same time, not know that which one knows. "Poetry, creative literature," Heidegger wrote, "is nothing but the elementary emergence into words, the becominguncovered, of existence as beingintheworld" (Heidegger 1982: 171–172). This act of disclosure, made manifest in translation, which both indicates what the original is and what it, precisely, is not, is Heidegger's ''truth," which he calls aletheia, "unconcealment." His definition of understanding has particular relevance
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here: "Along with understanding there is always already projected a particular possible being with the others and a particular possible being toward intraworldly beings" (Heidegger 1982:278). Elsewhere: "In selfunderstanding there is understood the beingintheworld with which specific possibilities of beingwith others and of dealing with intraworldly beings are traced out" (p. 279). Heidegger distinguishes between "authentic" and "inauthentic" understanding: "Factical Dasein can understand itself primarily via intraworldly beings which it encounters. It can let its existence be determined primarily not by itself but by things and circumstances and by others." "Inauthentic" understanding does not mean that it is not actual understanding, Heidegger insists: "It denotes an understanding in which the existent Dasein does not understand itself primarily by that apprehended possibility of itself which is most peculiarly its own'' (p. 279). The encounter of "Dasein primarily via intraworldly beings" is the encounter of the original with its translations; "inauthentic" understanding is the understanding of the insider which is specifically unaware of "that apprehended possibility of itself . . . most peculiarly its own." Translation becomes a mode of discovery, even of selfdiscovery, that discloses the original text at the same time that it enhances its selfconcealment. I have applied the Russian Formalist notion of defamiliarization (ostraenie) and Heidegger's concept of unconcealment to a consideration of translation. There is a third notion that seems apposite to these considerations: Brecht's Verfremdungseffekt ("alienation effect"). While Shklovsky's emphasis is aesthetic, and Heidegger's is metaphysical, Brecht's version is more modestly restricted to the psychology of theater. For the playgoer, the effect of watching a performance is to witness a presentation of the past, to see a presencing of the past: "The audience must be discouraged from losing their critical detachment by identification with one or more of the characters. The opposite of identification is the maintenance of a separate existence by being kept apart, alien, strange. . . . That is the meaning of the famous Verfremdungseffekt" (Esslin 1961:125). This description applies precisely to the process of reading a translation. The Verfremdungseffekt (French distantiation) characterizes the response of the reader to a translation. In the case of surrogate translations, the Verfremdungseffekt is one of exotic content. Here, with no
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native reference available to verify the accuracy of the translation, the bogus will prevail. The genre of pseudoaliens commenting on native experiences flourishes in an age of reason, in the eighteenth century, with Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721), Voltaire's Zadig (1747), and Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World (1762). Goldsmith's depiction of an "intraworldly" alien involves the observations of a pseudo Persian, a pseudoBabylonian, and a pseudoChinese, respectively. (Note the increasing remoteness of the alien in time and space.) In the early twentieth century, surrogate translations will be contrived, sometimes imagined out of whole cloth, or compiled from pastiches of various translations. In 1900, The Wallet of Kai Lung by Ernest Bramah initiated a series of very popular books that, over forty years, presented a China "so real and so comprehensively Chinese . . . that many readers and reviewers of the Kai Lung stories have tended to ask about their source."9 Documents uncovered after his death indicate that the author, Ernest Bramah Smith (1868–1942), had never been to China. There are, of course, many other instances of pseudoaliens who were, more or less, invented out of whole cloth. Hans Bethge's Die Chinesische Flöte (1907) was subtitled "Nachdichtungen Chinesischer Lyrik"; it inspired Gustav Mahler to compose a famous song cycle, "Das Lied von der Erde,'' which was performed in 1911, the year of his death. But a closer examination of the provenance of texts shows that at each stage of adaptation, liberties were taken not only with the rendering of each line but with the integrity of the original poems.10 Surrogate translations reflect an early stage of cultural exchange that often caters to the target audience's taste for the exotic, without concern for any fidelity to the culture being portrayed. Contingent translations are less mischievous, but they tend to stress the difficulty of access: the source appears too strange, and one is often estranged by the lifelessness of the presentation. Coeval translations provide what is perhaps the most constructive form of the 9.
William White, "Ernest Bramah on China: An Important Letter," Publications of the Modern Language Association 87 (3) (May 1972):511–512. One is not aware of the basis on which the author of this article, an American academic, claims that these novels are "so real and so comprehensively Chinese." 10.
For a detailed analysis, see Chapter 9.
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Verfremdungseffekt, for, with access to a worthwhile original and a creditable translation, the prospects for insightful exploration are enormously enhanced. In this brief excursus, one can see a progression from an audience that specifically excludes the possibility of a native in the source language reading the translations. The effect on the reader in the target language, particularly in the Englishspeaking world, was of something new and fresh—however traditional and familiar these works might have been to the Chinese.11 With the systematic development of Chinese studies in the West, particularly in the United States, after World War II, many of the surrogate translations were replaced by contingent translations: such works as William Hung's Tu Fu: China's Greatest Poet (1952) initiated this phase; he addresses an audience of students interested in the language. These productions would prove unappetizing to the general lay reader, and their sales were limited, restricted to specialists and university libraries. Native Chinese, of course, were not likely to need them (unless they were teaching foreigners). In the 1960s, a new group of scholartranslators, many not only native but educated in the West and teaching there, began producing coeval translations—that is, works that could bear up under the stereopic scrutiny of both the monolingual and the bilingual reader. C. T. Hsia, with his History of Modern Chinese Fiction (1961) and The Classic Chinese Novel (1968), provided a selection of newly translated excerpts of Chinese fiction in his analysis. James J. Y. Liu set a new standard for accuracy and deftness in the translations provided in The Art of Chinese Poetry (1962). David Hawkes, with his fourvolume The Story of the Stone (1979–1987, with the final volume completed by John Minford); Anthony Yu, with his fourvolume version of The Journey to the West (1977–1983); Gladys and Hsienyi Yang, with their version of Cao Xueqin's classic A Dream of Red Mansions (1978–1980)—all typify this generation of translators and translations. In a sense, these translators represent a new generation of readers as well: those from both cultures who 11.
Waley's first publications of Chinese poetry were heralded in the Times Literary Supplement in an article titled "A New Planet": "It is a strange and wonderful experience to read the translations"—cf. Madly Singing in the Mountains, ed. Ivan Morris (1970:135).
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have—to varying degrees—equal access to both languages and to both cultures. Even here, however, a Verfremdungseffekt remains. No longer is it a question of an encounter with "strange and wonderful" things, for the originals are already familiar; nor is it a question of generic malformation, where versions of literature take on the character of a classroom textbook, replete with glosses, notes, and, in some cases, transliterations and comments. The distantiation is more intellectual than cultural; it arises out of semantic disparities between the translation and the original. It would not be possible for a native familiar with the original to confront a translation with the same blithe trust that a nonnative might. And there is an inevitable shock in seeing something familiar in a foreign guise. Surely this is not the kind of Verfremdungseffekt that Brecht had in mind, nor is it precisely the "defamiliarization" of the Russian Formalists, but it has its uses nevertheless. It may be characterized as an ''unconcealment" of the original, seeing it more meaningfully for what it is—and, even in an unsuccessful attempt to capture it, for what it is not. In sum, translation offers a tool of investigation, particularly with a polyglot audience, into what literature is, rather than what literatures are. The truths of literary investigation are not propositional: they are intuitive; revelatory and epiphanous, they accomplish what Heidegger calls das Ereignen, which "yields the opening of the clearing in which present beings can persist and from which what absent beings can depart while keeping their persistence in the withdrawal."12 Heidegger's convoluted formulation recalls Poggioli's more translucent notion of the explicit absence of the original and its ideal presence in the translation. This intensely paradoxical and ironic ontology differentiates between what is obvious and what is unconcealed, between what is present by its absence and what is absent by its presence; the formulation is particularly apt for translation. For what one does have in a translated work is obviously not the original, but the original, in a sense, unconcealed; yet, at the same time, what is unconcealed is not actually 12.
From Unterwegs zur Sprache (Pfullingen, 1959), p. 258; translated by Peter D. Hertz, On the Way to Language (New York, 1971), p. 127; quoted by Alfred Hofstadter (1979:33).
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the original, but some original manqué. What is missing is not indeterminate, however, but a specific original that represents the "absences" that "can escape" and at the same time, "keep its staying in this escape." Nothing reveals more effectively the truths of Heidegger's aletheia, "unconcealment,'' than translation, for it shows both what is revealed and what is concealed.
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9— Horizons of Meaning: The Phenomenology of Translation Among the most active areas of literary research in recent years has been the readerresponse school (Rezeptionsästhetik) of such theorists and practitioners as Hans Robert Jauss and Wolfgang Iser. Jauss's concept of Erwartungshorizont, "the horizon of literary expectations," posits a relationship between the wide horizon of the literary text and the wide horizon of the reader's life experience: the expectations of the reader to be determined by the reactions of previous readers in published criticism. In the case of translations, the expectations warranted by the original can be easily established, since the work to be translated (even contemporary works) will have a progeny—a contemporary reputation in the case of recent works, a critical evaluation in the case of traditional. This horizon of expectation can be concretely compared with the horizon of expectation reflected in the rendering of at least one reader, the translator. But whereas Jauss measures the degree of disparity between the horizon of expectation in the literary text and that of the public as indicating the literary value of the work, in comparing the horizons of knowledge for text and translator, one may measure the degree of accuracy in translation. The difficulty of Rezeptionsästhetik is that it involves either quantitative analyses of response "norms" (as in the research of Werner Bauer et al. 1972) or the ingenuity of the critic in constructing a reader or sets of readers—whether an "implied reader" (Iser), a ''superreader" (Riffaterre), an "informed reader" (Fish), or an "intended reader" (Wolf). (One almost senses that the theorists of Rezeptionsästhetik are competing with authors in inventing as many
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readers as there are characters in novels.) Unlike these hypothesized "readers," however, the readers reflected in translations are determinable and documentable; the evidence of reading is explicit and unarguable in the text of the translation. Multiple translations of the same work over generations provide directly available clues on the way the literary text was read. And as every generation insists, rightly, on translating for itself the classics of the past, there is an ample and faithful record of representative readings across generations. As for the significance of a particular reading, the public response to a particular translation may be used as an index to the representativeness of a translation for that particular generation. Vertical studies of successive translations—of the Bible in English, of the Tale of Genji in Arthur Waley's version of 1923–1933 and Edward Seidensticker's of 1976—would reveal much not only about the work but also about the eras in which it was translated. Aside from the differences on specific points of translation, one can compare the stylistic characteristics of each and determine the disponibilité of a generation by examining not only which aspects of the original it emphasizes, but which originals it chooses to render and to read. Wolfgang Iser modifies Roman Ingarden's definition of the literary work of art as neither the mute text nor the subjective reaction of the reader nor the inferred intention of the author (avoiding thereby both the Intentional and the Affective fallacies, as well as the posited autonomies of New Criticism). He posits a convergence of text and reader, making the author and the reader partners in literary realization (Ingarden's Konkretisation). Iser (1978) takes pains to dissociate his theory of reading from the psychoanalytic theories of Norman Holland and Simon Lesser (pp. 38–50). And he is careful to distinguish his notion of "the implied reader" from: "the real reader"—too elusive to establish, particularly for earlier periods; "the ideal reader"—a "structural impossibility" which posits a reader with a code identical to the author, thereby making communication superfluous if not redundant; ''the superreader"—which, "though it allows for an empirically verifiable account of both the semantic and pragmatic potential . . . in the text," is "not proof against error" because it is too dependent on variabilities of "historical nearness of distance"; "the informed reader"—which is too readeroriented and focuses not on "clarifying the processing of
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literary texts" but on processing the user of the literary text; and "the intended reader"—which, while useful for an understanding of the historical context, fails to address the relevance of a work to contemporary audiences (pp. 28–34). To these discarded notions of the reader, Iser constructs a comprehensive model of "the implied reader''—which is not to be confused with any of the preceding models but which, in some sense, subsumes them all: the whole concept of the implied reader "provides a link between all the historical and individual actualizations of the text and makes them accessible to analysis. . . . [It] is a transcendental model which makes it possible for the structured effects of literary texts to be described. . . . [It] offers a means of describing the process whereby textual structures are transmuted through ideational activities into personal experiences" (p. 38). Earlier, Iser observed: "The structure of the text sets off a sequence of mental images which lead to the text translating itself into the reader's consciousness." The references to the process of "the text translating itself" and "the process whereby textual structures are transmuted" naturally bring to mind the process of actual translation, where the translator must perform both the author's role as the inventor of the text and the reader's role of realizing the text through "ideational activity." The translator is, therefore, Janusfaced: looking toward the author in one direction; looking to the reader in the other (a twofacedness not inconsistent with his popular image as traditore, "traitor"). The translator is a reader of an original text, as well as the author of the translation. As such, he provides invaluable testimony both on the text and on the reader response, for he is an implied reader, who may be, in different degrees, a "superreader" (translator as scholar), an "informed reader" (translator as student), and an "intended reader" (translator as contemporary). The focus on the translator as reader, though not without its complexities, has the advantage of providing the bilingual researcher with the documentation that makes possible a concrete examination of the "transcendental model" of the implied reader. Iser's own analyses of individual texts do not differ significantly from the usual literary analysis of texts: they are limited by their selectivity; they are intermittently attentive to the text when invoking the surrounding historical context (here Iser shows himself "the intended reader"); they range widely through synchronic
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cultural traditions (Iser as "superreader"). But it is difficult to see how his concept of "the implied reader"—while theoretically more satisfying than the other subsets of readers—relates methodologically to the study of reader response. With the focus on the translator and his translation, there is accessible documentation on the reading of an entire text, where there is a possibility of examining every constituent in the whole. This comprehensive attention is necessary, because a prime factor in readerresponse criticism is the "reader's role as a textual structure, and the reader's role as a structured act" (p. 35). Structure may be adduced in fragments and excerpts, but the objective consideration of structure must take in the whole, even when selected structural elements are adduced. In short, translation provides at least one reader's complete "reader's response.'' Another aspect of Iser's theory that bears on translation is his concept of "indeterminacy" in the text. Here translation complicates rather than simplifies the model. The gaps in a literary construct—in traditional fiction, details that are left unmentioned; in modern fiction, details that are deliberately withheld—provide the stimulus for engaging the reader and inducing in him or her a communal act of imaginative recreation. There is an interplay in literature between presence and absence: "With a literary text," Iser writes (1974:283), "we can only picture things which are not there; the written part of the text gives us the knowledge, but it is the unwritten part that gives us the opportunity to picture things; indeed without the elements of indeterminacy, the gaps in the text, we should not be able to use our imagination."1 The discussion of indeterminacy is prefaced by a consideration of a passage from Gilbert Ryle, in which Ryle asks a question that is cognate to the one we encountered from Socrates in the Theaetetus: "How can a person fancy that he sees something, without realizing that he is not seeing it?" A work of literary art conjures up realities precisely because it is not a representation of reality. Part of the 1.
Compare Todorov's statement: "In a certain sense, all texts can be considered as parts of a single text which has been in the writing since the beginning of time. Without being unaware of the difference between relations established in presentia (intratextual relations), and those established in absentia (intertextual relations), we must not underestimate the presence of other texts within the text" (Todorov 1977:244).
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indeterminacy of a text lies in its blanks: "an empty space which both provokes and guides the ideational activity" (1978:194–195). The reader fills in these blanks, "thereby bringing about a referential field; the blank arising, in turn, out of the referential field is filled in by way of the themeandhorizon structure; and the vacancy arising from juxtaposed themes and horizons is occupied by the reader's standpoint from which the various reciprocal transformations lead to the emergence of the aesthetic object" (p. 203). In the case of translation, these blanks are augmented by the blanks caused by the unfamiliarity of the reader with parts of the cultural background adduced in the original text. The difficulty is exacerbated by textual blanks that allude to, or allow for, areas in the source language with which the reader in the target language is unacquainted. It's a form of retinal blindness, in which the image passes through the cornea, but the break or lacuna in the retina leaves the eye without a screen on which to project the image. A blank is superimposed on a blank, as it were. (In translating, the translator must clearly, even to the resort of a footnote, remove the cultural blank, but he must be careful not to remove the textual blank.) The blank in the fictional text induces the reader's constitutive activity; but the blank in the cultural frame of reference in a translation will only frustrate the reader's efforts to reconstitute the original. Perhaps because they exploit this "double blindness," some works will elicit more interest in translation abroad than the original does at home. Omar Khayyam, the twelfthcentury Persian poet, became a sensation in nineteenthcentury England (through the efforts of Edward FitzGerald); Rabindranath Tagore, the Bengali poet, is perhaps better known in English than in Bengali; and Hanshan the Tang dynasty poet (variously dated to the seventh or tenth century) is more widely read in Japan and in America than in his homeland, China. Although Iser concentrates on fictional texts, the notion of indeterminacy—of active participation on the part of the reader—applies at least as well to poetry, where allusiveness and elusiveness are even more frequently encountered. The principle of indeterminacy for a text in translation is convoluted: there are the gaps in the original text that elicit the imaginative response of the reader. Even if these gaps are preserved in translation, it will not always happen that the same gaps will elicit the same set of re
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sponses from readers in the target language as were elicited from readers in the source language—too many gaps will meet with incomprehension; too few gaps will strain the patience with a tiresome burden of explanation. One would have appreciated from Iser some insight as to what constitutes an effective means by which "structured blanks of the text stimulate the process of ideation to be performed by the reader on terms set by the text" (p. 169). A comparison of the ampler version by Arthur Waley of The Tale of Genji (which is longer than the original) with the more economical version by Edward Seidensticker (which is shorter than the original) might provide some insight into the ability of readers to establish a "referential field." Another tenet of Iser's readerresponse theory recapitulates Shklovsky's idea of defamiliarization, but at the level of psychological verisimilitude rather than aesthetics. On several occasions, Iser posits a principle of reader interest: Since the world of the text is bound to have degrees of unfamiliarity for its possible readers (if the work is to have any "novelty" for them), they must be placed in a position which enables them to actualize the new view. This position, however, cannot be present in the text itself, as it is the vantage point for visualizing the world represented and so cannot be part of that world. The text must therefore bring about a standpoint from which the reader will be able to view things that would never have come into focus as long as his own habitual dispositions were determining his orientation, and what is more, this standpoint must be able to accommodate all kinds of different readers. [1978:35]
The essential points in this description are as follows: first, "novelty" as a factor of interest, described as "unfamiliarity" (rather than defamiliarization); second, the placement of the reader "outside" the world of the text at a ''vantage point"; third, the new perspective that results from a new orientation which dispels "habitual dispositions"; and fourth, the general accessibility of this new standpoint to "all kinds of different readers." This description, elusive as it may be to comprehend in the abstractions on reading—What is this standpoint in the text? How does one place the reader at a vantage point? What is this new perspective?—is patently clear when applied to translation. The novelty of content
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is the foreign culture being captured; the placement of the reader outside the world of the text is the placement of the reader in a language, and therefore a cultural environment, different from that of the original; the new perspective is a revised view of one's own experience, stimulated by exposure to and in contrast with another experience that is markedly different; the new standpoint, the rendering in another language, provides access to "all kinds of different readers" in the target language. "The reader's role is prestructured," Iser writes, "by three basic components: the different perspectives represented in the text, the vantage point from which he joins them together, and the meeting place where they converge" (p. 36). In the case of translation, these can be easily identified: the different perspectives represented in the text relate to those in the original work; the vantage point from which he joins them together relates to the dual perspective of the translation, looking both to the source and to the target language; the meeting place where they converge is the translation itself. Indeed, one submits that translation could be a concrete model for Iser's Rezeptionsästhetik. It solves a methodological problem in his theory—since the nature of the textual structure can only be adduced inferentially from the structured acts induced in the reader. (''The reason is that . . . their gradual convergence and final meeting place are not linguistically formulated and so have to be imagined.") In the translation model, the convergence and final meeting place are linguistically formulated (sometimes more than once). The difficulty of examining textual structure by imagining reading, is that this process blurs the line between the two phases of the interactivity: the text phase and the response phase. (Nor are these imaginings or inferences very solid bases for empirical research.) Iser's resourceful analysis of the dynamics of reading and the ontology of a literary work of art is a healthy reminder of the relationship—ambivalent and dialectic— between meaning and expression. His microscopic examination of the reading process leads him inevitably to the use of imaginative (if not imaginary) abstractions. We read him with a sense of corroboration if our experience accords with his; where we fail to understand his analysis, we also fail to emulate his practice of "implied reading." One cannot help feeling that one of Iser's unwitting rhetorical successes is
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that he pays his implied reader the supreme compliment of assuming that he reads as sensitively, as intelligently, and as knowledgeably as Iser does himself. In that sense, Iser's work, not unlike a work of fiction, creates its own reader and conjures up its own audience. A somewhat more macrocosmic perspective on the phenomenology of reading, and that of translation, is also available. We have seen how the concepts of "foreignness," "novelty," "defamiliarization," and ''unconcealment" keep recurring in our discussion. The dyadic notions of native/foreign, self/other, and esoteric/exoteric seem central to an understanding not only of translation but of the very process of understanding itself. Georges Poulet (whom Iser quotes) puts the dialectic of self and other, of projection as identification, most personably: Whatever I think is a part of my mental world. And yet here I am thinking a thought which manifestly belongs to another mental world, which is being thought in me just as though I did not exist. Already the notion is inconceivable and seems even more so if I reflect that, since every thought must have a subject to think it, this thought which is alien to me and yet in me must also have in me a subject which is alien to me. . . . Whenever I read, I mentally pronounce an I, and yet the I which I pronounce is not myself. [1974:54]
The projection of self into the other, which is too often misconceived as identification, is a process not unlike Keats' negative capability, where the self is momentarily suppressed in the act of empathizing imaginatively with the other. But the process is more dialectical than this would suggest: the self is not passive, not totally inert in the process of projection, since its "funded experience" (in Dewey's still useful phrase) is called upon to provide the reference points by which new experiences can be apprehended. The process of reading is, therefore, like the process of literary creation (with the difference that creativity in reading is controlled by the "schematized views"—in Ingarden's phrase—in the text): they both involve an extension of the self, in a "hermeneutical circle," of recognizing the strange, the other, and incorporating the strange into the self, first by projective empathy with what one is not, and then by discovering (as Poulet discovered) the "stranger within." This dynamic process is well described by Iser:
Page 160 Text and reader no longer confront each other as object and subject, but instead the "division" takes place within the reader himself. In thinking the thoughts of another, his own individuality temporarily recedes into the background, since it is supplanted by these alien thoughts, which now become the theme on which his attention is focused. As we read, there occurs an artificial division of our personality, because we take as a theme for ourselves something that we are not . . . Thus, in reading there are two levels—the alien "me" and the real, virtual ''me"—which are never completely cut off from each other. Indeed, we can only make someone else's thoughts into an absorbing theme for ourselves, provided the virtual background of our own personality can adapt to it. [1974:293]
This remarkable exegesis of the reading process will seem familiar to anyone who has, at the same time, "lost himself in a book" yet felt a heightened sense of self in the process of vicariously experiencing a narrative. The consideration of what is familiar and what is unfamiliar, of what is native and what is foreign, of what is self and what is other—provided that each of these terms is conceived of as an organic entity, growing and shifting, not a fixed designation of an unchanging identity—seems central to the process not only of reading but also of translation. Todorov has clarified the analogy between reading and translation by pointing to the concern with intratextuality in reading and extratextuality in translation: The task of reading begins by comparison, by the discovery of resemblance. In this sense, there is an analogy between reading and translation, which is also based on the possibility of finding an equivalent for a part of the text. But whereas in translation we orient the text toward another series, toward an extratextuality, in reading we seek an intratextuality. [1977:241]
However, a translation can be, for the reader of surrogate translations, addressed intratextually: the reader inhabits a selfsufficient version. For the reader of contingent translations, a translation is indeed addressed extratextually: the meaning, one is constantly reminded, does not lie in the contingent translations, which merely point to the original. A reader of coeval translation, however, confronts both intratextuality and extratextuality: for the coeval trans
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lation inhabits two simultaneous and concurrent contexts—one that is selfsufficent and another which alludes to the original. Translation merely externalizes, in linguistically manifest forms, the native and the foreign. Yet it would be equally misguided to attribute to the languages involved in translation the same static character that we deny for culture and for the self. There is the same dialectic at work between the self and the other in language as there is in any communication. The development of the Romance languages from the core of Latin, the estrangement of the "mother tongue" for speakers of "offspring languages"; the replacement of Latin first with French and then with English as the lingua franca (which was not, the dictionary reminds us, one dominant language but a hybrid of Italian mixed with French, Spanish, Greek, and Arabic)—all these testify to the dynamism of language. Languages may have both an endotropic and an exotropic impulse: that is, they tend to change in response to stimulus by becoming more inward or more outward. The stimulus may come from within or from without, but it is not obvious that all changes from within will be endotropic and all changes from without exotropic. For example, the furor in France against the incursion of Americanisms into the language—known as "Franglais"—was essentially an endotropic impulse, as is the preservation of the French language by the French Academy. France's commerce with neighboring countries has had very little impact on the development of the language; indeed, the opposite may be true. At least until recent times, that interchange outside the borders of France has resulted in an extension of Francophone countries, which are, by dint of language, more French than they are native, whether African, Quebecois, or Haitian.2 It should not be simplistically assumed that political dominion will always result in linguistic dominion: the Huns and the Mongols dominated the Eurasian landmass for significant periods, yet 2.
Senegal, Somalia, Burundi, Chad, French Congo, Dahomey, Gabon, French Guinea, Mali, Togo, Upper Volta—all indicate French as the national, or official, language. Other countries—Madagascar, Mauritania, Cameroon among them—indicate French as one of the major languages spoken. All of these countries received "technical assistance" from France as late as 1975—cf. Francophonie 1968 (Paris, 1969), Special Issue of the Revue de l'Association de Solidarité Francophone; see also Gordon (1978).
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left negligible marks on the languages of the territories they conquered. The endotropic emphasis may be determined by the degree to which a language resists absorbing foreign phrases and the extent to which it exerts its influence beyond its traditional borders. The exotropic impulse may be measured by the degree to which a language adapts foreign neologisms and the extent to which it fails to exert its linguistic influence beyond its borders. The English of Elizabethan England was perhaps the most exotropic language of any culture, since it absorbed in a dazzling array, in addition to its "native" AngloSaxon stock, which tended toward the monosyllabic, Celtic, Latin, or Romance elements, which tended toward the multisyllabic. The role of this linguistic plenitude in the effort of the Elizabethans to develop a standard of colloquial eloquence, as well as the role of borrowings of foreign neologisms in achieving an unparalleled copiousness in the language, have been well documented (Jones 1953:185–213). By contrast, Victorian England, despite its imperial profile and its cultural dominion in three continents, was largely endotropic; portmanteau words were, of course, imported into English, but they lost their "foreign" character and became Anglicisms.3 The history of Japan provides interesting contrasts and anomalies: perhaps no country has ever closed itself off from the rest of the world so definitively, and for such long periods of time, as Japan: from 894, when embassies to and from China were discontinued, to the midtwelfth century when Taira Kiyomori sent tribute to the Sung court, and from 1600 to 1853, when Admiral Perry forcibly opened Japan to the West with his "black ships," Japan was sealed off. These eras of isolation might suggest on the surface that the Japanese would be so left out of the world's affairs that they would have difficulty reentering into the mainstream culture. Nothing could be further from the truth, of course, as the last generation of Japanese history proves. One should begin with the fact that the first "foreign" culture for Japan was Chinese, which even down to modern times was regarded as a progenitor, not an upstart. Of course, Japan revered China in eras when Japan was most— 3.
Such words as "coolie," "pukker," "chukker," originally derived from Hindi, are more familiar in the English or AngloIndian modifications than in their original Hindi senses.
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admirably and vigorously—Chinese: the Tang (618–906); the Southern Sung (1127–1279); and the Ming (1368–1644). The eras during which China was ruled by barbarian dynasties—the Yuan (1279–1368) and the Qing (1644–1911)—were, for the most part and not so coincidentally, periods of isolationism in Japan. The tradition of a foreign language representing a prior and hence superior culture, which characterizes Japanese attitudes toward Chinese, may be contrasted with the tradition where a foreign language is always regarded as less venerable, less civilized, less respectable—which is, and has been, the Chinese attitude toward foreign cultures. The Japanese early on developed a syllabary for two kinds of foreign words: kanji for Chinese and katakana for Western terms. In other words, it is possible, with the most rudimentary knowledge of the language, to determine whether something in Japanese is of Japanese, Chinese, or Western origin, for each of these will be designated with its own syllabary. A student of the language can know the provenance of a word even if he does not know the word. Although Chinese has no formal, systematic way of differentiating words of foreign origin, the native Chinese knows that certain names, such as zhu , "the hundred names") to know what is not a Chinese family name; Japanese designates these formally and graphically. To know what is foreign in Chinese, one must be Chinese; to know what is foreign in Japanese, one may still remain foreign. The onomastic differences in Chinese and Japanese seem to demarcate the esoteric nature of Chinese and the exoteric nature of Japanese.
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Another point of contrast between the Chinese and Japanese languages is the rate of change: modern Japanese can no longer read the Japanese of a thousand years ago: (The Tale of Genji must be translated into modern Japanese); but a literate Chinese has greater access to ancient texts in his own tradition than a literate Japanese does. The phenomenon of a modern Japanese reading an ancient classic in English translation (as is the case with Waley's version of the Genji) will not be encountered in Chinese. The adaptability of the Japanese language to foreign terms has wrought many changes over time, but it has also enabled it to adjust to the present world—despite the fact that for more than half of the last thousand years, Japan effectively cut off all contact with the outside world. China, on the other hand, has had uninterrupted commerce and exchange with the outside world: with the Romans in the Han dynasty, Arab sailors in the Tang, Mongols in the Yuan, and Europeans since the thirteenth century. Indeed, China has been ruled by outsiders for more than a third of the last thousand years: the Mongols from 1279 to 1368 and the Manchus from 1644 to 1911. Yet Chinese has sustained relatively little change over a longer period of time. Clearly, as a rough hypothesis, one might theorize that the Chinese language has been endotropic—that is, it has responded to change by becoming more inward or by maintaining its inwardness—whereas the Japanese language has been exotropic, responding to change by becoming more outward. If we compare the experiences of the two countries in translation, we see that the two major Chinese translators, Yen Fu and Lin Shu, each in his way, stressed the esoteric (the Chinese) rather than the foreign elements of what they were translating. Both addressed the elite literati by choosing, quite naturally for the time, the literary language instead of the vernacular. Yen Fu perhaps went even further into esoterica, since he chose an ancient form of Chinese which even his admirer Liang Ch'ich'ao took issue with: "In his style he is too concerned with profundity and elegance. He is firmly bent on copying the style of the preCh'in period [the third century B.C. and earlier], and those who have not read many ancient books found his translations most difficult to comprehend" (Schwartz 1964:93). The search for an adequate style to render foreign works was the preoccupation of the Tongcheng school, which deplored the current "formless notational style of the Qing Empirical Re
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search School." They harked back to the philosophy of the Zhou (Chou) period (1100–221 B.C.). One cannot quite find an adequate parallel in a Western context. In terms of time, it would be as if one were to translate a contemporary work of science into preSocratic Greek; in terms of language differences, a closer parallel might be the rendering of a scientific tract in the language of Spenser. Of course, these extrapolations neglect the fact that Chinese literati would probably find the preQing language more accessible than educated speakers of English today would find Spenser. There has been, at least in the Chinese written language, less change in the two to three thousand years that separate the Zhou period and the present than separates the six hundred years of English from Chaucer to the present. The other great figure of translation in China is Lin Shu, who never traveled abroad and knew no foreign languages. Yet his translations were admired and read as great works of modern Chinese literature (Ch'ien 1975:8–25). Through oral interpreters, Lin Shu constructed a Chinese version of Balzac, Defoe, Dickens, Fielding, Scott, and Swift, as well as a host of such minor writers as H. Rider Haggard, Baroness Emma Orczy, and Arthur Conan Doyle (see Ma 1982). It is true that Lin's translations inspired a generation of literati, including Qian Zhongshu (Ch'ien Chungshu), to study Western languages, so that he could read the Lintranslated works in the original. Qian points out that he had read translations of Western works before, but claims that none had inspired in him the enthusiasm for the originals that Lin's versions did (p. 10). It may be that Lin Shu was the greatest writer of the late Qing, except that he just happened, for the most part, to write translations. Certainly his productivity was prodigious, and he maintained a high standard of quality over a large corpus—for many, such productivity and sustained excellence is the hallmark of a major writer. But by his use of the elite literary language, his works were essentially confined to a very small percentage of the population. There was little or no access to Western works for those whose education did not include a thorough command of the classical language. In short, a large portion of the population was left out when Lin chose to translate in ancient Chinese. He used an esoteric form of an endotropic language. In a sense, both Yen Fu and Lin Shu, each in their way, "sini
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cized" the Western works they translated: they incorporated them into the Chinese tradition, and they sought in them values and beauties that the elite Chinese reader would recognize. They conferred an excellence on some writers who are regarded in their home culture—H. Rider Haggard, for example—as being of only passing interest. Compare this to the tendency in Japanese translations of Western works in the late nineteenth century. A special hybrid style was invented for the rendering of Western books, known as the Gembun'itchi, which forged a new medium out of the colloquial tongue to accommodate a host of neologisms from the West. The result was not only to mark the fashionable modernity of a new style for Western works, but to make it more accessible to the populace at large. Indeed, so effective had this style become in conveying a certain "modishness" that Natsume Soseki used it in his own fiction. As Masao Miyoshi (1974) describes it: In Soseki's Pillow of Grass, the intricate shifting between present tense and past creates an impressive play of its own. However, when the narrative requires expository clarity, it resorts to the stiff "translation style" invented for handling the Western literatures. This style sounds artificial, and it is, imposing a distance between fiction's world and the actual world. Mishima's works, for instance, often have to suffer from this appearance of affectation only because the author is trying to establish a plain discursive narration and there seems no other way to get it than "translation style." [pp. xiv–xv]
The contrast with the Chinese response could not be more dramatic. The Japanese way of incorporating Western culture was to construct a new language manifestly "foreign": its character was exotropic. The Chinese approach was to resort to older styles, to rediscover something traditional with which to dignify, enhance, and make elegant the Western works being translated: its thrust was endotropic. The situation may, of course, be more complex, and what I have outlined here are mere suggestions for further exploration. But the subsequent history of Japan's modernization, accomplished spectacularly within thirty years of a catastrophic defeat in World War II, as opposed to China's still struggling attempts to modernize by the next century, might indicate some fundamental differences in the consequences of endotropic and exotropic cultural
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attitudes. One might look for these differences in the character of the languages themselves. In any event, the study of translations across cultures need not be restricted to the Chinese and the Japanese case, though they represent perhaps the most startling contrast. For example, a study of world religions would single out Christianity and Buddhism as exotropic: both emerged out of their original languages to attract adherents in translation; neither has any followers who speak the ancient tongues in which the originals were written. Other religions are more endotropic. As Northrop Frye (1982:3) has observed: The Koran, for instance, is so interwoven with the special characteristics of the Arabic language that in practice Arabic has had to go everywhere the Islamic religion has gone. Jewish commentary and scholarship, whether Talmudic or Kabbalistic in direction, have always, inevitably, dealt with the purely linguistic features of the Hebrew text of the Old Testament. In contrast, while Christian scholarship is naturally no less aware of the importance of language, Christianity as a religion has been from the beginning dependent on translation.
In another connection, Heidegger points to a decisive shift in Western thought from Greek to Latin paradigms. He sees "a sense of presence" in "the basic Greek experience of the Being of beings," the recognition of what he calls "the thingness of the thing." In his view, the transmogrification, the translation of Greek terms into Latin, from the sense of life in things to the sense of life in abstract terms, was critical: The interpretation of the thingness of the thing is established which henceforth becomes standard, and the Western interpretation of the being of beings stabilized. The process begins with the appropriation of Greek words by RomanLatin thought: hupokeimenon becomes subjectum; hupostasis becomes substantia; sumbebekos becomes accidens. However, this translation of Greek names into Latin is in no way the innocent process it is considered to this day. Beneath the seemingly literal and thus faithful translation there is concealed, rather, a translation of Greek experience into a different way of thinking. Roman thought takes over the Greek words without a corresponding, equally authentic, experience of what they say, without the Greek word. The rootlessness of Western thought begins with this translation. [1971:23]
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The shifts in thought, the changes in the very premises of understanding, wrought by the prevailing winds of one language over periods of human history can be traced: the geological strata are embedded in the languages themselves and in their provenance. One might ask why one country prevails politically and yet not linguistically; how another grows strong politically (and technologically), while sustaining continued and dramatic changes in the language, and yet retains its traditional national character; which literatures survive in translation and which do not, and the factors in the "natural selection" of literatures; and what insights the study of translation may yield on the development of human culture. The irony is that this story, this history, will have to be told in not just one language but in many—and the various versions will themselves constitute a new perspective. It is also an irony that we will pursue this investigation with the very instruments that thwart our understanding: when we are finished, we will have to remember to throw away Wittgenstein's ladder, Zhuangzi's fish net.
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10— The Maladjusted Messenger: Rezeptionsästhetik in Translation Earlier, I quoted Wolfgang Iser's comments about "the structure of the text" that "sets off a sequence of mental images which lead to the text translating itself into the reader's consciousness." I suggested that, because the translator is a reader of an original, as well as the author of the translation, he provides invaluable testimony on reader response, for he is an implied reader—with the advantage that, unlike other implied readers, he was explicit and provided tangible evidence of how he read the original.1 I argued that with the focus on the translator and his translation, there is accessible documentation on the reading of an entire text, where there is a possibility of examining every constituent in the whole. This comprehensive attention is necessary, because a prime factor in readerresponse criticism is the "reader's role as a textual structure, and the reader's role as a structured act." Structure may be adduced in fragments and excerpts, but the objective consideration of structure must take in the whole, even when selected structural elements are adduced. In short, translation provides at least one reader's complete "reader's response."2 1.
Iser reminds us that "the implied reader" has "his roots firmly planted in the structure of the text; he is a construct and in no way to be identified with any real reader" (Iser 1978:34). But surely a translator is a special case: he is an actual reader and, as the agent of meaning, a creator of the text structure in the target language, an implied (if often unacknowledged) author. 2.
I am, of course, not the first to notice the fruitfulness of examining translations from the perspective of readerresponse theory. André Lefevere has written: "Translation seems . . . to be an almost foolproof basis for the study of reception aesthetics" (in Rose 1981:58).
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In this chapter, we want to explore the methodological perspectives suggested in those remarks, illustrating through an analysis of three examples—each derived from the Chinese—the way translations and adaptations provide insights not only into the original and into the process of translation, but also into the ''horizon of expectations" of each translatorreaderinterpreter. The translation becomes a pivotal text which comments on and interprets the original, either explicitly or implicitly, and which in turn is commented upon and interpreted by the reader of the translation. The reader with access to both the original and the translator becomes, in fact, two readers: the interpreter of the original and the interpreter of the translation. Unlike the reader innocent of the original, however, the dualperspective reader—one with access to both the language of the original and the language of the translation—interprets the translation not only by comparing it with an original recalled: he must also take into account his own previous interpretation of the original, which may differ significantly from the translator's. One might consider the reading of a translation by a dualperspective reader, therefore, to be an especially interesting case of "intertextuality" or perhaps "concurrent textuality": the duallanguage reader, consciously or not, subsumes a specific original in his reading of the translation, even as he might (though less obviously) be susceptible to the influences of a translation when returning to the original text. We take as our first instance James Legge's translation of the Analects, traditionally attributed to Confucius. Raised in Scotland, educated at King's College, Aberdeen, a staunch Presbyterian, Legge (1815–1897) traveled first to the London Missionary School in Malacca in 1839 where he became principal of the Anglo Chinese College in 1840; later he was instrumental in converting the AngloChinese College into a theological seminary and arranging for its removal to Hong Kong in 1843. Legge translated many classics of Chinese literature and philosophy, including the Four Books—The Analects (Lunyu )—over a period of fiftysix years, from 1841 to 1897. His translations, which appeared in F. Max Müller's familiar Sacred Books of the East series, were decisive in establishing for two generations of Englishspeaking readers a particular view not only of the
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Lunyu, Confucius, and ancient Chinese philosophy, but of Chinese culture in general. Legge's version of the Lunyu was first published under the title Confucian Analecta in 1861 (DNB, pp. 959–960). The publication of a translation of a Chinese classic under a Latin title in the nineteenth century was hardly unusual: works of learning or of science with some intellectual aspirations appeared either in Latin or with a Latin title—the practice is a longstanding one: Newton's Principia and Leibniz's Novissima Sinica in the seventeenth century, Russell's Principia Mathematica and Wittgenstein's Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus in the twentieth century, are but the most famous examples. Yet, familiar as "The Analects" has become as a translation of the Lunyu, it gives a misleading impression of both the title and the text in Chinese. First, "analects" is a far less familiar and accessible word in English than lunyu is in Chinese; lunyu could be (and has been on occasion) rendered informally as "sayings" or ''conversations."3 On the surface, the word "analects" appears semantically accurate as a description of the contents of the Lunyu: it refers to "the extracts from the classical authors."4 Yet, even in the nineteenth century, the word "analects" sounded arcane and esoteric, in a way that lunyu in Chinese never has. This digression on the onomastics of titles is directly relevant to the way Legge read the Lunyu: he saw it as a classic in the Chinese tradition and hence treated it in translation as if it were a classic in the Western tradition, adorning it with an aura of classical learning. Certainly no fault can be found in this strategy. Still, deferential as it is, there is something awry in conceiving of the Lunyu as "The Analects." If one goes to the Lunyu with "the horizon of expectations" redolent of other classics, like Plato's Dialogues and Descartes' Discourse on Method, one is bound to be disappointed: there appears to be no coherence, no logical development, no reasoned presentation of a point of view. The Lunyu is nothing so much as a 3.
"Discourse" might also be suitable, since it denotes oral exchanges of a serious intellectual bent; "dialogues" might be even more appropriate, suggesting as it does philosophical conversations—although both words now carry strong connotations of structured and systematic argumentation, traits not found in the Lunyu. 4.
It would appear from the Glossarum mediae et infimae latinitatis, however, that the word was not used as a title in classical Greek, classical Latin, or medieval Latin.
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collection of unprepossessing, if profoundly insightful, anecdotes and intuitive remarks on various subjects, arranged in no particularly conspicuous order and governed by no discernible coherence.5 But what is misguided about Legge's rendering of the Lunyu as a "sacred book," as we shall see, is that it misleads the reader of the translation (as perhaps Legge himself was misled) into seeing the Chinese compilation as a pale reflection of a truly sacred text, a repository of divine wisdom. Legge did not fully appreciate Confucius' resolute and emphatic refusal to speculate about the divine or the hereafter: "The topics the Master did not speak of were prodigies, force, disorder and gods" (7:21; Lau 1979:88), and when a disciple asked about death, the Master rebuked him with this admonishment: "You do not understand even life. How can you understand death?" (11:12; Lau, p. 107). The Lunyu is, above all, secular, thisworldly. That is why a phrase such as 3:13, , though rendered with literal accuracy by Legge as "He who offends against Heaven has none to whom he can pray,'' is, nevertheless, "systematically misleading" (to use Gilbert Ryle's phrase). The Western reader cannot avoid reading this injunction except as an invocation to devoutness, a call to belief in the Almighty. "Heaven" in the Christian world is inextricably bound up in concepts of the hereafter, the dwelling place of God. In rendering this passage in what Legge must have thought was a selfevident reference to an omnipotent God ("Heaven" here in the translation is clearly a metonymy for God the Father), he was no doubt paying tribute to the Chinese by assuming that Confucius was a devout and profound, if unprofessed and unwitting, Christian. But this interpretation, inevitable as it was with Legge, cannot be justified by either the context of the passage or what we know about the secular mindset of Confucius. The dictum is in answer to the following question by Wangsun Chia: What is the meaning of the saying, "Is it better to pay court to the furnace than to the southwest corner?"
This translated version appears cryptic, whereas in the Chinese it is 5.
This is the one sense that is captured by "analects," which in its root meaning suggests miscellaneity.
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merely allusive: Wingtsit Chan's rendering (1963:25) supplies the context: "What is meant by the common saying, 'It is better to be on good terms with the God of the Kitchen [who cooks our food] than with the spirits of the shrine (ancestors) at the southwest corner of the house'?" Confucius said, "It is not true. He who commits a sin against Heaven has no god to pray to."
The question asks which is to be preferred: the "kitchengods" or the "ancestorgods"? There is no presumed monotheism. Here, though Chan also capitalizes the word "Heaven," it refers not to a divine and otherworldly empyrean, nor even to the sky above, but generically to ''the natural order of things."6 In other words, "Heaven" is the right translation for tian ,8 something which would be as theologically inconceivable as it would be grammatically awkward in most if not all Western languages.9 6.
Legge, in a footnote, cites Zhu Xi's interpretation of "Heaven" as principle: . But he rejects this interpretation and sees principle as divine immanence: "But why should Heaven mean principle," Legge writes, "if there were not in such a use of the term an instinctive recognition of a supreme government of intelligence and righteousness?" (1894:159). Li Xiansheng, under my direction, addressed these and other aspects of Legge's translation in his paper "On James Legge's Translation of Confucian Texts" (M.A., Comparative Literature, Indiana University, 1984). 7.
There can be no doubt that Legge believed that the Chinese knew "the true God": cf. his treatise The Notions of the Chinese Concerning God and Spirits (1852: chap. 1).
8.
The translation of the concepts of divinity was at the heart of the "Rites Controversy" which involved the question whether Chinese converts to Christianity should be allowed to observe the Confucian rituals. The controversy ended in 1742, when Pope Benedict XIV condemned the Confucian and ancestral rites: see George Minamiki (1985). 9.
H. G. Creel, in his article "Was Confucius Agnostic?" (1932:55–99), argues that Confucius, like the Hebrews of the Old Testament, felt that "ethics, politics, and the whole of life were inseparable from their cosmic and religious back
(footnote continued on next page)
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Book 17, Chapter 19, of the Analects offers the following exchange: The Master said, "I would prefer not speaking." Tszekung said, "If you, Master, do not speak, what shall we, your disciples, have to record?" The Master said, "Does Heaven speak? The four seasons pursue their courses, and all things are continually being produced, but does Heaven say anything?" [Legge, p. 326]
From the context, the word "Heaven" refers to the natural world, to the phenomena of existence, to all creation. In the text, the words tian ("all creation"; literally, ''the hundred things") are metonymies for the phenomena of nature. Confucius is saying no more than, like the phenomena of nature, he is mute and cannot put into words the mystery of being.10 Wingtsit Chan (1963:47) makes the distinction explicit in his version: Confucius said, "I do not wish to say anything." Tzukung said, "If you do not say anything, what can we little disciples ever learn to pass on to others?" Confucius said, "Does Heaven (T'ien, Nature) say anything? The four seasons run their course and all things are produced. Does Heaven say anything?"
Legge's translation is accurate except for one crucial syntagmatic detail: the insertion of the negative conjunction "but" in "but does Heaven say anything?" This simple addition radically changes the cosmological context of the passage, for it implies that the seasons, all creation, are but the manifest workings of a divine intelligence, and that this intelligence is metonymically referred to as "Heaven." The question for Legge is not whether there is an explanation, but whether Heaven chooses to divulge its explanation. Read in this (footnote continued from previous page) ground" (p. 99). There can be no disagreement that Confucius harbored a reverence for life and an appreciation of its mysteries, or that he was "religious" if being religious means being humbled by all creation. But this sense of reverence does not, by itself, predicate the personal anthropomorphic God that Legge imagined. 10.
This passage mirrors the philosophy of language and the epistemology inherent in the first lines of the Dao De Jing: "That which can be said is not the universal/everlasting word; that which can be named is not the universal/everlasting name":
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way, Confucius appears to be playing the august and omniscient sage, suggesting to Legge that he claims the right to be silent, even as the Creator chooses to remain silent before his creations. Legge reads tian ("heaven") as metonymy for the Creator rather than for (His) Creation. That this was Legge's reading can be seen in a footnote he added to the translation of this passage: "It is not easy to defend Confucius from the charge of presumption in comparing himself to Heaven" (Legge, p. 326). But Legge has forgotten that, as Confucius has not speculated on the divine, positing neither the existence nor the nonexistence of the Almighty, there is no One on whom to presume, and no One with whom to compare himself. Confucius was merely alluding to the generally recognized muteness of phenomena; he was not arrogating for himself the status of a supreme being.11 Legge's view of Confucius is reminiscent of the "virtuous pagans" in the first circle of Dante's Inferno, who "were born without the light of Christ's revelation and . . . cannot come into the light of God . . . they are not tormented. Their only pain is that they have no hope" (Ciardi 1954:49). Yet there is a profound ambivalence in Legge's attitude toward the Confucian tradition: to the texts themselves, so commonsensical and rational, Legge is passionately impatient; to the commentaries, so often intuitive and mystical, Legge is positivistic and skeptical. On Confucius' commonsensical secularism, Legge is condescending: The reader will be prepared . . . not to expect to find any light thrown by Confucius on the great problems of the human condition and destiny. He did not speculate on the creation of things or the end of them. He was not troubled to account for the origin of men, nor did he seek to know about his hereafter. He meddled neither with physics nor metaphysics. [Legge, p. 98]
Legge shows his largesse and views Confucius with the same indulgence and pity that Dante felt for the denizens of limbo: 11.
One cannot agree with Creel in his assertion that "Legge recognizes that the Chinese declare T'ien and Shang Ti to be two names for the same entity, but he refuses to admit their testimony." Creel assumes that T'ien does refer to a supreme being and that it occurs four times as often as its synonym, Ti or Shang Ti; cf. Creel (1932:74–75).
Page 176 These were sinless. And still their merits fail, for they lacked Baptism's grace, which is the door of the true faith you were born to. Their birth fell before the age of the Christian mysteries, and so they did not worship God's Trinity in fullest duty. [Ciardi, pp. 50–51]
Legge's compassion for Confucius reflects the magnanimity of nineteenthcentury Christianity to the less fortunate, to the unbaptized: Confucius is not to be blamed for his silence on the subjects here indicated. His ignorance of them was to a great extent his misfortune. He had not learned them. No report of them had come to him by the ear; no vision of them by the eye. And to his practical mind the toiling of thought and uncertainties seemed worse than useless. [Legge, p. 98]
Yet, as benighted as Legge saw Confucius to be, he was no more receptive to NeoConfucian commentaries which did "meddle . . . with metaphysics." He quotes Zhu Xi's exegesis of Confucius, and rather than being inspired by it, or finding that it satisfied his penchant for "revelation," or being impressed by its efforts to answer questions relating to "the human condition and destiny," Legge is derisive: "Let the states of equilibrium and harmony exist in perfection, and a happy order will prevail throughout heaven and earth, and all things will be nourished and flourish." Here we pass into the sphere of mystery and mysticism. The language; according to Chu Hsi [Zhu Xi], "describes the meritorious achievements and the transforming influence of sage and spiritual men in their highest extent." From the path of duty, where we tread on solid ground, the writer suddenly raises us aloft on wings of air, and will carry us we know not where, and to we know not what. [Legge, p.46]
If the commentator were Matthew and not Zhu Xi, and if instead of such phrases as "equilibrium and harmony" Legge had read "the peace that passeth all understanding," one wonders whether he would have been quite so unsympathetic. It would be churlish to dismiss Legge as a callous and uninformed interpreter of Chinese culture. He was, after all, someone who devoted his entire life to a disciplined and productive study of
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the Chinese classics, and his translations and commentaries still meet the highest standards of philological research. Nor was he entirely oblivious to the possibility of bias in his view of the Chinese, whose culture occupied him for so long, and whose people he had, no doubt, identified with over a period of nearly thirty years' residence. Indeed, an inkling of this awareness can be seen in his coda to the introduction to his translation of the Four Books: But I must now leave the sage. I hope I have not done him injustice; the more I have studied his character and opinions, the more highly have I come to regard him. He was a very great man, and his influence has been on the whole a great benefit to the Chinese, while his teachings suggest important lessons to ourselves who profess to belong to the school of Christ. [Legge, p. 111]
It is not Legge's own bias, but the bias inherent in a fundamentally Christian outlook which he could not escape, nor see objectively, that infuses his intemperate and inconsistent critiques of the Confucian canon.12 He saw Confucius as a false prophet, a Messiah manqué, whose practical wisdom was useful in developing moral character but whose thought would be forever mired in unbaptized and unredeemed benightedness. Our second text is one of the lyrics of Gustav Mahler's late song cycle, Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), adapted out of free renderings from the Chinese published in 1907 by Hans Bethge under the title Die chinesische Flöte. The genealogy of these lyrics, which can be traced from Mahler to Bethge, from Bethge to the original Chinese, through various translations,13 constitutes a fascinating sourcestudy. But rather than focus on questions of originality or generic integrity, we shall go beyond the variant strands that make up the composite whole to identify and reconstruct first 12.
Creel (p. 58) cites Legge's 1867 statement, "I am unable to regard him as a great man," alongside his revision in 1893, "He was a very great man," and concludes that this revision reflects virtue on both Legge and Confucius: "These passages are a striking evidence of the greatness, not only of Confucius, but of Dr. Legge as well." 13.
"Bethge was no sinologist and had no direct access to Chinese poetry, and the models he used for his sensitive poems were not the original texts but existing versions in German, English, and French"—Kurt Blaukopf (1973:235).
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Mahler's reading of Bethge and, through Bethge, his reading of the Tang poets. Let us look at Der Abschied (The Farewell), which Mahler attributes to "MongKoo Yen and Wang Wei" (presumably Meng Haoran thirtynine lines. Despite Mahler's attribution, no poem was jointly written by Wang Wei and Meng Haoran.14
). The lyric runs some
Mahler's Der Abschied derives from two translations in Bethge's collection: "In Erwartung des Freundes" by "MongKaoJen" and "Der Abschied des Freundes" by "WangWei." (See Appendix A.) Some lines, cited here, are interpolated into the text by Mahler: Die Blumen blassen im Dämmers chein Um im schlaf vergess'nes Glück Und Jugend neu zu lernen! Es wehet kühl im Schatten meiner Fichten Ich harre sein zum letzten Lebewohl O Schönheit! O ewigen Liebens LebensTrunk'ne Welt! Ich wandle nach der Heimat, meiner Stätte. Still ist mein Herz und harret seiner Stunde! Blüht auf im Lenz und grünt aufs neu! Allüberall und ewig blauen licht die Fernen!
The flowers pale in the twilight glow And in sleep forgotten joy And youth to learn anew It blows cool in the shade of my pines I tarry for him until the last farewell O Beauty! O everlasting Love Life Besotted World! I wander toward my country, my homestead My heart is still and awaits its hour Blooms in the spring and is green again Ever wherever and forever colors the horizon lambently blue
The translation is roughly comparable to Wang Wei's "Songbie" We should not pass over Mahler's conflation of the work of two 14.
Sequences of "answering" poems between poets were, of course, common.
. (See Appendixes A and B.)
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poets without comment. Western familiarity with Mahler's masterwork blinds audiences—as, no doubt, Mahler's intense romantic and listenable piece is intended to do—to the inherent license being exercised with literary texts. For a comparably outlandish example, one must imagine a Chinese composer conflating two lyrics on love, one by Shakespeare with another by Ben Jonson; or, to use specific poems on similar subjects, Coleridge's "Ode: On Dejection" with Keats's "Ode on Melancholy." What would be unthinkable with poets viewed and valued as individual artists is inevitable with figures only dimly perceived in garbled translations. Parting is, of course, a recurrent theme in Tang poetry, and Mahler cannot be faulted for composing an allpurpose parting poem. That he is able to do so reflects two conclusions: first, that the poets were, to his mind, so devoid of discernible and particular personalities that they could be combined without stylistic disruptions; second, that his purpose was not to convey the sense of a specific experience, rooted in time and culture, but rather to define the essence of leavetaking as a universal experience. The haunting effect of his music, and its popularity among concertgoers, would seem to suggest that he has succeeded in creating an accessible experience aspiring to universality. Yet this success does not critically depend on the listener's sense of the individual Chinese poets who ultimately inspired Mahler's work: one leaves Das Lied von der Erde with no greater sense of who Meng Haoran or Wang Wei was than before, however attentive the reader of program notes and record jacket copy might be. Before such achievements, it would be captious to insist on scholarly scrupulousness, for it is doubtful if a more esoterically faithful rendering would be musically superior. But to the extent that he is representative of Western culture, and Wang Wei and Meng Haoran typify the Tang poet, Mahler's transformations of the Chinese poets raise interesting questions in general about artistic tendencies in the West and in China. Mahler's tendency is to universalize personal moments, to abstract from a particular experience an elevated and grandiloquent gesture: "O Schönheit! O ewigen Liebens LebensTrunk'ne Welt!" One might speak of the nominalization of reality, so strong a linguistic feature of German, as distinctly antithetical to the particularization, which stresses immanence rather than transcendence, in Chinese. "Oh, Beauty! Oh, everlasting Love LifeBesotted World!" There is a
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magnificent grandeur in these lines, which can easily, in bad poets, turn to bathos and false emotion—the Egotistical Sublime, as Josephine Miles has characterized it. Traditional Chinese poetry, on the other hand, conveys a modesty and a restraint, a hesitancy about grand claims, a discretion about feeling, that can be disarming and heartening at its best, mundane and banal at its worst. Indeed, it was these qualities that attracted Bethge in the first place: "What graceful lyrical art confronted me here! I felt a shy, transient tenderness of lyrical utterance" (Blaukopf, pp. 235–236). Mahler's additions tend toward the grand romantic gesture: there is no shyness in such lines as: "Still ist mein Herz und harret seiner Stunde!" Even Bethge's comprehensive "Die Erde ist die gleiche überall'' is not capacious and breathtaking enough for Mahler, and he extrapolates it to virtually cosmic proportions: Die liebe Erde allüberall Blüht auf im Lenz und grünt aufs neu! Allüberall und ewig blauen licht die Fernen!
And where Bethge had written, simply, "Und ewig, ewig sind die weissen Wolken," Mahler ends the lyric with portentous ellipsis: Ewig . . . ewig . . .
In these additions and adjustments, one can see Mahler raising the philosophical and cosmic stakes in Bethge: he extends the discourse in time and space. Experience is global and comprehensive: O Schönheit! O ewigen Liebens LebensTrunk'ne Welt!
The self, the "I," is no longer a specific individual in history, bound in an age, or restricted by region, constrained by contemporaneity: the "I" becomes supernal, almost messianic and apocalyptic: Still ist mein Herz und harret seiner Stunde!
A comparison of Bethge's translations with the originals shows the following interpolations (see Appendix B):
Page 181 O sieh, wie, eine Silberbarke schwebt Der Mond herauf hinter den dunkeln Fichten Der Bach singt voller Wohllaut durch das Dunkel Wo bleibst du nur? Du lässt mich lang allein! Ich wandle auf und nieder mit der Laute Auf Wegen, die von weichem Grase schwellen.
Oh see, like a silver ship The moon floats up behind the dark pines The brook sings full of melody through the darkness Where then art thou? Thou hast left me alone for so long I wander up and and down with my lute On paths overgrown with tender grass.
The additions are, with one exception, in the spirit of the original: the images are concrete, immediate, evocative. The "Silberbarke" is, of course, a nineteenthcentury maritime European intrusion in a landlocked, eighthcentury Chinese poem. The last line, which conveys the longing appropriate to the poem, expresses it in a way not to be found in the original: O kämst du, kämst du, ungetreuer Freund!
The imperative remonstrance in this line contrasts sharply with the discretion of the last lines in both original poems, which read, in Witter Bynner's version: "And so I think of you, old friend, O troubler of my midnight dreams!"
and And still—because you promised—I am waiting for you, waiting, Playing my lonely lute under a wayside vine.
Even the Bynner translation overdoes it: the original is much more succinct and restrained: Feeling like this, remembering you, old friend, I think of you in the midst of my dreams. Expecting you to return home, A lonely lute waits by the overgrown path.
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Both the German and the English versions make the emotion more explicit than it is in the Chinese. At the very center of Bethge's poem is a crucial modification of the original sourceline: . . . Die arbeitsamen Menschen Gehn heimwärts, voller Sehnsucht nach dem Schlaf.
. . . The laboring people Gohomeward, longing deeply for sleep.
The sourceline in Meng Haoran's "At the MountainLodge of the Buddhist Priest Ye" reads: ("about to" or "almost") in the preceding line, which Bynner doesn't quite capture, the sense of which should be: "The woodsmen have almost all gone home." There is a strong contrast between the natural phenomena of life and immanent human experience—between, on the one hand, the woodsmen returning home, the birds roosting in their nests at evening, and, on the other, the friend who has not yet arrived. But these observations (it would be crucially missing the point to call them metaphors) are inclusive as well as contrastive, for the sense of the previous lines is to suggest the nearcompletion of a process: the woodsmen almost all gone home, the birds beginning to settle down. The reverse implication is thereby adduced as well: some woodsmen, a few, have not yet returned; the birds have not yet settled down. The end of the poem hangs fire: it does not preclude either the possibility of the Buddhist priest Ye showing up soon, or not at all. This anticipatory indefiniteness—combining apprehensiveness with hope—is the essence of waiting. The poem is a realization of an indicative moment, not a series of insights derived from experience reflected upon.16 The thrust of Bethge's poem is to abstract the experience and 15.
"Birds . . . in the quiet mist" is an extrapolation of the simple compound yanniao, which would be awkward to render as "misty bird."
16.
I have commented on this aspect of Tang poetry in an earlier essay (Eoyang 1973:613–615).
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generalize from it: instead of "woodsmen," we have "laboring people" ("Die arbeitsamen Menschen"—which in Mahler becomes ''müde Menschen"). Whether determined by poetic preference or dictated by the exigencies of the music, the specific events in the poem are hypostasized into general symbol: the familiar warrants of evening, woodsmen returning home, birds roosting, are summarily comprehended: "Die Welt schläft ein . . ." Our third example involves a comparison of two translations of the same poem from the Chinese Book of Songs, the Shijing, no. 143, one by Arthur Waley, the other by Ezra Pound. (See Appendix C for the original.) Pound's Version (1954):
Waley's Version (1937):
The erudite moon is up, less fair than she Who hath tied silk cords about a heart in a agony She at such ease so all my work is vain.
A moon rising white Is the beauty of my lovely one, Ah, the tenderness, the grace! Heart's pain consumes me.
My heart is tinder, and steel plucks at my pain so all my work is vain, she at such ease as is the enquiring moon.
A moon rising bright Is the fairness of my loverly one. Ah, the gentle softness! Heart's pain wounds me.
A glittering moon comes out less bright than she the moon's colleague that is so fair, of yet such transient grace, as ease, undurable, so all my work is vain torn with this pain.
A moon rising in splendour Is the beauty of my lovely one. Ah, the delicate yielding! Heart's pain torments me.
As a guide to the original, Waley's rendering is certainly the more useful: he captures the formulaic structure of the ballad; he retains the repetitions with programmed "improvised" variants, so familiar in orally composed and orally transmitted songs, the simplicity of diction. By the time Waley published these translations in 1937, entitled
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The Book of Songs, he was already an accomplished translator from the Chinese and the Japanese: A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems appeared in 1918; The No * Plays of Japan in 1921; The Tale of Genji, in six volumes, from 1925 to 1933. Possibly because the Shijing had been the focus of anthropological study by Marcel Granet in his Fêtes et chansons anciennes de la Chine, published in Paris in 1919, Waley arranged the 290 poems of the 305 poems in the Shijing,17 not in their traditional order, but according to subject matter. The topics, "courtship," "marriage," "agriculture," "music and dancing," and so forth, would especially facilitate anthropological and thematic study. For these renderings, he consulted the scholarship of both Gustav Haloun, to whom the volume is dedicated, and Bernhard Karlgren, whose annotated prose translations he recommends to the ''specialist." But his translation of no. 143, one of the folk songs in the guofeng ("airs of the country") section of the Shijing, is somewhat typical of Waley's success with the pining love ballads that dominate this section: the chaste and modest demeanor, the controlled passion, the reflective discretion—all seem right. (Waley is less successful with political satire or bombast, as in 49, 52, 223—Waley nos. 269, 270, 268.) Pound's rendering appears on the surface contrived and forced: it is certainly more "written up" than Waley's. There is no warrant in the original for "erudite moon," though the image is striking. There is nice paranomasia in "My heart is tinder." The phrase "steel plucks at my pain"—though an anachronism—is suggestive. And "transient grace," prompted by a line in the original that Karlgren interprets as "How easy and handsome" (Waley: "Ah, the delicate yielding"), is an apt descriptor for both the moon and the beauty of the young. Pound conflates the sense of Karlgren's "easy" and Waley's "yielding" into a neologism that looks like a misprint: "at ease, undurable." Pound did not profess to know Chinese for his 1954 version, but he had the help and consultation of the Harvard sinologue Achilles Fang, who provided his version, published under the title of The 17.
He omitted 15 poems "partly because they are much less interesting than the others and partly because in many passages the text is so corrupt that one would be obliged either to write nonsense or to leave many blanks"—Waley (p. 11). The "Finding List" at the end of the book is misleading, since it gives Waley's numbering for all 305 poems, including the 15 not presented.
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Confucian Odes, with an introduction; Pound almost certainly had access to Waley's 1937 version of the Shijing. Indeed, it is difficult to imagine some of Pound's versions as anything but extreme reactions to Waley. A comparison of the 290 Shijing translations to be found in both Pound and Waley reveal few if any versions that are even approximately similar, representing a high order of improbability when one considers that the same originals are involved. It may be that Pound translated not so much through Waley as against Waley. Sometimes he went to great lengths to avoid imitating the English poetsinologue, not infrequently producing neither translations nor poems but travesties of verbal reconstruction: Pound's versions of Shijing 40, 75, and 76 are particular disasters. Yet the same strategy can produce an affecting imitation of a hillbilly folk ballad, even if it may sound very dated to urban audiences, as in his rendering of Shijing 187 ("Huangniao"). Moreover, his dirge inspired by Shijing 23 ("Lies a dead deer on yonder plain") is one of the loveliest laments for lost youth and the death of innocence in the English language. Pound's strategy is to create a literate text out of an oral song: as in other versions (nos. 40, 75, 90, 99), he modifies the balladic oral formulas into readable texts rather than singable scripts (although Waley's indifference to regular metrics precludes his translations being sung). He alters the vocative aspect of the original into a declarative, reflexive selfrumination on personal misery. He converts a syntactically simple ballad which could just as easily have been translated without verbs (the verbs in the poem are, if anything, only stative or participial) into dense contortions of syntax—as in "she at such ease / as is the enquiring moon" and "A glittering moon comes out / less bright than she the moon's colleague / that is so fair" (where one would expect the accusative "her" after "than" and not the nominative "she''). Pound's version also introduces a third voice: the implicit "I" of the narratorspeaker, the implied "you" of the readerlistener, and the explicit "she" of the text of the poem. In the original, the sentiments are effusions addressed to no one in particular, a self soliloquizing to an absent lover, overheard by the readerlistener. But in 18.
This order of publication reverses the order in which Pound's Cathay (1917) and Waley's One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918) appeared.
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Pound there is discursiveness and narrativeness: the speaker refers to the object of love in the third person; the reader is actively invoked as witness to the narrator's plaint. This "narrativity" in the lyric undermines the lyricism of the original—converts it from an example of what Eliot, in defining the lyric, referred to as "that which is overheard" to a description which is directly communicated from one person (the poet or narrator) to another (the reader or listener). As such, the entire poem in Pound takes on a level of irony and sophistication absent in the original, which is, after all, a series of balladic apostrophes, a "round," that could be expanded indefinitely with slight variation of a word or two in each of the four lines. The element of narrativity introduced into the Pound version elicits expectations of coherence and argument on the part of the reader. One senses a need for beginning, middle, and end. Pound tries to weight the poem toward a climax by using two techniques, one involving length of line and the other rhyme. His last stanza is the longest of the three (in the original they are all of equal length), and, unlike the previous stanzas, the final stanza ends with a rhyme. Pound's version of Shijing 143 indicates that he read it as a work to be reconstituted as text, not as script; he saw it as literate pretext for the expression of emotion (hence the words that smack of the study, such as "erudite," "enquiring," and "colleague," the coining of ''undurable"). His perspective is at the antipodes of Waley's "anthropological" approach: where, for Waley, these songs were verbal artifacts that preserved in ritual terms the generational experience of the people, for Pound these are private expressions of authentic, autochthonous emotion. The contrast is more than a matter of correct or incorrect translation; it is a reflection not only of how Pound read the poem, whether in the original, with the help of Achilles Fang, or influenced by previous translations, but also of how we read these translations. Waley's approach is no less disingenuous than Pound's, for he presumes our interest to be research, not aesthetic enjoyment; he presumes on the reader's scholarly curiosity and arranges the Shijing poems topically, as if their value might be, thereby, enhanced, when the reader is conveniently directed to the subject matter in each poem. Pound sees the Shijing as the fount of private inspiration, not as public expression to be reconstructed. We read the three texts—the original and the two
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translations—with a sense of how variously distant they all are from us. The simplicity of the original seems charming, if a little innocent; the spareness of the Waley strikes us as bland and passionless; and the ingenuity of the Pound impresses us as dense and tortured. We have examined three different instances of what Robert Escarpit calls "trahison créatrice" or what Harold Bloom would characterize, without pejorativeness, as "misprision." Each instance betrays the interpreter, who reads into the text his own predilections and presuppositions, even as the translations betray the original text. Each instance provides textual warrant for "an implied reader'' that is far from ideal yet somehow apt and useful for us (their "implied readers") in deriving knowledge from the texts, whether originals or translations. The study of translations must break out of the anecdotal as well the merely lexical: translations provide too rich a study for reader interpretation to be left to linguistic pedants. They offer too many insights—not only on the target and source languages, but often on language itself—to be left to dilletantes. It may be, as George Steiner and others have argued, that the study of translation, so peripheral to the interests of national literatures, yet so central to a growing population of expatriates and exiles, may be one of the paradigms for human understanding and learning: for in understanding something new, isn't the first instinct to relate it to something old and familiar? And when the false analogy between the "new" and the "old" has been discovered, hasn't one then begun to appreciate the new on its own terms? And does this process not mirror the process of translation, in which one appropriates an unfamiliar source text into a familiar target language, always erroneously and fruitfully misinterpreting (even when the translation is accurate: for then the essential uniqueness of the original in the source language is thereby betrayed)? The progressive realization of the errors in translation restores for us the radical originality—not to mention the radical historicity—of the source text: they make us see the original more clearly, providing what anthropologists would call "emic" (insider's) knowledge as well as "etic" (outsider's) knowledge. Heinz Kohut characterizes this contrast as "experiencenear" and
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"experiencedistant," by which he means what might be understood roughly as intuitive knowledge and analytic knowledge. I should like to borrow from current computer vocabulary by using the terms "nativefriendly" and "strangerfriendly." Translations are generically predisposed to being "strangerfriendly" (though some academic translations, as we have indicated, are more inaccessible to the targetlanguage reader than the original ever was to the sourcelanguage reader).19 The student of translation, however, needs to be sensitive to four typologies of interpretation: the strange made familiar (as in FitzGerald's Omar Khayyam or the Hebrew Old Testament in English); the strange made strange (as in any of a number of bizarre transliteration systems of Chinese, not excluding pinyin); the native made familiar (which constitutes ''emic" experience by virtue of long acculturation); and the native made strange ("etic" experience, or ostraenie, defamiliarization). Clifford Geertz's description of the process involved in anthropological analysis holds as true for translators and students of translation: "a continuous dialectical tacking between the most local of local detail and the most global of global structure in such a way as to bring them into simultaneous view" (Geertz 1984:134). Of those we have studied in this chapter, only Legge went to China: Mahler, Bethge, Pound, and Waley never set foot on Chinese soil. Yet extended residence did not remove the scales of Christianity from Legge's eyes: he never saw the Confucian texts in their own light. In a sense, Legge didn't really know he was in China, despite his extended residence. The others imagined themselves, rightly or wrongly, in traditional China: Mahler took the Chinese experience and derived from it transcendent, universalist musical expressions for friendship, parting, and longing. Bethge 19.
A perfect pair of examples for the "strangerfriendly" and the "nativefriendly" contrast can be seen in the Yugoslavian car imported to the United States called "Yugo," which is not only an apt abbreviation of the source of the car but an inviting descriptor of the vehicle itself—"You go!" The obverse example is the insistence of General Motors on naming one of its Chevrolet models "Nova," which connotes in English "a starburst" as well as newness, but which reads to Spanishspeaking peoples (including those in the United States) as "no va"—"It doesn't go." Both the Yugo in Yugoslavia and the Nova in the United States are "nativefriendly" in the country of manufacture, the one appealing to native patriotism, the other to the American penchant for the novel. But the Yugo is "strangerfriendly," the Nova is not.
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discovered in the Chinese poems his own lyrical impulse, perhaps not so shy as that in the original, but haunting and evocative in its own right. Pound took the Chinese classics as sources of inspiration, Waley as sources for study. If these "readers" of Chinese had never gone to China, their imaginations nevertheless persuaded them that they were in China. There is a haunting entry in Wittgenstein's On Certainty (1974b:42e) which is relevant here not only because it mentions China: I ask someone "Have you ever been in China?" He replies "I don't know." Here one would surely say ''You don't know?"
In an age when the mere physical fact of having been to China seems to confer knowledge (or at least the aura of knowing), it is important to remember that the majority of natives all over the world are natively ignorant, and that the truly knowledgeable people are those who command native knowledge of a subject with a stranger's perspective on that subject. To adopt Hirsch's polarity, if being a native is the only way to understand the meaning of what life is like in a culture, only a nonnative perspective will yield its significance. This principle of epistemology is merely the more abstract version of the tourist's truism that one does not understand or appreciate one's own country until one leaves it. Neither the naturalization of the foreign, which erases the unique character of the original, nor the exploitation of the exotic, which exaggerates differences,20 is sufficient for a truly global or scientific perspective in our "horizon of expectations." One must demystify the Other even as one defamiliarizes the Self. 20.
The notion of seeing translations as "naturalizations" or as "barbarizations" is insightfully explored by James J. Y. Liu in his article "Polarity of Aims and Methods: Naturalization or Barbarization?" (1975b:60–67). "Naturalizations" render the strange familiar; "barbarizations" preserve the strangeness of the unfamiliar. These terms in the context of Liu's discussion are clear enough, but they have failed to be widely adopted because of their inherent ambivalence: "naturalizations" are unnatural processes by which immigrants gain citizenship in the United States; "barbarizations," on the other hand, suggest to the Chinese anyone who is not Chinese. The terms are, therefore, "loaded" in American English and, when translated, in Chinese.
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11— Catalyst and Excavator: Pound and Waley As Translators of Chinese Poetry One of the most frequently posed questions by teachers of world literature who are innocent of Chinese is: "Who is the better translator? Arthur Waley or Ezra Pound?" Like so many interesting questions, it is unanswerable. Not because there are no final answers (partisans can be found on both sides), but because as a question, it is—as the philosophers would say—illphrased. There is the obvious but necessary need to ask first: on which poem is Waley's or Pound's version to be preferred? There are also the prior questions: What does one mean by "translation"? What criteria are assumed in a judgment of value in translation? What can be learned from these versions and by their comparison, either about the original or about the process of translating? These are the questions that must be addressed before one can address in any meaningful way the question: Who is the better translator? Waley or Pound? These prior questions—on the ontology of translation (what is it?), on its criteria of canonicity (how does one judge it?), and on what might be called its heuristics (how does one teach from it? what can be learned by studying them?)—are by no means settled, nor can they be definitively resolved. Yet these questions are worth exploring. For by asking them we will be able to see the larger issues implicit in the Waley or Pound choice, issues which illuminate not only the generics of translation but the dynamics of language and culture, as well as the methodology of crosscultural comparison.
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The text that attracted both Waley and Pound is, of course, the Shijing , the ancient Chinese classic which is itself surrounded by complex and interesting questions of historicity, genre, and canonicity. Complex hermeneutical questions about this work can be asked, and voluminously answered, but we will resist the temptation to rehearse that scholarly scenario.1 For the purposes of this discussion, one posits the original existence of these works, not as texts, but as songs, paeans, celebrations, laments, memorials composed—either orally or in writing—by ancient peoples or persons unknown who lived sometime before the lifetime of Confucius, whose dates are 551–479 B.C.2 The typologies of translation are numerous. Distinctions have been drawn between translations and imitations as between translations and versions; these distinctions have been denied just as vigorously: some argue that all translations are, in some ways, imitations, and that a translation is inevitably a version.3 But these are author determined classifications and do not take into account the factor so often neglected in translation studies: the audience. Just as with the assumption that the original is one and inviolate, so also it has been assumed—but with far less warrant—that the audience for translations of a work is and should be one and the same. A look at literal translations, imitations, adaptations, and the like will show that their ontological differences can be adduced only if one examines the intended, or implied, audience. A literal version, for example, is not intended for a bilingual reader: he has no need of wordforword equivalents, and he would not need to grasp the 1.
For a recent survey of these issues see Pauline Yu, "Collections, Canons, and Classical Chinese Poetry," a paper presented to the Second SinoAmerican Symposium on Comparative Literature, Princeton University, 29–31 October 1987. 2.
The Confucian character of the traditional interpretation of these texts is reflected in Pound's title for his versions: The Confucian Odes: The Classic Anthology (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1954; New York: New Directions, 1959). Waley's version is more anthropological and emphasizes the folkloric character of the original: The Book of Songs (London: Allen & Unwin, 1937; New York: Grove Press, 1960). 3.
See John Hollander, "Versions, Interpretations, and Performances," in Brower (1959) for an analysis of the distinctions; for the argument against the distinctions, consult Susan BasnettMcGuire, "Ways Through the Labyrinth: Strategies and Methods for Translating Theatre Texts," in Hermans (1985), especially p. 101.
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meaning of the original work in such a mechanical way. Nor is a literal version intended for the general reader: he does not know the original and is not likely to appreciate the accuracy of the rendering; he does not care for the clumsiness of wordforword versions since it disappoints his expectations of reading literature. Literal versions—or "trots" in academic parlance—are actually aids to the student of the source language.5 Imitations, on the other hand, are the more appreciated when the reader is thoroughly familiar with the original. Pope's imitations of Juvenal and Homer, Dryden's of Ovid and Virgil, Pound's of Propertius, are to be savored by a reader who is assumed to be conversant with the originals in Greek and Latin. On the other hand, the translations by Edward FitzGerald of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, the renderings of the Confucian classics by James Legge, and the English versions of the Bible dating from at least the TyndaleCoverdale rendering were directed at audiences who were not expected to know the original: readers were not expected to have access to Persian, Chinese, Aramaic, or Koine Greek. The differences in intended audience seem crucial in creating a useful, and historically accurate, genealogy of translation. Earlier,6 I characterized the first type of translation as coeval, that is, designating works that subsume the original as a reference in the imitation.7 The second type I have called surrogate translations, where the reader is expected to be innocent of the language in which the original was written.8 The third type, which includes 4.
Vladimir Nabokov might be cited as a perverse and eccentric exception, but his insistence on literal renderings no matter how awkward was a strategy calculated to remind the reader of the ultimate futility of translation, not to render the essence of the work through translations. 5.
An anecdote may illustrate the pitfalls of literal translation. A foreigner, upon returning home, was asked how he enjoyed his visit to the United States. He said he had a fine time, but he was puzzled that all the merchants should be telling him to get out. "What makes you think they wanted you to get out?" the interlocutor asked. The disappointed tourist said: "Because they kept saying, 'Here you go!'" 6.
See Chapter 8.
7.
This genre has been a staple in traditional Western literature, when the reader could be expected to know the classical languages at least as well as his own; it is no accident that imitations should have flourished during the Neoclassic period, when classical learning was emphasized. 8.
These terms were developed in Chapter 8.
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literal versions and trots, is directed at a reader who is assumed to be neither wholly innocent of the original nor entirely familiar with it. I have characterized these translations as contingent because they are not selfsufficient, either as surrogate translations, which do not require knowledge of the original, or as coeval translations, which have their own literary identity independent of the original. These versions could be characterized as "metatranslations" or "metaoriginals." The reader of these contingent translations is the student of the language, who is not always—alas!—a student of literature. Texts and editions for this readership have proliferated in recent generations. These versions, with their accompanying linguistic apparatus and the density of their annotation and exegesis, often bewilder the general reader.9 They are sometimes presented in a metalanguage comprehensible neither to the speaker of the original language nor to the native speaker of the target language untrained in the specialized discourse. In the case of translations from the Chinese, these may be familiar as ''sinological" translations. Transliterations are but one example of this metalanguage, particularly obvious in nonalphabetic languages, where the native speaker is often an unreliable source, since, not needing to spell his words out, he is spared the burden of romanizing words he knows in nontransliterated orthography.10 To clarify the differences between the three categories of translation, I propose the following "ontological grid":
target text
source text
untranslated works
explicitly absent
implicitly absent
surrogate translations
explicitly present
implicitly absent
contingent translations
explicitly absent
implicitly present
coeval translations
explicitly present
implicitly present
9.
Bilingual editions fall into this category, as does Stanley Burnshaw's widely used The Poem Itself (1960).
10.
Chinese is particularly burdened in this respect: the speaker of English learning Chinese must be familiar with at least half a dozen transliteration systems (WadeGiles, pinyin, Guoryuu Romatzyh, postal system, Yale, p'op'omoph'or).
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The characterization of untranslated works as both explicitly absent and implicitly absent might seem a banal insight, but it reflects an important lesson of epistemology: not only does it underline the difference between realizing and not realizing that something is missing, but it reminds us of the crucial importance between selfconscious and blithe ignorance. In translation, it represents the difference between knowing about the existence of an important work in another language that is as yet untranslated and not knowing that the work even exists.11 Surrogate translations presuppose the inaccessibility of the original for its readers (the effective nonexistence of the source text). In this perspective, there is the possibility of a certain linguistic chauvinism: a work does not exist until it is translated into the target language. The practice, alas, of a number of departments of English that teach "continental" works in their English versions without any consideration of their preexistence in the source language is a lamentable confusion of cultural as well as literary identities; it stems from a dangerously ignorant linguistic provinciality, akin to the ardent belief of many Southern Baptists in America that the Bible was written in English.12 Contingent translations, by contrast, show by their very impenetrability and cumbersomeness that only the original exists. If surrogate translations are often misused by the language provincial, contingent translations are as often abused by the language snob. Coeval translations are the presage of what might be called the ultimate postBabelian future, where everyone knows everyone else's language. The paradigm of the future is not so much the "melting pot" model, where all languages and cultures become one bland pabulum, but a pluralistic "harmony of flavors" where each 11.
Part of Japan's success in recent years may be attributed to the fact that it leads the world in translating into its native tongue works of all sorts from other languages.
12.
These instances proliferate as more translations become available: a recent Ph.D. thesis, vaunted by its department as one of its best, addressed the topic "Confucianism and Ezra Pound," yet no one conversant with Chinese, or knowledgeable in the voluminous Confucian tradition, or capable of examining Pound's understanding or misunderstandings of Chinese, was on the dissertation committee.
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ethnic ingredient retains its character yet contributes to a delectable whole. Coeval translations might start with the selftranslations of Vladimir Nabokov of Russian into English (and a few works written in English into Russian) and those of Samuel Beckett from French into English and English into French. Certainly both versions coexist in these translations; in some cases it might be hard to discern which is artistically the more original, however easy it might be to determine originality in terms of chronological priority. These generic characterizations are not meant to be rigidly categorical: one should not expect in every instance to determine unequivocally whether a given translation is surrogate, contingent, or coeval, though in most instances these distinctions will prove useful.13 These three categories are not to be thought of as equally exclusionary: a surrogate translation and a coeval translation will address mutually exclusive classes of readers: one cannot be both ignorant of an original and familiar with it. But the contingent category is more fluid: the student of the original, and the original language, can read with profit both a surrogate version and a coeval one, though they are less relevant to his interests. All three classes of translation are, of course, relevant to the student of translation. With these categorical and generic classifications in place, we can now address the WaleyPound question. In judging value for each of these "genres" of translation, different criteria will be applied. Surrogate translations will be judged solely according to their impact on the targetlanguage reader—whether it piques sufficient interest to ensure the survival of the work in a new language. Fitz 13.
These categorizations seem to me more helpful with literary translations than other typologies that have been proposed. Katharina Reiss's ternary divisions—informative, expressive, or operative—are based on the source text and cover a wider scope, distinguishing between, say, textbooks, belleslettres, and advertisements. Juliane House's distinction between "overt" translations, where the reader is aware that what is being read is a translation, and "covert" translations, where the translation is "almost accidentally in a language other than the original," distinguishes between culturally sensitive productions (literature) and culturally less sensitive communications (mathematics, scientific documents), but doesn't sufficiently recognize readerbased conceptions of genre implicit in every literary translation. See Marilyn Gaddis Rose (1981:32).
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Gerald's Rubaiyat and the King James Version of the Bible are prime examples of successful surrogate translations. Accuracy or fidelity to the original text is not a crucial factor.14 Contingent translations are to be judged by the degree of usefulness to the student: their purpose is to ease access for the nonnative reader to the original. Readability is not a desideratum for these versions: Nabokov's version of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin falls in this category, along with the almost impenetrable translations, with their brackets, extended footnotes, and linguistic mutations, that characterize many an academic rendering. Coeval translations answer to perhaps the most stringent requirements: they must succeed as literary works in their own right and—in some measure—satisfy those who are familiar with the original. The remarkable translations of Gabriel García Marquez by Gregory Rabassa, and both Arthur Waley's and Edward Seidensticker's renderings of The Tale of Genji, each in its own way, brilliantly accommodate both the source and the targetlanguage audience.15 From this perspective, let us examine songs from the Shijing in the Pound and Waley versions. Let us start with Shijing 40. Here is Pound: North gate, sorrow's edge, purse kaput, nothing to pledge. I'll say I'm broke none knows how, heaven's stroke. 14.
The voluminous scholarship since the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls (conveniently accessible in the multivolume Anchor Bible) makes the King James Version of the Bible no longer a reliable textual resource, but its literary value as a surrogate translation remains undiminished. Robert Graves, similarly, has exposed the linguistic errors in FitzGerald's version of the Rubaiyat, and has supplied a more "accurate" version, yet he has not managed to replace FitzGerald in providing a better surrogate rendering. (See The Original Rubaiyyat of Omar Khayaam (Graves and AliShah 1968). 15.
The two versions of the Genji pose a somewhat special case, however, since the original is not in contemporary Japanese but in a language that few in Japan can read. Hence there are no living sourcelanguage speakers, and hence no truly bilingual readers of the Genji. It has often been observed that the Japanese resort to Waley's translation (and now, doubtless, Seidensticker's) more often even than to the "translations" of the Genji into modern Japanese in the versions by, among others, Yosano Akiko or Tanizaki Junichiro.
Page 197 Government work piled up on me When I go back where I lived before, my dear relatives slam the door. This is the job put up on me, Sky's "which and how"? or say: destiny. Government work piled up on me. When I come in from being out my homefolk don't want me about; concrete fruit of heaven's tree not to be changed by verbosity.
It would be easy to dismiss this version as a strained attempt to create a "literary" poem where none existed. Pound's eclectic diction, mixing the intellectual slang of "purse kaput" with the homey "my homefolk don't want me about" and the abstract nominalizations "Sky's 'which and how'" and ''concrete fruit of heaven's tree," presents a pastiche that is awkward and unnatural. The version is obviously an attempt at a surrogate version, for Pound ignores the student learning the source language and the reader familiar with the original. Pound makes no effort to accommodate the original meaning: the translation reads like a poetic exercise verging toward, but failing to achieve, originality. The vestiges of the refrain in the original, which consists of three lines, occurring at the end of each of the three stanzas, is conflated by Pound into one line: "Government work piled up on me." What Pound has tried to do is to compose a successful poem to be read rather than a lyric to be sung: the texture of his language is contrived and cerebral, whereas the original is closer to visceral utterance. Pound makes only a token attempt to preserve the balladic form of the Chinese (the conflated refrain is repeated only once), and there is no attempt to retain the themeandvariation pattern in the original. Arthur Waley's version preserves more of the original structure: there is, at least, a lineforline correspondence to the original: I go out at the northern gate: Deep is my grief.
Page 198 I am utterly povertystricken and destitute; Yet no one heeds my misfortunes. Well, all is over now, No doubt it was Heaven's doing. So what's the good of talking about it? The king's business came my way; Government business of every sort was put on me. When I came in from outside, The people of the house all turned on me and scolded me. Well, it's over now. No doubt it was Heaven's doing, So what's the good of talking about it? The king's business was all piled up on me; Government business of every sort was laid upon me; When I came in from outside, The people of the house all turned upon me and abused me. Well, it's all over now. No doubt it was Heaven's doing, So what's the good of talking about it?
In this version, the formulaic structure of the original is manifest: each variation on the line is preserved; each verbatim repetition carefully duplicated. Clearly, Waley had the original in mind, not merely as a catalyst for poetic inspiration, but as a form, a content, to be preserved as much as possible in English. The student of the language, and of the Shijing, finds these renderings useful as an aid to the original text. Yet there is something awry here. The Waley version is verbose and tedious in a way that the original in Chinese, with its basically fourword, foursyllable lines, is not. (Each stanza has seven lines; most of the lines contain four wordsyllables in Chinese, except for line 5, which has only three characters; line 2 in the second two stanzas has six characters: see Appendix D.) Clearly there are no gross inaccuracies in the Waley, at least at the level of the individual line, though the result would be hard to recognize as poetry. Waley's version tries neither to replace the original nor to vie with it: it is a serviceable contingent translation that can be relied upon to render at least the sense of the original plaint. Yet contingent translations, when they are successful, are
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manifestly unsuccessful: they create a void which can only be filled by reading the original. They are accurate without being satisfying: their value is contingent, and only in the access they provide to the original. If these versions by Pound and Waley were to be evaluated, one could say defensively that Pound attempted a surrogate translation but did not succeed; Waley provided a contingent translation, which succeeded within its generic limitations. Notice that the failure adduced in the one case is not the same as the failure adduced in the other: Pound's translation fails because it is an inept piece of poetic writing, not because it is inaccurate; Waley's succeeds despite its slack verbosity because it effectively evokes the original—indeed, it almost compels the reader to consult the original. But the two are being judged on different criteria, because they proceed from entirely different premises. Both versions, however, are equally unsatisfactory in one respect: neither captures the vocative immediacy of the original expression which even two millennia of scholarly exegesis in Chinese have not quite managed to erase. These are intensely commonplace sentiments with a universality which the song does not try to hide: the diction is simple, almost visceral, in its directness; there is nothing here that smacks of the studio, of belleslettres, or of scholarship. At the risk of exposing my own vulnerabilities, let me offer a version which I've developed to render some of the disarming accessibility of the original. The title of this version might be (and has been) used more than once as the title of a popular song: That's Life Can't work there any more— Now I'll be poor. No one knows All my woes. What's the use— That's life! What's the point? 16.
Renato Poggioli's dictum is: "Artistic translation presupposes . . . both the ideal presence of the original and its physical absence."
Page 200 Working in a bureaucracy— All kinds of work piled up on me. They played fast and loose, And really cooked my goose. What's the use— That's life! What's the point? Slaving in a bureaucracy— All kinds of work were dumped on me. They found every excuse To cook my goose. What's the use— That's life! What's the point?
I make no brief for this version as anything more than an illustration of the direct sentiments, disarmingly expressed, in the original. What this version lacks, of course, is the "hoariness" that the original text has acquired: millennia of scholarly commentary cannot help but leave their mark. Yet few would deny the original folkloric provenance of these words; few would dispute the fact, even if they occasionally forget it, that this is a poem from the section of the Shijing titled "Airs of the States," a section traditionally regarded as a collection of songs from the people reflecting their complaints and miseries, joys and sorrows, which was intended to serve as a "mirror for magistrates." Pound's version of Shijing 75 is nothing short of an embarrassment (Appendix E): one would never have guessed from it that a simple lovelorn lyric was the inspiration. Even allowing for the traditional allegory, commonplace in Confucian commentaries, of reading the neglected and unrequited girl as the minister neglected by the emperor, Pound's version is farfetched: Live up to your clothes, we'll see that you get new ones. You do your job, we'll bring our best food to you'uns. If you're good as your robes are good We'll bring you your pay and our best food.
Page 201 Nothing too good, bigosh and bigob For a bureaucrat who will really attend to his job.
The jazzy colloquialisms, the brash diction, the inflated rhetoric, represent Pound's inventiveness out of control: it is creativity without a critical conscience; fecundity without discrimination. How far this departs from the poetry in the original can be seen in a comparison with Waley's version: How well your black coat fits! Where it is torn I will turn it for you. Let us go to where you lodge, And there I will hand your food to you. How nice your black coat looks! Where it is worn I will mend it for you. Let us go to where you lodge, And there I will hand your food to you. How broad your black coat is! Where it is worn I will alter it for you. Let us go to where you lodge, And there I will hand your food to you.
Waley leaves out the lineending vocalizer— xi—which marks the ballad, a "heighho," "tralala" insertion to fill out the line or to end with emphasis, but, on the whole, his version reflects the simplicity and poignancy of the original. There are many such lyrics in the Shijing, the pure and unadorned expression of folk sentiment, originally sung communally, perhaps antiphonally.17 Pound's version smacks of false rhetoric, the sophisticated condescension of a wordsmith mimicking the sounds of the populace. Waley's rendering is more modest and, given the modest posture of the persona in the song, more appropriate in tone. Pound's surrogate version misfires; Waley's contingent version is prosaic, but it preserves some of the spare abjectness of the original. Note also the 17.
Marcel Granet, in his Fêtes et chansons de la Chine (1919) two generations ago, cited parallels in contemporary folksinging in Southeast Asia, which he considered—from an anthropological perspective—offshoots of the original folk tradition that produced many of the songs in the Shijing.
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strident, imperative tone of Pound's rendering, so at odds with the deferential elegance of most traditional Chinese poetry. Shijing 90 is a perfect instance of the themeandvariation ballad form (see Appendix F). There are three stanzas of four lines each, four words (thus four syllables) in each line. In the first line, the first two words are the same in every stanza; in the second, again, the first two words are the same; the third line in each stanza is identical; and in the last line, only the last word is changed from stanza to stanza. The song is an almost abstract design, with no internal progression, and the variations appear to be random. It conforms to a common ballad formula, where limited demands are put on the invention of the singers. The repetitions are the heart of the poem, an obvious vestige of its oral origins. One of the problems, so often glossed over in discussions of translation, is not merely the difficulty of translating from one language to another but that of translating from oral to written discourse. The difference between script as phonetic transcription—the case with IndoEuropean languages—and script as ideogram—the case with Chinese—further exacerbates the difficulties. Repetition in an oral mode has a different value from repetition in a written or printed mode (which is why refrains of songs in printed texts are not repeated verbatim but are abbreviated in one way or another). Repeating the same words in the same positions in a text, without the accompaniment of music, is boring; as lyrics in a song, in a refrain, the same words elicit an incremental pleasure. The differences become obvious when we see Waley's contingent version—for, faithful as it tries to be, the result is boring and lifeless: Wind and rain, chill, chill! But the cock crowed kikeriki. Now that I have seen my lord, How can I fail to be at peace? Wind and rain, oh, the storm! But the cock crowed kukeriku Now that I have seen my lord, How can I fail to rejoice? Wind and rain, dark as night, The cock crowed and would not stop.
Page 203 Now that I have seen my lord, How can I any more be sad?
The first line includes a error common among translators of Chinese: the term qiqi (archaic klôg) in the second line of the first two stanzas respectively: he borrows from Japanese and provides Japanese onomatopoeia (kikeriki/kukeriku) in an English translation of a Chinese poem! Pound is sensitive to the preponderance of repetition in the text, and alert to its potential dullness on the page, so his version is a freewheeling recreation that preserves the repetition in more palatable ways—at the level of imagery rather than at the lexical level. But even here he varies the lexical form: "wind and rain" (fengyü ) he renders alternatively "wind, and the rain," "wind and the rain," "Wind, rain''; "cock crows" (jiming ) he renders "cock crow," "the cock crows and crows," "the cock's neverending cry." Pound adapts an oral lyric into a readable text, converting its verbatim repetitions to phonemic variants: Cold wind, and the rain, Cock crow, he is come again, my ease. Shrill wind and the rain and the cock crows and crows, I have seen him, shall it suffice as the wind blows? Wind, rain and the dark as it were dark of the moon, What of the wind, and the cock's neverending cry;
Page 204 Together again he and I.
Pound has composed a version that sits better on the page than either the original or its more literal translations, as a text to be read rather than as a song to be sung. It replaces the ancient oral Chinese song with a modern American poetic text; one is surrogate for the other. A more successful surrogate version, which relates to the original Shijing poem not as a copy, nor as counterpart and correlative, but as variant to theme, is no. 143 (see Appendix C), a poem we considered in the last chapter. Here we will examine it from a generic perspective in order to evaluate it on the basis of its implied criteria. The original folk song is a loveplaint full of longing and almost inarticulate desire: it is pure lyric; the emotion is repeated and intensified with every stanza, but there is no narrative progression. Waley gives a fair attempt at a faithful rendering: A moon rising white Is the beauty of my lovely one, Ah, the tenderness, the grace! Heart's pain consumes me. A moon rising bright Is the fairness of my lovely one. Ah, the gentle softness! Heart's pain wounds me. A moon rising in splendour Is the beauty of my lovely one. Ah, the delicate yielding! Heart's pain torments me.
As an example of a simple folk expression, these versions are valuable, yet from a literary point of view the lines are not very interesting. One sees clearly enough the persona in the poem: a girl addressing her swain in his absence, and probably without his knowledge. (Modern adolescents might recognize this condition as a "crush.") Pound transforms this simple lyric into a notsosimple piece of
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romantic rhetoric, replete with bookish imagery ("erudite," "colleague," "enquiring," "undurable"), paranomasia (''my heart is tinder"), and syncopated rhyme: The erudite moon is up, less fair than she who hath tied silk cords about a heart in agony, She at such ease so all my work is vain. My heart is tinder, and steel plucks at my pain so all my work is vain, she at such ease as is the enquiring moon. A glittering moon comes out less bright than she the moon's colleague that is so fair, of yet such transient grace, at ease, undurable, so all my work is vain torn with this pain.
Pound notes, more in satisfaction than in apologia: "a few transpositions, but I think the words are all in the text." Yet a reader familiar with the original poem is not likely to recognize the original in this rendering. Several important aspects of the original are missing in Pound's version. First, he chooses an implicitly male "I" persona whose object of desire is female; the Chinese, by leaving the subject unstated, is ambiguous on this point. Second, his tone is leisurely, contemplative, studied, and discriminating ("less fair than she,""of yet such transient grace," "at ease, undurable"); his syntax is contorted and complex ("less bright than she the moon's colleague"); the tone in the original is urgent, breathless, scarcely articulate, an utterance whose aspirations (in both senses) are reinforced by the repetition of the balladic line ending xi. The original is pure evocation, simple apostrophe, with little or no predication. In the last chapter, I considered several of Pound's versions of the Shijing which, though different from the original in significant ways, yet bear comparison with them. Indeed, they succeed not only with
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the reader innocent of the original: those familiar with the original have reason to marvel as well. (See Eoyang 1974:33–42.) His version of Shijing 23 ("Lies a dead deer on yonder plain") ranks with his "River Merchant's Wife: A Letter," his translation of a ballad by Li Po, published almost forty years earlier, as an instance of a successful coeval translation, one that can be appreciated not only for its own literary value but also as an adjunct to the original (Appendix G) . Waley's version conveys some of the chaste simplicity in the original lyric: an expression of feral innocence, of virginity both proud and vulnerable: In the wild there is a dead doe; With white rushes we cover her. There was a lady longing for the spring; A fair knight seduced her. In the wood there is a clump of oaks, And in the wilds a dead deer With white rushes well bound; There was a lady fair as jade. "Heigh, not so hasty, not so rough; Heigh, do not touch my handkerchief. Take care, or the dog will bark."
Waley's rendering of "longing for the spring" is perfect for the Chinese expression, huai chun
, which is the sash women use to wrap their robes
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around them, and therefore an extremely crucial and functional article of clothing. Pound's rendering captures both the imagery and the dramatic situation with flawless resourcefulness: Lies a dead deer on yonder plain whom white grass covers, A melancholy maid in spring is luck for lovers. Where the scrub elm skirts the wood, be it not in white mat bound, as a jewel flawless found, dead as doe is maidenhood. Hark! Unhand my girdleknot, stay, stay, stay or the dog may bark.
The insistent "stay, stay, stay" at the close is a superb trouvaille, for it succinctly preserves the ambivalent tone of entreaty and protest in the poem. Good as the poem may be in Chinese, a reader of the original can only delight at Pound's rendering, for one now has access to two poems, the original in Chinese and Pound's version of it, that—coevally—interpret the same experience: each of them creates its own voice and preserves a memorable moment. We can now attempt an answer to the original question—"Who is the better translator? Waley or Pound"—by rephrasing it into another question: "For whom is Pound or Waley the better translator?" The student of Chinese will find Waley generally the more reliable; the studnt of poetry will often find Pound the more interesting. Waley may be limp and laborious, but he never falls into the meretricious or the bombastic. Pound, on the other hand, may be uneven, but some of his versions achieve poetry in a way that Waley never does. Where Waley is safe, Pound is inspired.
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In contemplating Pound and Waley, one is reminded of another famous pair: Dryden and Pope, and what Dr. Johnson said of them. The parallels between the two comparisons are not exact, but there are some similarities. Of Pound, it could be said, as Johnson did of Dryden: "Pound's performances were always hasty . . . he composed without consideration, and published without correction. What his mind could supply at call, or gather in one excursion, was all that he sought, and all that he gave." It might be said of Pound and Waley, as Johnson did of Dryden and Pope, that "of Pound's fire the blaze is brighter, of Waley's the heat is more regular and constant. Pound often surpasses expectation, and Waley never falls below it." Yet one must be careful not to force a false equivalence of comparisons: if we can say of Pound, as Johnson did of Dryden, that he "is read with frequent astonishment," we cannot with equal justice say of Waley, as Johnson did of Pope, that he may be read ''with perpetual delight." Waley produces contingent translations of unerring if often bland good taste. Pound produces surrogate translations of variable quality, ranging from misjudged exercises in failed rhetoric to superlative recreations with a life of their own. Pound invariably attempted surrogate translations, versions addressing an audience that would be content only with his view of the original.18 Waley's posture was somewhat ambivalent: he often spared the reader the scholarly apparatus that he was familiar with, yet he was modest about the literary character of his translations. In the preface to the second edition (1960), Waley indicated as his intended audience "anyone using my book for documentary purposes, that is to say, for the study of comparative literature, folklore, or the like."19 Waley translated to show the intrinsic or extrinsic value of the originals: hence his versions were contingent on their value. Where Pound translated for an audience of general readers, Waley addressed an audience of students and scholars. The audience for translation can be categorized into three dis 18.
In addition to the consultation, somewhat permissive, of Achilles Fang at Harvard, Pound had access to at least three previously published translations: James Legge's (1893), Waley's (1937), and Bernhard Karlgren's (1950). 19.
The implicit view of comparative literature as a field of study that precludes any interest in the original, or the original language, is not so much in fashion now as in Waley's day.
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tinct and decisive groups: the monolingual, the incipiently bilingual, and the bilingual. Surrogate translations accommodate the first; contingent translations appeal to the second; coeval translations attract the third. Most teachers of world literature (Waley would have called them teachers of comparative literature) depend on surrogate translations. An intelligent response to the question "Who is the better translator? Waley or Pound?"—like so many questions in so many fields in the modern period, from relativity theory to narratology—reverses the focus of inquiry, turns both telescope and microscope back at the viewer. Instead of determining what the object of study is, these disciplines ask: "What is the persona of the intelligence behind the inquiry?"20 "What is the vantage point of a field of study?" "Whose point of view is being subsumed by the question?'' Translating these concerns to the current theory and practice of world literature, one must convert the question "What is world literature?" to "Which worlds are in us, the students of world literature?" "Is there really any such thing as 'nonWestern' literature, or is that denomination merely a reflection of Western ethnocentricity?" When we ask the question "Waley or Pound?" we are—whether we realize it or not—asking a profoundly relevant question about ourselves. 20.
The ambivalence of the word "subject" is apposite here, for present in any field of inquiry is not only the agent, the central intelligence (subject) conducting the inquiry, but also the field of study (subject) as reflecting subjective biases.
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12— Beyond Visual and Aural Criteria: The Importance of Flavor in Chinese Literary Criticism Concepts of value in literary aesthetics generally involve either abstract indicators of degree ("excellent," "mediocre," "poor'') or metaphorical markers reflecting perceptual judgments ("brilliant," "drab," "dull"). Where terms of criticism are not blatantly affective (hence subjective: "repugnant," "disgusting," "moving"), they are hierarchical ("good," "better," "best"). There are also implicit metaphors ("outstanding," "ordinary," "banal") as well as conceptual extrapolations of perceptual experience ("stunning," "bland," "odious"). The imagery inherent in such concepts of value, with particular focus on the terminology of Chinese literary criticism, occupies our concern in this chapter: we want to determine what implict premises underlie those concepts and to explore more intuitive—equally meaningful if less systematic—notions of literary quality. There is a hierarchy of the senses—from sight to sound to touch to taste to smell—from which the vocabulary of description is borrowed. One speaks of "form" and alludes initially to the visual; one talks of "harmony" and refers primarily to the aural; one identifies "substance" and points to the haptic. In critical discourse, perceptual terms of this kind can be synaesthetically transferred, and one can say quite naturally—and meaningfully—"a harmony of colors," "a substantial work of art," "a harmonious design." When one uses the descriptors of the lower senses, however, the terms are much less adaptable and versatile. "A fragrant picture" is less likely to be an aesthetic judgment of quality as a trivial comment on the olfactory emanations of the canvas; "a flavorful symphony" is
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at best an awkward evaluation which borders on the ridiculous. Furthermore, while visual and aural terms can often be transferred to affects of the lower senses—"a vivid taste," "a quiet scent"—the reverse does not always yield aesthetic meanings—"a tasty sonata?'' "an odiferous sculpture?" No doubt, this is due in part to a larger vocabulary of visual, aural, and haptic descriptors in language, which in turn reflects a greater reliance on our senses of sight and sound and a corresponding neglect of our senses of taste and smell. The neutrality of words designating the sense perceptions is compromised in the case of the olfactory: the word "smell" in English now has pejorative overtones that date at least from Dr. Johnson's age. Indeed, uses of olfactory descriptors for nonolfactory phenomena are almost always pejorative: "This place stinks," "The novel smells!", "What a putrid play!"1 These intimations are particularly worth examining when contrasted with the tradition in Chinese literary aesthetics, in which olfactory and gustatory descriptors are used time and time again to indicate praise. The values enunciated in Chinese literary criticism, so exasperating to the Western student, are seemingly intuitive and elusive, not only because they are unsystematic but because they resort to sense data little understood and repeatedly dismissed as unworthy tools for intelligent discourse. Chinese literary criticism is imbued with the scents of the garden and the savors of the kitchen. Modern physiology and psychology provide analogues of interest to the study of taste. They recognize that what is referred to as the sense of taste is actually multiple, not single. Tasting is an activity that involves scent, texture, temperature, consistency, as well as the response through the taste buds. Often one attributes to taste what belongs to the other senses. A standard experiment indicates that when the sense of smell is removed, one cannot "taste" the difference between such disparate foods as apples, onions, and raw potatoes (Gibson 1966:136). Textbook descriptions of taste as a perceptual system rather than as an isolated sensation are particularly apposite and apply equally well to what Hume distinguished as "bodily taste" and "mental taste." Taste as "a major perceptual 1.
Even olfactory compliments—"he came out smelling like a rose"—are ironic and critical.
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system, and a principal concern of life for many persons," can be appreciated in both the literal and the metaphorical sense of the word. The analogues between the physiology of taste and the aesthetics of taste are so close that one encounters a statement such as the following, from a textbook on the physiology of taste, with at least a shudder of recognition: "Tasting is a kind of attention, and the mouth can be said to focus on its contents" (Gibson, p. 139). The perceptual models in literary evaluation include Horace's juxtaposed qualities of "sweetness" and "usefulness"—dulce et utile—which succinctly modified Lucretius' trope of bitter medicine taken with honey (the ancient version of the modern ''sugarcoated pill"). The image of honey and the industrious bee suggests an apt simile to Ben Jonson, who wrote in Timber (no. 130): Not, as a Creature, that swallowes, what it takes in, crude, raw, or undigested; but; that feeds with an Appetite, and hath a Stomacke to concoct, devide, and turne all into nourishment. Not, to imitate servilely . . . but to draw forth out of the best, and choicest flowers, with the Bee, and turne all into Honey. [Quoted in Wimsatt and Brooks 1957:179]
The image of the bee is contrasted with that of the spider in Swift's telling comparison in The Battle of the Books: Which is the nobler being of the two, that which, by a lazy contemplation of four inches round, by an overweening pride, feeding and engendering on itself, turns all into excrement and venom, producing nothing at all, but flybane and a cobweb; or that which, by an universal range, with long search, much study, true judgement, and distinction of things, brings home honey and wax. [Wimsatt and Brooks, pp. 219–220]
The discussion relates to the controversy between the ancients and the moderns, but Swift's aesthetic values are apparent in the final determination that the bee is superior because it endows the world with two of its "noblest things": As for the Ancients, we are content with the bee to pretend to nothing of our own, beyond our wings and our voice, that is to say, our flights and our language. For the rest, whatever we have got, has been by infinite
Page 213 labor and search, and ranging through every corner of nature; the difference is that, instead of dirt and poison, we have rather chosen to fill our hives with honey and wax, thus furnishing mankind with the two noblest of things, which are sweetness and light. [Wimsatt and Brooks, p. 220]
The two supreme qualities, offering pleasure (sweetness) and instruction (light), derive respectively from the senses of taste and of sight. That Swift insists on the virtues of industry, discrimination ("distinction of things"), and perspective ("an universal range") reminds us that while aesthetic judgments may be spontaneous, they are not uninformed or uncultivated. Perhaps the most familiar gustatory comment on the value of books comes from Bacon's essay "Of Studies": "Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts, others to be read, but not curiously, and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention." Practical as this advice might appear, the underlying premise is that value may be found in that which is fragmented as well as that which is whole. The fragmentariness of both Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Spenser's Faerie Queene does not diminish their aesthetic value, though their incompleteness belies any claims to perfection. The image of ingestion as a metaphoric model for reading and for composition is natural and inevitable (one thinks of Valéry's "Le lion est fait de mouton assimilé"). It establishes a clear relationship between the modern and the ancient, between the contemporary and the classic. In the process of assimilation, there is both selection and digestion. The model of ingestion, not to say nourishment, gives some warrant to the suggestion that having taste is conducive to good health. Here the aesthete and the physiologist disagree. Where Remy de Gourmont might say, "Il est probable qu'il n'y a rien de plus sain pour un homme, comme pour tout animal, que de suivre ses goûts," the physiologist would observe (with more realism than wish fulfillment): Taste in the full meaning of the term usually gives a correct detection of alimentary values, but not always. This is true for both animals and men. Noxious substances sometimes get eaten and nutritive substances fail to get eaten. [Gibson, p. 141]
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Gourmont's faith that there is probably nothing healthier, for man and animals, than to follow one's tastes contradicts the notion, both popular and scientific, that some beneficial ingestions are malodorous. We won't always like what is good for us, and our tastes will not always be sure guides for our health or our sanity. Perhaps there was already a canny commonsense psychology in the Horatian formula of the sugercoated pill. Of course, taste has always figured prominently in the literature of some cultures. The taste of the madeleine in Proust is not only an important gustatory event but also a significant literary moment, for A la recherche du temps perdu may be said to have been set off by a single olfactory stimulus. Many French and Chinese novels give detailed descriptions of the bill of fare at a meal, no doubt reflecting the importance of haute cuisine in these cultures.2 Roland Barthes in L'Empire des signes has tried to arrive at a structural analysis of Japanese cuisine; Claude LéviStrauss has explored the anthropological dimensions of Le cru et le cuit, presenting his findings in analogues of music, thus playing synaesthetically on our sense metaphors. Jullien, in his discussion of these perspectives (1985:123), quotes Claudel—"Pour comprendre les choses, apprenons les mots qui en sont dans notre bouche l'image soluble. Ruminons la bouchée intelligible" (Art poétique)—and Barthes—"Sapientia: nul pouvoir, un peu de savoir, un peu de sagesse, et le plus de saveur possible" (Leçon). Modern French writers and literary theorists share with traditional Chinese aesthetics a particular appreciation for the ineffable quality of "savor" in art. The valuation of literature in China, tied very early to the concept of wen , the written word, with its emphasis on pattern, elaboration, and elegance, has perhaps obscured an equally important tendency toward nonvisual, essentially nonliterary considerations in Chinese literary criticism. We will explore some of the perceptual biases behind certain critical concepts and will test the validity of others, based on less accessible perceptual models. Implicit in the criteria of unity, wholeness, and roundedness, for 2.
The 1974 annual meeting of the Modern Language Association of America presented a seminar on "Culinary Aspects of Literature" which received some notoriety in the New York Times. By all accounts, it was not a success. The fault, however, was not in the subject matter; unfortunately, the session was dominated by someone—alas!—more interested in scatology.
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example, is the perceptual valorization of sight, and perhaps of touch. Symmetry as a value can be verified spatially by the eye, and temporally by the ear, but it is an abstraction that responds to some senses better than to others: "symmetry" in smell, or "symmetry" in taste, means very little. "Patterns," "elegance,'' even "beauty"— these notions are more immediately apparent and more audible than accessible to our senses of smell or taste. Indeed, the language reflects a heavy emphasis on the socalled higher senses—sight, sound, and touch. There are no familiar counterparts for "apparent," "audible," or "tenable" denoting something that can be smelled or tasted ("smellable"? "tastable"?). Sight and sound images, furthermore, can be transposed and used metaphorically for other sense perceptions. One can speak of a "beautiful scent" or a "lovely taste," but the transferences in the other direction are more limited and generally pejorative. ("The picture stinks!", "the book smells," "the play reeks of selfrighteousness" but not: "the fragrant poem" or "the tasty novel"—"tasteful" would mean something else altogether.) As one descends from the visual to the gustatory, the valuative neutrality of sense metaphors diminishes. (A picture can be "beautiful" or "ugly," but while "the poem stinks" can be taken as a serious if crude critical judgment, one cannot characterize quality by saying that "the poem smells fragrant.") The evaluative relevance of images involving lower sense perceptions is also compromised: "a sweet book" is a judgment that points more to personality than to taste. This consideration of current semantic usage is necessary, for it highlights the peculiarity of much of Chinese literary criticism, which uses the "lower" sense metaphors when it attempts to characterize work of the highest quality. The olfactory and the gustatory are warrants of meaning and value beyond that which can be verified by the senses of sight, sound, or touch. The metaphors of sense perception figure in the Chinese classics—either as apprehensions to be extrapolated into the abstract and conceptual, or as impediments to phenomena that one must transcend if one is to attain true understanding. This dual tradition—of perceptual experience to be extrapolated and perceptual experience to be transcended—runs throughout Chinese literary criticism and establishes important criteria of value in literature.
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A Sense of the Senses The extrapolation of knowledge from the experience of the senses can be seen in certain Confucian texts. For the purposes of Confucian morality, it is necessary to emphasize the commonality of sense experience in everyone. In the Mencius, tastes are considered universal: Therefore, what is relished in the mouth is the same in everybody; the sounds perceived by the ear are heard alike by everybody; the colors of the eye are alike, beautiful to all. When one reaches the mind, is it alone without agreement on such things as "principle" or "righteousness"? The sages arrive at earlier what my mind already confirms, and therefore "principle" and ''righteousness" gratify my mind, just as the meats of the table gratify my mouth. [SPPY 11:8b]3
The supposition that, at bottom, perceptions are the same with different perceivers—that objects of the senses will elicit the same sensory responses from different individuals—forms the base of an analogy, the other member of which is that morality is accessible to all and may be understood alike by everyone. A second passage from the Mencius is also pragmatically moral, for it anticipates the hedonist's irresponsibility of attributing his actions either to "his nature" or to "the will of heaven": Mengtzu [Mengzi] said: "The flavors the mouth tastes, the colors the eye sees, the sounds the ear hears, the scents the nose smells, the repose and wellbeing the four limbs seek—these are part of man's inherent nature. But there are things that are fated, decreed by heaven, which the superior man does not attribute to his nature. "Humaneness" in the relations between father and son; "righteousness" between sovereign and minister; "propriety" between guest and host; "wisdom" in the noble; the sage living by the ways of heaven—these are decreed. That which is from one's nature, the superior man does not call the will of heaven. [SPPY 14:7b–8a]
The sense of this passage is that one must not expect moral qualities to develop of themselves: one's inherent nature must be 3.
Translations, unless otherwise indicated, are mine.
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adapted to the call of heaven. The senses provide a template from which further instructions might issue. If one is capable of sense impressions, one can be taught moral values—according to the Hanshi waijuan (Exoteric Commentary on the Han Text of the Book of Songs, a secondcentury B.C. work): Confucius said: "If a person's mouth craves flavors and his heart desires idleness I would teach him jen
. [HWTS 5a8; Hightower 1952:46]4
The relationship between the senses and moral precept is not one merely of analogy, nor of opposition (as in Chan Buddhism), but rather one of mediation. The senses are to be exploited for the sense beyond sense: far from being the "five thieves," they are the conduits of moral insight. Elsewhere, the Hanshi waijuan speaks of the "six desires," which correspond to the five senses (the sense of touch being subdivided into inner and outer sense perceptions): Man has six desires. His eyes desire to see goodlooking colors, his ears desire to hear [the notes] kung and shang, his nose desires to smell fragrant odors, his mouth desires to taste fine flavors, his four limbs desire repose and inactivity; of clothing he likes the elegant and embroidered, the light and warm. These six are the six desires of the people. Neglecting them results in trouble; acting in accord with them, in harmony. Hence the Saintly King, in instructing the people, always makes a point of following their desires, employing ritual, li to control them. I being simple and complete, ritual li being easy and regulated, and [neither] departing far from [human] desires, the people as a result obey orders quickly. [HWTS 9b9; Hightower, pp. 175–176]
Where the interest in the Confucian texts is intensely pragmatic, those from the Daoist canon are consistently skeptical of the biases 4.
The terms jen and i are the same as those translated by "humaneness" and " righteousness" in the previous passage from the Mencius.
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posed by sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste. The senses, in this view, are perceptual crutches that must be discarded if one is to confront pure experience: "To act without acting," as the Dao De Jing says, "to accomplish without accomplishing, to taste without tasting." The Dao, phenomenal truth, does not yield itself to the senses, and "the [Dao] that emerges from the mouth is bland in its tastelessness.'' Sense perceptions provide us with sense data; but "sensibilities" arise from metaphors for understanding. "I see!" "I comprehend!" "I grasp the concept"—these are condensed metaphors combining (and often confusing) the perceptual with the conceptual.6 Keen perceptions are not always guarantors of sharp insight: blind Milton "sees" more than those who are sighted. This distrust of the senses—despite our tendency to model our modes of understanding on them—is stressed in the Zhuangzi. Now, there are five instances of losing the nature of things: first, the five colors disorienting the eye, so that it no longer sees clearly; second, the five tones disorienting the ear, so that it no longer hears accurately; third, the five odors overwhelming the nose, causing congestion in the sinuses; four, the five flavors muddling the mouth and ruining the taste buds; five, preferences that undermine the mind and cause it to fly off. These five are all harmful to life. [SPPY 5:11a–11b]
The fifth sense is qushe , which might be better translated as biases, or proclivities, for they suggest preferences in favor as well as preferences against. The injunction is against overemphasis on any one sense in particular and against overreliance on natural, though misleading, perceptual biases in general. The mischief is in extrapolating from the senses rather than apprehending that which is prior to perception. The clearest and most mystical exposition of 5.
The word "taste" in English has so many social, nonaesthetic connotations that it is scarcely usable as a translation of wei in Chinese. It is also semantically unstable: an indefinite article, a definite article, or no article at all, makes the distinction between different senses: (1) "this apple has a taste"; (2) "I have a taste for . . ."; (3) "the taste of apples"; (4) "a person has taste." Chinese wei has only the meaning of "taste" in sense (1) and (3). 6.
George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Mark Turner have explored similar lines of inquiry: cf. Lakoff and Johnson (1980); Lakoff (1987); and Lakoff and Turner (1989).
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this position occurs in the Liezi, from the chapter on "Heaven's Gifts": Hence there are the begotten and the Begetter of the begotten, shapes and the Shaper of shapes, sounds and the Sounder of sounds, colours and the Colourer of colours, flavours and the Flavourer of flavours. What begetting begets dies, but the Begetter of the begotten never ends. What shaping shapes is real, but the Shaper of shapes has never existed. What sounding sounds is heard, but the Sounder of sounds has never issued forth. What colouring colours is visible, but the Colourer of colours never appears. What flavouring flavours is tasted, but the Flavourer of flavours is never disclosed. All are the offices of That Which Does Nothing. [SPPY 1:5a–5b; Graham 1960:20]
Sense data are already at one remove from reality. The senses are used not so much as metaphors for insight, nor even as conduits to thought: they are the manifestations of the "primal source," which is Nothing. The Nothing (reminiscent of, yet distinct from, Aristotle's Prime Mover) expresses itself through the senses. Another text from the Liezi expands on the passage already quoted from the Zhuangzi on the blinding effort of simply seeing and the deafening effect of simply hearing: The eye is about to grow dim when it can discern the tip of a hair; the ear is about to go deaf when it can hear the wings of a gnat; the palate is about to deteriorate when it can discriminate between the waters of the Tzu and the Sheng; the nostrils are about to stiffen when it delights in sprinting; the mind is about to go astray when it can recognize what is real and what is illusion. Therefore if a thing does not reach its limit it will not revert. [SPPY 4:11b; Graham, p. 84]7
Supersensitivity is a distortion. Reality cannot be conveyed through one sense, no matter how intensely perceived. The pleasure one derives from the senses is most succinctly described in the notoriously cynical Yang Zhu chapter from the Liezi. (Curiously, there is an echo of the point from the Hanshi waijuan Confucian text that it is injurious to neglect the gratification of the 7.
I have modified Graham's rendering of shihfei
from "right and wrong" to "what is real and what is illusion."
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senses.) In the usual progression of the senses, the anomaly is in the description of the functions of the mouth: Yen P'ingchung asked Kuan Yiwu about "nourishing life." Kuan Yiwu said: "It is simply this: no restraints, no impediments." Yen P'ingchung asked: "How is this?" Yiwu said: ''Let the ear hear what it wishes to listen to, let the eye see what it wishes to gaze at, let the nose smell the scent it craves, let the mouth say what it wants to say, let the body rest in what it is content in, let the will have its way. For if the ear does not hear the sounds it wishes to hear, the hearing is blocked; if the eye does not see the sights it wants to see, then its vision is impaired; if the nose does not whiff the scent of spices and orchids, then its olfactory sense atrophies; if the mouth cannot express what it wants about reality and illusion, then its genius is hampered; if the body does not enjoy beautiful textures, then its tactile sense is undermined; and if the will does not enjoy free play, then one's nature is diminished. All these impediments are extremely destructive. If one can rid oneself of these impediments and be content until death whether for one day, one month, one year, or ten—that is what I mean by "nourishing life." [SPPY 7:4a–4b; Graham, p. 142]8
The savors of taste do not figure in what the mouth enjoys doing: "let the mouth say what it wants to say." The mouth is presented as the oracle: "if the mouth cannot express what it wants about reality and illusion," then its genius is thwarted. The mouth is characterized as the orifice through which truths and falsehoods pass. Where every other sense is discussed in concrete sensations—sights, sounds, smells, touch—the mouth is defined as a sensor of abstract intimations of reality and illusion rather than as an orifice where nourishment is admitted. The substitution of noumenal notions for phenomenal sense impressions is indicative of one of the emphases in Chinese epistemology. The attack against words found in the Yijing and the Dao De Jing is against fixed concepts, words transcribed and defined. The word that transmits itself directly from the page through the eye to the mind, without the intermediary of oral discourse and modulation, is the word that must be suspected. It is at a greater remove from that which it tries to describe: "'Writing does not fully express 8.
I have departed from Graham's rendering in places.
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speech; speech does not fully express thought" (Choui, SPPY 7:10a); "The Dao is eternal and has no name" (SPTK la:16b). Reality has about it something of the inexplicable, the impalpable, the undefinable, that yields a sense beyond sense: "The words that emerge from the Dao are so bland as to be tasteless. See it, and it does not yield completely to sight; hear it, and it does not yield completely to hearing; use it, and its uses are inexhaustible" (SPTK 17b; see Chow 1979). Ironically, the skepticism about words only served to elevate in esteem those works which offered this critique of the word: these classics became the source, model, and justification of literature in the first systematic effort of literary criticism in Chinese, the Wenxin diaolong ("The Heart of Literature and the Ornamentation of Dragons"; more familiarly known as "The Literary Mind and the Carving of the Dragon"). At once a disquisition on the nature of things and an exploration into the various genres and qualities of literature, Liu Xie's sixthcentury classic emphasizes the expressionistic values of wen, literature, as something that makes manifest the nature of things in visible and intelligible patterns (Gibbs 1970; McMullen 1973; Liu 1975a). Wen as writing, and as elaboration, points to outward signs of inner meaning, just as (in Liu Xie's famous simile) the spots and stripes of a leopard and a tiger are manifestations of "tigerness" and "leopardness.'' But if this analogy of literary elaboration merely relates inner meaning to outer form, then the reference to the spots of a leopard and the stripes of a tiger can only point to rhetorical ornamentation. Literature then becomes superficial in its literal, not its pejorative, sense: the spots of a leopard for the leopard, the stripes of the tiger for the tiger. The preponderantly visual orientation of these images has, unfortunately, obscured Liu Xie's nonvisual analogies. The sounds of the forest, a spring cascading over a rock, are also "where inner forms (xingli ) express themselves in patterns, when emanations of sound also give rise to their manifestations" (WHTLC, p. 1; Shih 1983:14). In Chapter 44 of the Wenxin diaolong, in which he is considering the art of writing, Liu Xie describes the work of a good writer: "He will encounter each exigency, and his genius will be imbued by what he is describing, whereupon the essence of meaning will come tumbling forth, in inspired expressions of enormous variety. To the eyes: an intricate tapestry; to the
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ears: silken sounds; to the taste: delectable flavors; to the scent, the fragrance of fresh grasses" (WHTLC, p. 656; Shih, p. 330). Excellence in literature stimulates metaphoric delights comparable to those available through the senses. Literature affords the same kind of pleasure as the beauties of nature. Though not currently conventional in its usage, literature can be "savory" as well as "beautiful"; poetry may be "fragrant" as well as "melodious.'' In Chinese, the critical terms are borrowed with equal facility from any one of the senses. The Importance of Flavor The student of Chinese literary criticism will notice how frequently one encounters the word wei , meaning "flavor," or "savor," in discussions of literature. For the Westerntrained critic, this reliance on such an elusive quality is an inevitable source of frustration. Wei cannot be abstractly described or defined: as a critical term, it seems entirely circular in its logic: critics with "taste" find "taste" in fine words of literature; those who do not appreciate quality will have no "taste" and cannot "taste" what they read. At best, wei appears totally subjective and impressionistic, hence totally unusable as a critical concept. This state of affairs will prove insoluble if one is bent on understanding the constituent elements of literature or the processes of literary enjoyment through analysis. If one considers the pervasiveness of critical references to taste as indicative of values beyond the reach of analysis, however, perhaps something of interest may emerge. First, it will be helpful to survey the key passages in Chinese literary criticism to see how this notion of wei is used—as metaphor, as organic model, as epistemological vehicle. In his hymn to the art of letters, more dithyramb than analysis, Lu Ji (261–303) described his own almost delirious response to fine writing: "oblivious to all sights, oblivious to all sound," he read and then reached the point where, "drinking at the onrush of words, he rinsed his mouth with the fragrant essence of the 'six arts'" (Hughes 1951:96; Fang 1951:532).9 Bad writing, Lu Ji maintains, is 9.
The "six arts" are: rites, music, archery, chariot riding, learning, and mathematics. Hughes' rendering of the liu i as "Scriptures" is misleading.
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like something "without the lingering flavor of the sacred broth"; it is like "the notes that issue from the vermilion lutestrings, so thin and eerie" (Hughes, p. 105; Fang, p. 541). The act of reading is compared to tasting delights: the act of appreciation is an evaluative effort. The false brilliance of flawed works is compared to crude, unsubtle food, or to a tuneless, discordant sound. When he discusses the transmission of history in Chapter 25 of the Wenxin diaolong, Liu Xie quotes Yang Xiong's version of the dictum from the Yijing on the relationship between thought, speech, and the written word: "Speech is the sound of thought; writing is the image of thought" (WHTLC, p. 455; Shih, p. 202).10 Then, later, when discussing music in poetry (Chapter 33), he writes: "The beauty or ugliness of sound and of image is transmitted in the chanting, and the flavor (ciwei ) of the chanting imbues each phrase, each word" (WHTLC, p. 553; Shih, p. 259). ''Flavor" is the soul of writing. Sound and image convey some of the thought, but only flavor can convey the essence of the thought. The verve and the vitality captured in flavor, in Liu Xie's analysis, are part of the thought in literature and cannot be communicated in sounds or images. The written word is fixed; the spoken word is more flexible; but the phrase chanted transmits the flavor of literature. Literature read and literature heard involve the faculties of seeing and hearing; but if it is to be appreciated, all the senses must be active, if sometimes by abstraction. The encounter with literature through visual and aural means lends an appropriateness to the use of visual and aural values in appreciating literature, but the other senses are by no means less crucial in our total literary experience. The distinctiveness of a work is not manifest in its "image" or in the sounds it suggests (which, in a nonphonetic language like Chinese and with ancient works, is purely hypothetical and problematic in any event). For the Chinese critic, the distinctiveness of a work lies in that quality called "flavor." Closely allied to the notion of flavor is the concept of "fragrance": the garden of literature produces scents and tastes that are the sign of vitality and growth. "The essence of literature may be compared 10.
This formulation is apt only for Chinese, for phonetic languages, the second member of the aphorism must be changed to: "writing is the image, not of thought, but of speech."
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to the various plants and trees," Liu Xie writes, "alike in the fact that they are rooted in the soil, yet different in their flavor and their fragrance, their exposure to the sun" (WHTLC, p. 519; Shih, p. 232). The character of each work is manifest in its unique savor and scent. This warrant of uniqueness is critical when one examines the criteria by which true literature is identified as being both fresh and enduring at the same time. In this context, the significant insight is that the uniqueness of a work can be savored: texts and meanings may echo other works, but the personality of any work is instantaneously verified by what Liu Xie calls wei ("flavor") and xiu ("fragrance''). It is this uniqueness that persists, surviving innumerable bad imitations, shifts in circumstances, lost phonetics, changing styles. It is what remains fresh in the classics, what gives to the contemporary reader a sense of discovery and newness. The works of the past that seem forever new are those writings with lasting savor: Liu claimed that their "roots were deep, their foliage luxuriant, their expression succinct yet rich; the things described were familiar, but their ramifications are farreaching: so, although they were written in the past, they have a lasting savor that remains fresh" (WHTLC, p. 22; Shih, p. 24).11 How does one acquire this "savor"? In the technique of composition, in the style, or in the form? Liu Xie's answer is that it cannot be found in technical ingenuity, or even in absolute uniqueness. Contrivance and originality, no matter how imaginative or brilliant, soon pall. The warrant of true savor is in the authenticity with which the writer expresses his feelings. Without this authenticity, the most elaborate and dazzling work turns out to be bland and tasteless: Speech travels far in the written word: How sincerely expressed, these experiences! When expressions of the heart assume literary form, Then it will blossom forth in glory. Silks from Wu: how dazzling! 11.
Although the same Chinese word wei is used in this passage, I have translated it as "savor" to stress the combination of qualities inherent in a work rather than to restrict these qualities to a single "flavor." Furthermore, the word "flavor" in English does not naturally accommodate the aesthetic overtones that the Chinese word wei elicits: in this context, "savor" may be more suitable. Jullien uses the French equivalent, saveur, in his treatment of Chinese aesthetics (1985:123–160).
Page 225 Blossoms from the hibiscus are merely pretty. Elaborate designs with no feeling Must, in the end, cloy our tastes. [WHTLC, p 539; Shih, p. 249]12
The successful work of art is a symbiosis of sincerity and technique: both must be present—the one immediately apparent, the other manifest only after careful analysis. Without sincerity, there is no savor; without technique, there is no artistry. In his time, of course, Liu Xie was arguing against the rhetorical excesses of elaborate composition: hence the criticism against pure form descending into mere prettiness, attractiveness without substance. But he was also against feeling that is not graced by art; clumsy sincerity gets equally short shrift: Skillful language is easily recognized, But stupid phrases are hard to hide; Flaws in language and in writing Lie deeper than those in jade. [WHTLC, pp. 637–638; Shih, p. 308]
Overemphasis on feeling has its pitfalls as well: Turning them around, they appear to make sense, But upon close study, they turn out to be nonsense. There are the wayward changes of feeling, That lead to decadence in literature. [WHTLC, p. 638; Shih, p. 309]
Liu Xie posits the polarity of the impersonal dimensions of art against the personal dimensions of feeling. The aroma and flavor of a work are warrants of feeling: they provide the reader with a particular sense of a work, even as its form conveys its universality. Where, in the writings of former commentators, the notion of flavor loitered at the periphery, in the work of Sikong Tu (837–908) it occupies a central place. Far from being an ornamental 12.
The hibiscus has large, showy flowers and seems an appropriate rendering for shunying
, though it is not as shortlived as the shunying, which blooms only for one day.
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metaphor, or idle analogy, wei becomes for Sikong Tu an article of critical faith, almost a byword of quality (see Robertson 1972). Criticism begins with the discrimination of tastes and flavors: Only after one has distinguished between flavor, in my opinion, can one talk about poetry. South of Chiangling [among the barbarians], when it comes to a matter of tastes, the pickles are certainly sour enough: the trouble is, that's all they are, sour; the brine is salty enough: the trouble is, that's all it is, salty. Now, the Chinese eat this fare only to satisfy their hunger, and then they stop, for they know savors other than salty and sour: they sense that something fine and delectable is missing. [Ssuk'ung Tu 1969:47]
We encounter here an attitude familiar to moderns: the notion that "taste" is emblematic of advanced civilization. Crude tastes bespeak uneducated and primitive upbringing; appreciation for the subtle is a measure of cultural superiority. The quality of the "fine and delectable" (chun mei , ''untainted and beautiful") is the hallmark of good poetry. The implication is that a good critic, like the Chinese in Sikong Tu's illustration, can savor tastes that are subtly blended, with no one taste dominating, and that he can recognize the "extraordinary savor" of fine poetry. That this "extraordinary savor" is the mark not only of authenticity, but of genius, is suggested by a comment from Jiang Kui (ca. 1155ca. 1221): The poetry of each master has its own flavor, just as each of the twentyfour modes of music has its own tone, which is where the music comes to rest. Imitators, even though their words may resemble the master's, have lost the tone. [Quoted by Liu 1975a:45; see Liu 1966:83]
A cognate expression that occurs frequently in Chinese literary criticism is the word qu , as in xingqu, it can suggest "interest," "enthusiasm," "disposition."13 The valuation of poetry depends as much on the inclination (dis 13.
Xing in turn, when combined with wei, as in xingwei
, suggests "enjoyment," "pleasure," "relish."
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ponibilité) of the critic toward the work as on the inherent characteristics of the work itself. Taste in poetry resorts neither to discursive reasoning nor to brute instinct, but is developed out of a creative tension between the two. The seemingly arcane comments of Yen Yu (fl. 1180–1235) are illuminating in this context: Poetry has other resources that do not involve writing; poetry has other interests which do not involve reason. Without wide reading and exhaustive reasoning, however, one cannot arrive at the ultimate in poetry. This might be called the superiority of not following the road of reason or of falling into the trap of words. Poetry sings of emotions and the nature of things. The poets of the High Tang wrote from heightened sensibilities [xingqu], like antelopes hanging their horns in trees at night, leaving not a trace to be found. Their magic is in their transcendent charm, which cannot be analyzed—like sounds in emptiness, or the shape of phenomena, the moon in the water, the image in the mirror. Words can be exhausted, but meaning is inexhaustible. [KCSH, pp. 77–78]14
The last phrase is an echo of the phrase first encountered in the Yijing: "Writing cannot exhaust speech; speech cannot exhaust meaning." Yen Yu's contempt for poetry written with words is not a selfcontradiction. Just as meaning is not circumscribed by speech, nor speech by writing, neither can poetry be subsumed by, or identified with, the words in the poem. If words are limited and meanings unlimited, a poem is successful to the extent that, beginning with words, it transcends those words to convey inexhaustible meanings. When Yen Yu discusses the shortcomings of the poets of the Southern Dynasties (420–589), as well as the shortcomings of the poets of his own day, and compares them with the watershed poets of the Tang period, he offers a succinct set of criteria for the evaluation of poetry: Poetry has the logic of language and the savor of meaning (yixing poets of our time attend to the meaning 14.
). The poets of the Southern Dynasties attended to the language and neglected the meaning; whereas
James J. Y. Liu renders hsingch'ü (xingqu) alternately as "inspired gusto" or "inspired feelings"; see Liu, (1975a:39, 81).
Page 228 at the expense of language. But the poets of the Tang period exploited both language and meaning to their very core. [KCSH, p. 94]
In the first chapter of the Canglang shihua, Yen Yu outlined five modalities of poetry: style (tizhuang ). Each points to a different aspect in a poem, but all five are present. Now, of the five, the qualities most easily identified and analyzed are style, form, and musicality. Style may be manifest in the diction in a poem; form may be adduced in the construction of a poem; musicality by its tone pattern, sounds, and rhythm. The third and fourth modalities are harder to define. How does one recognize "spirit" and "savor" in a poem? The other three may be approached abstractly: style can be simple or complex, ornate or simple; form falls easily into generic categories (fu, gushi, yuefu, five or sevenword lushi, jueju); musicality, particularly after Shen Yue's codification of the four tones in Chinese in the early fifth century, can be schematically outlined as a pattern of even and deflected tones. But the "prevailing spirit" (qixiang) and the "savor" (xingqu) will elude our analytical grasp. One modern commentator has glossed Yen Yu's ''xingqu" as meaning "the quality in a work that bespeaks its farreaching and lasting flavor" (Chang 1966:25). It seems to be a quality that brings out the inner sense of the work and gives it a sense of life. It is what differentiates "live words" from "dead words." In the third chapter of the Canglang shihua, Yen Yu recalls Bodhidharma's dictum: "One must contemplate vital, 'living' sentences, not stale, 'dead' sentences" (Jingde quandenglu iii:l; Ch'en 1957:135). These "live" words give off, even after a lapse of years or generations, the authentic savor of the poem, which both establishes the original character of the poem and makes it new. Yen Yu's rejection of poems that use words makes sense only in this context: words that are only words cannot but be limited to the meanings of the individual words, but words that have "savor" create poems with limitless suggestions and resonances—"they do not follow the road of reason nor fall into the trap of words." Poetry aspires to the wordless state—like sounds in the void, the moon in the water, the image in the mirror. With a surface similarity to Plato's conception of poetry as twice removed from reality, the written word has been conceived as the
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image of the spoken word, and the spoken word has been characterized as the sound of thought. What one reads, then, is only a vestige of the original thought impulse. As the sixteenthcentury critic and literatus Yuan Zongdao (1560–1600) put it: The mouth and the tongue represent thought; literature in turn represents what is expressed by mouth and tongue. Thus transformed, and at such a remove, however brilliantly written, literature will still not do justice to what is expressed by mouth and tongue. How much can possibly remain of thought? [Lunwen, SYWCH, p. 1]
Yuan then proceeds to argue the position identified with Heidegger and H.G. Gadamer under the rubric of "radical historicism," in which one is reminded of the past being "ontically alien" to the present. No one moment in history, therefore, can ever be fully realized by any other. In addition to the loss from thought to speech to writing within contemporaneous periods, there is the further loss occasioned by differences between different epochs. The distance, the loss, must never be forgotten in the flush of comprehending, and the excitement of responding to, the past. But if this distance is never to be bridged, and if the loss is forever irretrievable, then, Yuan asks himself, why study the ancients? His answer points to more basic concerns: The ancient writings placed a value on communication; therefore, we learn about communication when we learn about the ancients. To understand their meaning does not mean that one must get bogged down in their words and phrases. Today one wears cloaks and robes, but we study the twined leaves and skinned pelts of the ancients; today we have fiveflavored recipes, but we study the ancients eating raw meat and drinking fresh blood. Why? The ancients' objective was to stuff the mouth, fill the belly, and cover the body; our objective today is the same: to stuff the mouth, fill the belly, and cover the body—there is not a great deal of difference. When we borrow the words of the ancients in the compositions we write, it is not unlike patching pelts and twining leaves for shirts and sleeves, or using flesh and blood as a substitute for bean food. In general, the writings of the ancients were mainly for the purpose of communication. Writing today fails to communicate for the most part. For those who fail to communicate, studying the works of those who have successfully communicated—this is what happens when we study the ancients. [SYWCH, p. 3]
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It is the process behind words—the act of communicating—which is the real object of study. The need to communicate, like the need for food and clothing, has not changed, despite changes of fashion and refinements in cuisine. The study of the ancients provides insights into the meanings beyond words, just as the study of styles of dress and cuisine reveals something of more durable interest than this year's hemline or yesterday's menu. The eighteenthcentury poet, critic, writer of cookbooks, and promoter of talent in women, Yuan Mei (1716–1798), proposed a synaesthetic test of good poetry which reiterates authenticity, sincerity, and effective communication as the hallmarks of quality: Poetry is one's personal nature, and it is enough to draw from one's own person. If its words move one's heart, its colors dazzle one's eye, its taste pleases one's mouth, and its sound delights one's ear, then it is good poetry. [Translated by Liu 1975a:136]
Both intent and emotion are involved in the evaluation of poetry: there must be genuine emotion and there must be effective communication. The senses, both literally and metaphorically, participate in the appreciation of good poetry: the alert reader of poetry has his senses, as well as his wits, about him. The use of the senses, in combination, as a means of identifying true poetry is no longer mere metaphor but a correlative of the recognition process. Sensory perceptions impinge on the mind with such intensity that the mind is compelled to acknowledge the presence of something it does not completely understand. What it apprehends might be called an "intuited insight," differing from a rational insight in that this process registers simultaneously while reason programs sequentially. For the simultaneous apprehension of phenomena, the "lower senses," which require no focusing, may be more effective in registering phenomena too fleeting to be seen or heard. The senses of smell and taste, perhaps because less constantly in use, are quick to recognize and slow to forget. Unlike sights and sounds, however, they are not so easily reproduced by the mind. One can reconstruct an image or recall a melody, but it is difficult to mentally reconstruct a taste or memorize a flavor (although Chinese are familiar—in literature as in cooking—with the notion of huiwei , a recollection in the mind of a previously encountered flavor).
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The memory of taste and smell is passive; it can be stirred even after long lapses; it can respond but it cannot initiate. This is why the most salient comments in Chinese literary criticism are often gnomic statements about taste and smell that elude paraphrase. They have been criticized as vague by later commentators, but the truth is that they are precisely faithful to the qualities described, pointing to that sense beyond sense captured in poetry. Neither evasive nor coyly mystical, it is no accident that (as James J. Y. Liu has remarked of Yen Yu's statements) they describe poetry more often in terms of what it is not than in terms of what it is (Liu 1975a:39).15 For only by negating concepts which do not subsume the essence of poetry can one give an accurate intimation of what poetry is. These negative definitions—one might call them "delimitations"—are often more satisfying, even though they define something in terms of something that it is not. Yuan Mei provides a typical, more or less instructive, example. Quoting with approval a remark from the Lientang shihua, Yuan writes: Resonance in poetry lies in the meaning, not in the phrases; force in poetry lies in its spirit, not in the lines; the transcendent in poetry lies in its emptiness, not in its cleverness; the limpidity of poetry lies in its subtlety, not in its superficiality. [SYSH, p. 73]16
It is, of course, such words as "meaning" (yi ) that are the hardest to establish. Like the affects of taste and smell, difficult though they may be to define, their presence is, nevertheless, unmistakable. What one is confronted with in these experiences is the proposition that one's knowledge in certain instances is no less definite despite one's inability to explain them adequately. They are outside our range of vision, and therefore not "seeable"; they lie outside our grasp, and are therefore not "comprehensible." Possibly, 15.
For a consideration of the epistemological ramifications of the negative construction, see Graham (1959).
16.
"Resonance" has become a useful if elusive concept in modern film criticism. One anecdote relates the reply of a film director when challenged to define "resonance"; his response: "The aroma of the roast" (New York Times Book Review, 1 April 1979, p. 30).
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for certain kinds of reality, the "lower senses" provide the more meaningful models for understanding. In his observations on poetry, Yuan turned Sikong Tu's aphorism on the "flavor that is beyond flavor." (wei wai wei contemporaries:
) against some of his less distinguished
Ssuk'ung piaosheng [Sikong Tu] discussed poetry and relished those instances when a "flavor beyond flavor" had been achieved; I say that, with those who write poetry today, there's no flavor even of its own [literally, "the flavor within flavor"] to be had, let alone the "flavor beyond flavor.'' [SYSH, p. 100]
Though said partly in jest, the comment nevertheless differentiates between mystical abstraction and quotidian sensation. The flavor of poetry must be "fresh"; the sounds of poetry must be "crisp." Yuan presents his criteria for selecting poems: Selecting poems is similar to using talent: the canvass must be wide, the choice must be rigorous; to be able to know the sources of the different schools, one is naturally broad minded; to determine where the essence lies, one must naturally be rigorous. When I discuss poetry, I appear liberal but I'm actually very rigorous, and I'm fond of saying: "The sounds may be kung [gong] or cheng, but they must all be crisp; the flavors may be salty or sour, so long as they are fresh." [SYSH, p. 120]17
Perhaps the most memorable intimation of Yuan's notion of flavor in poetry may be found in the following examples from the experience of a gourmet as well as one who appreciates beauty: Bear's paw and baby leopard [rare culinary delicacies], so prized as delectable delights, when swallowed raw skinned alive are no better than eating vegetables or bamboo shoots. The peony flower, so admired for its luxuriant beauty, snipped off, is no better than the smartweed [water pepper] or the mountain sunflower. Flavor is to be preferred to this kind of freshness; taste is to be preferred to this kind of quintessence. One must appreciate this point before one can discourse about poetry. [SYSH, p. 12]
The value of wei, "flavor," as a constituent element in literature 17.
Kung and cheng are names of two tones in the Chinese musical scale.
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is no more apparent than in the remarks of Yao Nai (1731–1815) in his introduction to the Collation of Genres in Ancient Literature (Guwen cilei zuan): There are altogether thirteen kinds of literature, but of the constituent elements in literature there are eight: imagination (shen), principles (li), force (qi), flavor (wei), form (ge), prosody (lu), sound (sheng), and color (se). Imagination, principles, force, and flavor are the quintessence of literature; form, prosody, sound, and color are all the coarser elements. But if one neglects the coarser elements, where will the quintessence be? Those who study this in the ancients must first encounter the coarser elements before they ultimately master the quintessence; only then can they forget about the coarser elements. [SPPY 16a–16b]
Eye and ear are relegated to the last and least important places in the hierarchy of eight. Flavor occupies a central place (as the least among the quintessences) along with form (as the greatest among the coarser elements). This emphasis on constituent elements not involving eye and ear reflects the notion in Chan Buddhism that transcendental knowledge cannot be attained through the faculties of seeing or hearing. The power of "mystical virtù" (dexing ) enables the adept to reconcile the here and the beyond. Zhang Zai (1020–1077) wrote: "Men are said to have knowledge, but it is received through the eyes and the ears. But what impinges on man comes from the here and the beyond together, and this knowledge of the here and the beyond is one that lies outside the scope of eye and ear. That kind of knowledge is far beyond the common man" (Chang Tsai 1936:42; Ch'en 1957–133).18 This knowledge, to which eye and ear do not provide access, is also knowledge attained without discursive reasoning and without the written or spoken word. It would naturally be liberated from any dependence on a text to be read or sounds to be heard: in its ideal state, poetry then becomes wordless, invisible, and inaudible. Beyond the Visual and the Aural Concern with taste in Chinese literary criticism should not diminish the importance of the dominant strain, which is, after all, based 18.
Ch'en translates têhsing
as "inherent virtue."
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on visual and aural models. Aesthetics in Chinese cannot help but be conditioned by the visual image, defined and symbolized by the fact and the essence of wen as "pattern," "ornament," "literature." In perhaps the key statement of this tradition, Liu Xie writes: The fundamentals of literature are based on three principles: first, form, the five colors; second, their tone, the five sounds; third, their feeling, which are the five emotions. [WHTLC, p. 537; Shih, p. 245]
Senses other than sight and sound are not mentioned. It is not clear whether they are included under the rubric of "feeling" or excluded altogether. The metaphoric comparison of literature to weaving, to brocade, to finely patterned silk, all attest to the importance of wen in the development of Chinese culture.19 But, without displacing the visual model, the persistent mention of wei, " flavor," seems equally significant, not as an alternative metaphor but as pointing to precisely those qualities not adducible by references to wen. "Profound literature has obscure beauties," writes Liu Xie, "with a lasting flavor that is somehow fulfilling'' (WHTLC, p. 633; Shih, p. 305). The phrase "obscure beauties" is oxymoron verging on contradiction and betrays the strain on language that Liu's thought is exerting. The yuwei , which I translate as "lasting flavor," is the key term, for it explains not only the permanence of literature but its vitality. The written word preserves a work on paper, but what enables literature to retain its hold on new audiences? What changes the reputation of a piece, admittedly beautiful in one era but dismissed as stale and insipid in another? The idea of wen as a manifestation of inner nature has both negative and positive dimensions: as sincere expression of inner feeling, wen becomes the outward form of truth; as insincere elaborations of surface prettiness, wen becomes excessive rhetoric, impoverished in feeling. The Wenxin diaolong is as much a critique of the excesses of wen as of its successes: the counterbalance to wen is the presence of wei. This exploration into the epistemological background behind the sensory metaphors and models in Chinese literary criticism sug 19.
See Chapters 1, 9, 25, 27, 31, 47 of the Wenhsing tiaolung; for an important perspective on the term in a later period, see McMullen (1973:322–344).
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gests that, familiar as one may be with such criteria as unity, originality, clarity, there may be other values not so much antithetical as complementary to these familiar criteria. In such notions as spontaneity, authenticity, freshness, one encounters qualities that are not objective, nor abstract, nor even very definable. But they are, to judge by the attention paid to them in Chinese literary criticism, pervasive and real. Even the quality of literary criticism itself may elicit an oral or gustatory metaphor, as in the following remark by Zhou Zuoren (1885–1967) on Jin Shengtan' s commentary on the Shuihu juan: Of all the commentaries on fiction, Chin Shengt'an's are of course the best. . . . When I read the Shuihu chuan [Shuihu juan], I pay equal attention to the main text and to the comments. It is like eating white fungus (pai mu erh ); they taste even better eaten with soup. [Quoted by Wang 1972:81]
Such comments may be dismissed as merely anecdotal and therefore useless psychological litmus tests of quality; were they to be cited in support of structural or stylistic analyses, they would be, clearly, less than adequate. But are such testimonies failures of analytical thinking, or do they point to something beyond analysis? However unwieldy they may be for students of literary criticism accustomed to the formulations of Aristotle and the "modes" of Northrop Frye, they constitute a significant portion of what Chinese literary criticism has to offer. As Jullien (1985:159) reminds us, Western literature embodies a semiotic bias toward the eyes: En Occident—de plus en plus?—le texte littéraire est lu seulement des yeux (au sens propre comme au figuré) et il existe essentiellement au plan—médiat—de la représentation: la tradition des littéraires occidentales aboutit logiquement à une valorisation du symbole.
The reader who disregards the importance of flavor as well as the nuances of savor in literary criticism discards testimony of more than subjective or anecdotal relevance. There are three texts that come to mind in this connection. The first is the wellknown parable from the Zhuangzi about Cook Ding. More than a story about impressive technical skill, the parable be
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came in time a commonplace of criticism, "part and parcel of the literary language" (Liu 1975a:32). When admiration is expressed at his skill, Cook Ding replies (in Watson's translation): "What I care about is the Way, which goes beyond skill. When I first began cutting up oxen, all I could see was the ox itself. After three years I no longer saw the whole ox. And now—now I go at it by spirit and don't look with my eyes. Perception and understanding have come to a stop and spirit moves where it wants. I go along with the natural makeup, strike in the big hollows, guide the knife through the big openings, and follow things as they are. So I never touch the smallest ligament or tendon." [SPPY 2:1b–2a; Watson, pp. 50–51]
The parable illuminates the role of analysis in the understanding of process: the "cutting up of the oxen" can only reveal the constituent parts of the animal, but it cannot explain the difference between an ox with life and an ox without life. It cannot explain the individual aberrations of the physiology in each animal. Analyze though we will, and valuable as analysis is, it brings us up against limitations that must be acknowledged. Complete understanding requires that one see beyond the "whole ox." The second text is a dialogue from the Lushi chunqiu. Yiyin is saying: "In the matter of blending [flavors], sweet, sour, bitter, acrid, and salty must be measured in exact proportions and introduced in the right sequence. Their savor is subtle, and each has its own character. The processes in the cauldron are marvelously subtle, which words cannot describe, and thoughts cannot conceive" (SPPY 14:5). Value in literature is no more unmistakable, no less inexplicable. The analysis of literature will yield only the recipe for a successful work, but it will not produce the distinctive savor of a masterpiece. The final text is one of the twenty verses that Tao Qian wrote under the title "Drinking Wine" (yinjiu flippantly and profoundly—to sources of inexpressible knowledge:
. But it is in no. 14 that Tao Qian points—at once
Page 237 Old friends know what I like: They bring wine wherever they come by. We spread out and sit under the pines; After several rounds, we're drunk again. Old men chatting away—all at once; Passing the jug around—out of turn. Unaware that there is a "self," How do we learn to value "things"? We are lost in these faraway thoughts; In wine, there is a heady taste. [Liu and Lo, p. 54]
The uses of wine in poetry as a subject of inquiry will elicit much more interest than can be satisfied in a brief survey. The particular properties of wine—its "déreglement de tout les sens," its bouquet, its taste—all seem to relate to what Rimbaud called "l'alchimie du verbe," which is poetry. It will be enough if this discussion does nothing more than whet the appetite for an extended study of taste in Chinese aesthetics.
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13— Polar Paradigms in Poetics: Chinese and Western Literary Premises In the burgeoning field of EastWest comparative literature, little consideration has been given to questions of methodology and the logic of comparison. Tantalizing and presumably interesting questions—Is there a Chinese tragedy? Why is there no epic in Chinese?—pique interest but produce no real illumination. Of course, one fails to notice the bias in these questions. The obverse questions are rarely, if ever, asked. Why are there no dynastic histories in the West? Why has the West produced no counterpart to the Shijing? Are there equivalents to the lushi and zaju forms in the West? If these challenges to lacunae in the West strike one as slightly absurd, then we must consider the possibility that the original questions might be equally pointless. The speculations are ultimately futile and meaningless because they fail to address the fundamental confusions of premise and methodology implicit in the unreflected— one might say the unselfreflected—posing of these questions. Large issues are involved in their very formulation, and any answers they might occasion are compromised by an inherent confusion which can only render chimerical or meaningless any "insights" produced. In colloquial parlance, it is an "apples and oranges" problem: how does one judge an orange in terms of an apple, an apple in terms of an orange? We see clearly the methodological absurdity of trying to explain why one is an inadequate form of the other, because we are ourselves neither apples nor oranges and we are, generically, disinterested when it comes to fruit. But that neutrality does not obtain when, in our culturally bound perspective, we inadvertently
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assume a point of reference of the West (say, apples) or East (say, oranges). We are judging from a premise which is itself an object of study, not an absolute point of reference.1 It is the realm of "pseudouniversals" that I would like to explore in this chapter—to establish not so much a neutral point of reference (which, in any event, would be impossible) but a multiple perspective from which biases and distortions can be effectively reduced, if not eliminated altogether. I envision these points of reference as polar rather than categorical opposites in order to emphasize that they are not fixed conceptual boxes which require a binary either/or logic. This strategy also permits a guard against oversimplification, the mistake of the mythically monolithic. We are talking about cultural complexes which, despite their aggregate differences, contain within them worlds of difference and varieties of perspectives, so that any discussion of largescale referents—whether "Western" or "Chinese"—must be provisional and contingent; our analysis will provide only a rough order of approximation. Individual instances will, inevitably, depart from the norm, and there will be exceptions that prove the rule. The intellectual exercise is not to create draconian contrasts but to see meaningful discriminations, so that the characteristics of each tradition might emerge more clearly by the comparison. The problem with making comparisons out of context, and without due regard for the paradigms of premise, is that objects in the foreground are compared without adjusting for vastly different backgrounds. Meaningful insights reveal the relationship between the "foregrounded" object and the "backgrounded" context. Taking objects out of their cultural context, and comparing them with other objects from a different cultural context, is an exercise in tautology: the resulting comparison produces nothing of importance to one's understanding of either member of the comparison, for it is the relationship of object to context that really matters. Basic faults of ontological analysis may not be so obvious when one discusses cultural entities, because one is deluded by language into 1.
There is an important distinction between the inescapable tendency to use one's own experience as a reference, as a point of departure, and the epistemological error of regarding that point of reference as universal and absolute, for any inquiry, by any inquirer.
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thinking that abstract concepts are culturefree. To say that an apple is not an orange is not to say what an apple is; nor does it explain why one chose an "orange" and not, say, a triangle as a point of reference to indicate what an apple is not. Too many EastWest comparisons remind me of "fruit salad"—appetizing to the palate, but not very nourishing for the mind. The polar paradigms that I wish to examine fall into four groups:2 modal; conceptual; generic; and philosophical. (Earlier, in Chapter 5, we considered conceptual, generic, and cultural factors and valences, but here we wish to explore more fundamental constructs.) Modal paradigms highlight instrumentality: the effect of the tools on the product. Improved technology suggests a potential enhancement of possibilities and prospects, but what is not noticed are the effects of technology on what can be produced: one might speak of technological biases. These can be seen in such examples as the uniformity of type (leading to "stereotypes" and "reproductions") or the ephemerality of speech and the fixity of the letter. In other words, the instrument one uses will determine the style, the forms, the meaning of what is produced— either (as in primitive tools) because of technical limitations or (as in modern equipment) because of technological enhancements.3 Modal concerns remind us to look—selfreflectively—at the tools we use to describe reality, at the instruments we employ to transform reality. The primary and primeval tool, which describes, creates, and transforms reality, is language itself. 2.
I have no reason to believe that there are necessarily only four groups, but each of these classes seems to represent enough instances to warrant separate consideration.
3.
Anyone who has used a "word processor" has registered the temptation to spend time (and labor) "formatting" a text, just because it was easier to manipulate and to solve the problem of the physical appearance of a text, than to wrestle with the production of another thought or another (as yet unformatted) insight. The phenomenon is familiar to teachers of composition, who despair of students who are impressed with the physical perfection of a "wordprocessed" assignment, but who miss its intellectual poverty. Advertising is another instance where the "medium'' is erroneously taken for the "message"; yet, at a deeper level of analysis (as McLuhan maintained), the "medium" became the "message." One need only be reminded that the importance of "packaging" in modern marketing takes advantage of the easy confusion between the tangible symbolization of quality and the intangible substance of quality.
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Conceptual paradigms point to the "privileged" terms of reification in a discourse. In science, it is quantification; in mathematics, it is logic; in positivistic thought, it is demonstrability; in empiricism, it is experience and experiment; in economics, it is material welfare; in dance, it is movement; in art, seeing; in music, hearing. Languages are not equivalent in what they consider important: Western languages mark number and tense and some indicate gender; East Asian languages do neither. On the other hand, Chinese and Japanese have a more pronounced sense of what linguists call "aspect," which includes detailed attention to honorifics and social class. Chinese pronominals are more like generic nominals: they are determined by individual relationships rather than by neutral counters of first, second, or thirdperson degrees of directness. This is not to claim that there is no tense in Chinese, and no honorifics in Western languages, only that the emphases are different in different languages, and that these differences influence the terms of reification that will be privileged. In other words, how we conceive the world affects the way in which we perceive the world.4 A foreman of a paper mill will see a forest in a way different from a hiker; a general will have a different vision of peace from a priest. Generic paradigms focus on the forms of discourse, the shape of communication, expression, and creation. "Closed" and "open" forms began as descriptive terms in the history of art, but they have applicability to literature as well. Behind notions of generic preference are certain hidden assumptions with regard to form itself. Is there a bias in favor of form over formlessness? Does meaning privilege coherence and organization? Is it possible that one's preference for meaning, exemplified in a taste for coherence and organization and system, elicits forms of pseudomeaning (as in scien 4.
One might consider the disparity in English and German in the way that each denotes knowing. In English, the same word is used for knowing a subject, or a person, or a technique; but in German, to indicate one knows a subject, one uses wissen; to indicate one knows a person, one uses kennen; and to indicate one knows a technique, one uses können. Does this mean that there must be one kind of knowing with three subsets, as in English, or that there must be three distinct actions, in no way categorically identical (though perhaps generically similar), as in German?" One can offer an opposite example, with its own subtle significances: the distinction of "history" as chronicle and "story" as narrative in English, but their conflation in French histoire, German Geschichte, and Italian historia.
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tism, astrology, statistics) which give assertions the lineaments of meaning but none of the substance? Is understanding in these instances not, as one might assume, the acquisition of new meaning but merely the comforting reinforcement of the configurations of what one already knows? The triumph of analytical thinking, whether in the development of mechanical engineering, digital technology, cybernetics, or artificial intelligence, inspires a credence and an allegiance to categorical approaches—as if intellectual tidiness were a reflection not so much of convenience as of truth. Validity is falsely assumed to be proved by manipulatability or retrievability. We have previously quoted the memorable formulation by M. H. Abrams: "The endemic disease of analytical thinking is hardening of the categories." An examination of generic paradigms focuses on the categories before they harden into orthodoxy or doctrine or doxology or "truth." Philosophical paradigms point to worldviews, weltanschauungen, which determine the scope of one's exploratory vision and scope. In every assertion there is, explicitly or implicitly, consciously or selfconsciously, a deictic delimitation. Among the questions raised by philosophical inquiry are the delimitations of the study of wisdom itself: Does it, for example, include the metaphysical and the mystical? Is it dedicated to the discovery of universals or particulars? If universals, are these concrete or abstract? If particulars, are these phenomenal or noumenal? Modal Paradigms Let us turn to modal paradigms, the first of which concerns the instrument of writing. In the West, since the introduction of papyrus, writing has involved a sharp edged, beveled instrument which scratches the hard surface of the bark to make an impression. The lines it draws are incised with only limited latitude in the width of the stroke. In China,5 however, the instrument from time immemorial has been the brush, and the "tablet" on which writing takes place is not a smooth surface, like bark or papyrus, but textured 5.
In the course of this study, the statements made about China can also be variously applied to Korea and Japan, to the extent that these cultures followed Chinese models.
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and absorbent, like rice paper or silk cloth. The lines drawn by the brush are variable, and the action of the writing instrument is flowing and requires little pressure. Where the pen requires force and pressure to make an impression, the action of the brush is quite the opposite: the slightest contact with the surface leaves a mark. The modulations of the line are much more varied with a brush than with a pen, and the rhythms of a brushstroke are much more expansive: they admit of more stylization than is possible with a pen. In the West, the emphasis is on clarity of form, on penmanship; in China, the emphasis is on calligraphy. (There is no word for penmanship apart from the sense of calligraphy.) Indeed, for some, like Li Mengyang (1472–1529), "composing literature is like calligraphy."6 These technical details have farreaching manifestations and account for very different aesthetic considerations in China and in the West. Whereas, in the West, the arts of literature and painting are separate,7 in China, Korea, and Japan they are one. The adept at painting was equally—and naturally—adept at literature, because the same instrument, the brush, was being used. The intellectual difficulties of the systematic and meaningful study of the relationship between literature and the other arts, which has occasioned such controversy and such irresolution in the West, as well as avantgarde attempts to integrate seemingly disparate arts within one new art form (whether "concrete poetry" or "wordpictures"), would seem odd to the Chinese aesthetician, who is not surprised to see a poem inscribed in a painting; indeed, he would consider a painting unfinished without an inscription. The cautions of the Laokoön and the New Laokoön are either meaningless or superfluous in Chinese. To read Lessing's famous statement on "visible and invisible" beings and actions in the Chinese context is to experience a sense of disjunction. "Homer," Lessing wrote, "creates two classes of beings and of actions, visible and invisible. Painting is incompetent to represent this difference; with it everything is visible, and visible after one fashion only."8 6.
See Liu (1975a:91).
7.
Michelangelo and Blake, geniuses in both the written word and the visual arts, are more the exception than the rule.
8.
In Chapter 12 of the Laocoön, by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, translated by Robert Phillimore (London: Macmillan, 1874), p. 127.
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The characterization of painting as an art that makes everything visible—and, by inference, that it is not able to render anything that is invisible—is based on the presumption of Western painting, in which the surface is totally painted over (in a finished work): even empty spaces must be painted. Chinese painting, on the other hand, does not adhere to the principle of technical explicitness; it leaves blanks untouched by ink. Indeed, a Chinese painting can be said to be as much unpainted as painted. One is not so willing to accept Lessing's dictum that painting can only paint what is visible in the Chinese case, since a good deal of the aesthetics of Chinese art is to suggest what is not visible. There is a contrast in Western and Chinese approaches to representation: traditional Western requirements of painting require that even empty spaces be painted—that a canvas, even one depicting an unpopulated and unoccupied landscape, must be covered in paint or else it is considered unfinished. In Chinese painting, however, not only is much of the surface of the paper unpainted, but some of these blanks "depict" real objects—whether sky, or water, or clouds, or air. (Here one might observe the irony that, even when they share the same instrument, the brush, Chinese and Western painting differ radically in their aesthetics, a function, of course, of the preference in the West for oil and in China for ink.) To take more recent examples, such notions as "die wechselseitige Erhellung der Künste" (the mutual illumination of the arts) assume that the arts are distinct in the same way for all cultures and that they are so regarded. A "mutual illumination" of the arts, as well as an integration of the arts, in Wagner's Gesamtskunstwerk, in artbooks, or in concrete poems, will be seen as iconoclastic, innovative, and bold in the West, whereas in China they will be regarded as merely traditional and natural. An old saw of Chinese literature and art is the one about Wang Wei, the eighthcentury Tang poet, whose paintings have been lost—"there was poetry in his painting, and painting in his poetry." That observation typifies the symbiotic relationship in Chinese of what in the West are regarded as separate arts, those of poetry and those of painting. In China, it does not take theoretical clarifications or analytical syntheses to justify what has been appreciated for centuries as "the art of the brush," including poetry, painting, and calligraphy.
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Another modal difference between fundamental Western and Chinese poetics relates to the "instrument" of feeling and the "instrument" of thinking—the seat of the emotions and the faculty of reason, generally regarded in the West as conventionally separable between the organ of the heart and the entity known as the mind. We have already discussed (in Chapter 5) the different views on the separation of thinking and feeling in China and the West. The consequences of integrating what the mind and the heart do in Chinese—seeing the mind and the heart as one—affect the very definition of poetry, for the understanding of the very earliest dictum on Chinese poetry—shi yan zhi . But neither alternative really does justice to the original, for poetry in Chinese can express both thought unalloyed with emotion as well as emotion devoid of thought. Most commonly, however, and there is in this an implicit value judgment, good poetry expresses a fusion of both feeling and thinking. There is, in Chinese aesthetics as well as in Chinese ethical teaching, a distrust of both pure mentation and pure emotion. In Western terms, the heart is a check to the coldness of the mind; the mind is a check on the fervor of the heart. But even in this formulation there is a bias, for it assumes that two prior entities must somehow be brought together in a symbiosis, whereas in the Chinese view the situation is quite the opposite. The two faculties are not two, but one, and it is their separation, either in abstract or concrete terms, that violates the wholeness of things and creates distortions that disrupt the natural order.9 This is not quite Eliot's "dissociation of sensibilities," but it is cognate; for traditional Chinese see no meaningful bifurcation between "sense" and "sensibility." We need not pause to consider which view of things is correct, the 9.
Two passages in the Mencius, fairly close to each other, illustrate the latitude of the word xin. Book II A, Chapter 2, Verse 1, refers to the "unperturbed mind": .
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associated or the dissociated view of heartmind or mindheart; it may turn out that the two views are not contradictory.
10
Another disjunction is provided by John Ruskin's critique of true and false sentiment, developed, interestingly enough, by one who had both an eye for painting and an ear for poetry; Ruskin insists on a valorization of mind over heart. His hierarchy of poets may be worth reviewing at this juncture: We have three ranks: the man who perceives rightly, because he does not feel, and to whom the primrose is very accurately the primrose, because he does not love it. Then, secondly, the man who perceives wrongly, because he feels, and to whom the primrose is anything else than a primrose: a star, or a sun, or a fairy's shield, or a forsaken maiden. And then, lastly, there is the man who perceives rightly in spite of his feelings, and to whom the primrose is for ever nothing else than itself—a little flower apprehended in the very plain and leafy fact of it, whatever and how many soever the associations and passions may be, that crowd around it.11
There are some categorical exclusions in this passage that might be worth remarking before one passes over it. First, despite the seemingly objective character of the categorization, there is subjectivity in Ruskin's use of the primrose as the lodestone for judgment; second, he sees the metaphoric, symbolic, or allegorical tendency as essentially an outgrowth of feeling rather than of thought; third, there is consideration neither of the one who perceives wrongly, because he thinks, nor of the one who perceives rightly, because he feels.12 Then, in a memorable hierarchy, Ruskin characterizes those who feel nothing as being no poets at all; those who feel, but 10.
Recent developments in Western medicine have revived previously discarded notions of mindbody influences, although "holistic medicine" is still greeted with skepticism from the majority of doctors trained in Western medicine; see Daniel Goleman, "The Mind Over the Body," New York Times Magazine, 27 September 1987, p. 36ff. 11.
The Literary Criticism of John Ruskin, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Anchor Books, 1965), p. 66, the italics are mine.
12.
Ruskin is somewhat inconsistent: the second order of poets he accuses of perceiving wrongly because they feel; the first order of poets he praises for perceiving rightly in spite of their feelings. Yet elsewhere he characterizes the firstrate poet as among those "who feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly."
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who perceive wrongly, are poets of the second class; whereas those who perceive rightly, in spite of their feelings, are poets of the first class. The ranking of poets emerges out of Ruskin's seminal discussion of the notion of "pathetic fallacy," which he characterizes as "a falseness in all our impressions of external things," a morbidity in which life is attributed to the lifeless and feeling to the unfeeling. Literary critics since have tended to identify instances of pathetic fallacies with disdain, recalling Ruskin's own dictum on its use: "I believe, if we look well into the matter, that we shall find the greatest poets do not often admit this kind of falseness,—that it is only the second order of poets who much delight in it." A closer reading of Ruskin's essay in Modern Painters will, of course, show considerable ambivalence toward the pathetic fallacy on Ruskin's part: he cites a ''morbid" passage from Coleridge but claims to like it; yet the images in the passage he quotes from Pope's version of Homer "are not a pathetic fallacy at all." Ruskin reminds us "that the spirit of truth must guide us . . . even in our enjoyment of fallacy." These considerations are discriminating exemplifications of the history of taste and provide important insights into aesthetics. Certainly, most moderns would agree with Ruskin's censure of the dull tropes in Pope, as well as his almost guiltridden enjoyment of Coleridge's "morbid" images. Yet when we apply these concerns to one of the most famous lines in Chinese poetry, we find them curiously unavailing. Du Fu's "Spring Prospect" ( ) begins with the oftquoted lines:
Country ruined, mountains and rivers remain; City in spring, grass and trees are thick. Moved by the times, flowers spill tears; Hate being apart, birds startle the heart.13
The attribution of sorrow to flowers is an instance of what Ruskin would have called a "morbid" pathetic fallacy. Yet it is precisely 13.
I have taken certain liberties with ganshi in the fourth line, which could be rendered "moved time" or "when [we are] moved."
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what one encounters in one of the most admired lines in Chinese poetry. Implicit in the line is an assumption, which Ruskin would characterize as "false," that flowers are capable of shedding tears.15 One is left with a dilemma: either Ruskin is wrong in his characterization of meretricious rhetoric, or Du Fu must be demoted, at least in this instance, from the "first order of poets," for his lapse into the pathetically fallacious. But is this Manichaean dichotomy really necessary, or is there a "middle" possibility available? One need not discard the poetry to vindicate a critical insight, nor need one undermine the critical insight to maintain one's admiration of a cherished line. The underlying assumption in Ruskin is the superiority of the mental faculty over the emotional: truth is conceived of as strictly intellectual. Emotion can only distort the truth, or cloud the truth, or suppress the truth, but it cannot itself be an instrument for the discovery of truth. And if truth is to be preferred to passion, then, clearly, thinking must be superior to feeling. Yet we must acknowledge the existence of "false feelings" and "true feelings" even if we cannot entertain the converse, which yields either the contradiction or the redundancy of "false truths'' or "true truths." Du Fu comes from a tradition where such bifurcations and discriminations would have been, in any event, unfamiliar if not bizarre. Two adjustments are available to resolve the dilemma. First, if there is no division between heart and mind, and hence no hierarchy possible between the faculty of thought and the faculty of feeling, there can be no qualitative difference between an assertion of the mind and an assertion of the heart. (Both would be represented by the word zhi , which denotes both intention and conation.) Second, there is no real exclusivity in the human capacity for feeling: it does not take a rampant animism to entertain the prospect of sentience being variously attributed to all creation. There is a certain intellectual onanism in Ruskin's analysis of the pathetic fallacy: it assumes the prior existence of human emotions on their own 14.
Indeed, Ruskin adds a footnote to his initial essay on the "pathetic fallacy" and quotes lines almost identical to these, but from Tennyson's Maud: "There has fallen a splendid tear / From the passionflower at the gate." 15.
Interpretations suggesting that the tears can only be human, and that these tears have been shed by humans onto the flowers (as if the poet were "crying over flowers" instead of "spilt milk"), strike me as grotesque.
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terms and then suggests the impropriety of attributing those emotions to nonhuman objects. But Chinese, language and people, do not conceive of emotions in quite the same way. The terms for feeling may be themselves metaphors borrowed from the world at large, which has provided the vocabulary of feeling. We've mentioned the word for "sorrow, melancholy, sadness," chou , which combines the etymon for "mindheart" with the word for ''autumn." Our modern sense of sophistication should not blind us to the fact that emotional terms are conventional abstractions, the existence and identity of which are notoriously difficult to establish. (Consider the meaning of "love," "hate," and "envy," with which one is familiar, and which one can identify, yet be unable to define.) It may be that a sense of "autumn in the heart" is the most concrete, the most precise, and the most comprehensive definition of sorrow that there is. For the Chinese word chou encompasses the sense of the sadness of time passing, the lamentation for things dying, the dread of inhospitable winter, the intimation of one's own mortality—all easily recognizable as autumn feelings (in cultures and climes that do include autumn in their seasons). The "resonance" between human emotions and the world of nature informs the poetics of a number of traditional Chinese critics, most notably Wang Shizhen (1634–1711) and Wang Guowei (1877–1927).16 To attribute human emotion to inanimate objects of nature is, far from being fallacious, merely a restitution of the sources of feeling, a return of semantic capital to the resources of meaning. In Du Fu's poem, of course, it is all the more powerful because the contrast of human dishevelment with the steadfastness of nature is superseded by the confluence and congruence of change and stability in the word "tear." The sense of the poem is precisely that human culture has strayed too far from nature, which is why the one atrophies and the other abides. The debate among linguists over the existence or nonexistence of "counterfactuals" in Chinese is less interesting than a prospective examination of the prevalence or nonprevalence of the subjunctive and indicative moments in Chinese and Western poetry. For in this 16.
For Wang Shizhen, see Lynn, in DeBary (1975); for Wang Guowei, see Rickett (1977) and Tu (1970); for an exploration of these implicit themes of resonance throughout traditional Chinese poetry, see Sun (1982).
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perspective, one sees another instance of the significant inapplicability of certain Western distinctions to the Chinese case. The false assumption of earlier readers, equating the persona of the poet in the poem with the historical figure writing the poem, enshrined over a generation ago in William Wimsatt's article on "The Intentional Fallacy," is no longer so persistent in the West as it was before the advent of New Criticism. But if one no longer mistakenly equates the narrator with the historical poet, one can nevertheless posit an "implied author." Still, in most Chinese poems, the poet—despite the validities of the arguments against the ''intentional fallacy"—is the narratorpersona in the poem. The constant resort to an autobiographical inscription in Chinese poems, marking the moment of composition as well as the event which inspired the poem, an event which is indeed inscribed in the poem, remind us that sophisticated Western analyses dispelling the equation of the "I" in the poem with the poet seem either to be contradicted or beside the point in many Chinese lyrics. Scholars of Chinese poetry (whether Chinese or Western) are accustomed to referring to the historical Du Fu or Li Bai in their poems (though Li Bai uses personae more than Du Fu; Bai Juyi's use is even more pronounced). The notion of "art" is altogether more personal, less pretentious, in China than in the West. Poetry is not the calling of specially endowed individuals, but the accomplishment of any literatus. Of course, the productions of the Chinese literati, even when they conform to strict rules of prosody, are more often than not merely exercises which seldom attain to the level of art, nor would they attract the attention of anyone except personal friends and acquaintances. In traditional China, poetry was written not by generic "poets" but by wenren, lettered individuals. It would be expected of every wenren that he could and occasionally did write poetry. The subject matter of that poetry would naturally be the events and emotions of his own life. Except in rare instances, he would not be inclined to construct an elaborate mythical world of his own invention; his inclination would be to merely allude to such a world in his own very personal productions. If there were ambitions of a more comprehensive scope, there would be specific forms in which they would be accommodated, and these would be available only to those who were empowered to use them: comissioners and minis
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ters could write court memorials and remonstrances to the emperor; disgruntled officials could compose complaints privately shared, usually in allegorical guise. Private individuals could offer indirect criticisms, deploring the conditions of life, which implicitly reflect badly on those entrusted to govern, but these expressions were modest and personal communications. The notion of a Virgil or a Dante, writing the entire history of the culture in a work of literary imagination, would be difficult to conceive of in the Chinese instance. The closest counterpart to the "conscience of the race" would be the dynastic historians, beginning with Sima Qian and his Shiji. But these accounts never pretended to be original creations, however elegantly written, brilliantly conceived, or memorably narrated they might have been. These reminders are necessary when one considers the intentional fallacy. Students of Chinese literature are faced with a dilemma when confronted with the strictures of New Criticism, as articulated by William Wimsatt in his seminal essay: The meaning of a poem may certainly be a personal one, in the sense that a poem expresses a personality or state of soul rather than a physical object like an apple. But even a short lyric poem is dramatic, the response of a speaker (no matter how abstractly conceived) to a situation (no matter how universalized). We ought to impute the thoughts and attitudes of the poem immediately to the dramatic speaker, and if to the author at all, only by an act of biographical inference.17
These concerns, which now seem unexceptionable when applied to Western authors, with their tradition of the artist as the darling of the Muses, are awkward in the Chinese context, which sees no clear bifurcation between the man of letters and the literary artist. That context has less emphasis on artistic mimesis, poiesis, on literary creation as the figment of a poet's imagination than on one's autobiographical mood, one's authentic voice. Wimsatt's notion of drama implicit in every lyric conflicts with the aesthetics, indeed, the breeding, of the Chinese literatus, for whom selfdramatization of any kind would be unseemly if not repugnant. Furthermore, an exaggerated selfimportance would 17.
The Verbal Icon (New York: Noonday Press, 1954), p. 5.
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violate ancient Chinese teaching, whether Daoist or Confucian, which emphasized wisdom and valued selfeffacement as a virtue. Traditional Chinese lyrics were intensely personal forms of discourse: not infrequently, they were specific communications to, or invocations of, friends. Wimsatt's division of "public" and "private" is not so easy to assimilate in the Chinese case. His notion of "public" defines it as accessibility to a user of the language; he conceives of "private" as idiosyncrasy, that which is not available through the language but only through personal contact. In this sense, traditional Chinese poetry is both public and private. Chinese poetry is public, if one recalls that the readers were also the writers and that the audience and the author were not so categorically separate as they are today. There was, in China, greater homogeneity in the literati class than there has been among literate readers in the West since the Renaissance. In many instances, the Chinese poet wrote either for himself or for someone very much like himself, at least in terms of idiosyncratic background and knowledge. Yet the Chinese poet was also very private, but not in the sense of arcane and cabalistic allusiveness (as, say, in Blake or Christopher Smart or T. S. Eliot). His sense of privacy was in the area of discretion, not in the area of meaning: he assumed that his allusions would be understood, for he assumed he knew who his reader was; his allusions were not coy disguisements of meaning but subtle enhancements of its ineffability. Conceptual Paradigms The verse from Du Fu's "Spring Prospect" brings out another disjunction in EastWest comparison. Is the first line—"Country ruined, mountains and rivers remain"— metaphor or antimetaphor? There is a comparison here, but there is no "figure of speech in which a name or a descriptive term is transferred to an object to which it is not properly applicable."18 Yet, unmistakably, the line does embody a homology, even if implicit. Consider other contrasts where no implied metaphor is posited: "Human beings suffer, but life goes on" or "The world of man is everywhere in turmoil, yet Nature is serene.'' These contrasts, poignant as they 18.
Definition of "metaphor" in the Oxford Universal Dictionary (1955).
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may be, do not strike the reader as poetic: they do not engage one's emotions as directly as "Country ruined, mountains and rivers remain." For the conjunction of two opposite phenomena within the same line implies what the situation should be: that human affairs should be consonant with Nature. That there is a contrast, rather than a parallel, constitutes the entire moral force of the poem. There is also another sense: "mountains and rivers remain" suggests a haven against the chaos of human history, as well as a recrimination against it. But this line, which cannot be characterized as a metaphor, is a prime instance of what, in Chinese, is labeled bi , which, strictly speaking, means "comparison" but is customarily—and misleadingly—translated as ''metaphor." The complexities raised by this instance are not simply caused by inaccurate equivalents: they are occasioned by a fundamental difference in premise and paradigm. To compare human affairs with Nature in a willful act of imagination or fancy—that is, to deliberately impute to one object characteristics that do not properly belong to it—is to assume the autonomy of each object and the originality of the relationship inferred. But what if human affairs and Nature are conceived of as emanating from one and the same source? If the world is conceived of as one, comprising the human world and the rest of the world, then there can be no false attribution of human qualities to nonhuman objects, for what is human derives from Nature: the terms of human discourse, the vocabulary of human feeling, derive from Nature. We recall Wordsworth's verse: One impulse from a vernal wood Can teach you more of man, Of moral evil and of good, Than all the sages can.
But where, earlier, we might have taken this sentiment as romantic philosophy, perhaps as subjunctive metaphor, we can now accept it as etymological and epistemological fact. The other two concepts in the trivium of early Chinese rhetoric are even more problematic than bi. Fu has been explained
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as meaning "to inspire," "to begin," "to exalt," and has been characterized as an "associational'' mode (Liu 1975a:109–110). In any event, these terms do not correspond to Western tropes, or figures of speech: although bi subsumes within comparison both metaphor and simile, it is not restricted to them. The notions of fu, bi, and xing do not correspond neatly to any set of Western rhetorical tropes. Furthermore, they are traditionally lumped with certain poetical forms that derive from the Shijing: feng . The commentaries from the ancient text indicate how far these terms depart from the technical terms of Western rhetoric. Where Western tropes designate techniques of imagery, determined by their structural characteristics, Chinese notions of composition are organic and didactic; they are determined by their effect on behavior and their force for good. Take, for example, the testimony of the Zhouli as quoted in the Cihai: Feng expresses the development of virtue and nobility, the cultivation of the Dao; the exposition in fu sets out in detail the management and teaching of good and evil in our time; bi surveys the misrule in our time and, for those not daring to make direct recrimination, seeks expression in comparisons; xing looks at beauty today, despises fawning flattery, and celebrates virtuous acts and urges their emulation; ya is rectitude and speaks of those who are righteous in our time, so they can become a rule and guide for later generations; song's expressions are recitations of virtue in our time, to broadcast its beauty.
Several points deserve attention: first, these are not merely technical terms for literary composition, for they embody a moral bias and a moral value; second, they are not formal categories but are "affective" and conducive to good or evil; third, they represent implicitly a principle of moral aesthetics, of ethical splendor: That is beautiful which is good. Though the logic of exposition differs, the conclusions are Platonic. The use of these terms is further complicated when one subdivides the liuyi , the "six principles of propriety," into formal and functional categories: feng, ya, and song in the former, fu, bi, and xing in the latter. Feng has been approximated as "airs," a happy rendering, which captures both the folkloric and musical nature of these ballads; ya has been rather inelegantly rendered as "elegan
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tiae"; song can be fairly accurately translated as "encomia" or "hymns." These genres do not, by any means, provide a comprehensive division of ancient poetic forms. Nor do fu, bi, and xing exhaust all the ancient poetic functions. Indeed, the three terms need not even be mutually exclusive: an effective comparison, bi, can be descriptive and expository, as in fu; it may also inspire and exalt, as in xing. They are aspects, not categories, of poetry. In Western poetics, inspiration, comparison, and description are not immediately obvious as coterminous categories: the first is a state of mind, the second is a mental process, the third is a form of writing. Despite the various attempts to conceive of fu, bi, and xing as complementary categories in translation, they resist categorization: they are not distinct rhetorical entities, in the way that metaphor, simile, symbol, or allegory can be considered distinct entities. (A metaphor is distinct from a symbol; nor is a simile at the same time an allegory.) There are two kinds of disjunction between Chinese poetic terms and Western tropes: they do not coincide in meaning; and they exemplify different paradigms of analysis. It is not so much that the Chinese terms are analytically inadequate; they are designed for other purposes and premised on a less technical, more anecdotal, model of composition. Another disjunction between Western and Chinese concepts of language involves parts of speech. It is customary in classical Western grammar to teach parts of speech, tense, declension. But to take merely the customary division of subject divisions in Western languages, one finds normatively three single cases (first, second, third person) and three plural cases (first, second, third person). In English, for example, only one instance allows for the subject to be unstated: the imperative case in the second person (as in "Go home!"). In other words, the omission of the subject is a morphological indicator of case. In classical Chinese, however, where the omission of the subject is not only possible but customary, one can ask if the tripartite divisions in Western grammar hold. Is it possible that the unstated subject in the Chinese sentence might not be definitively a designation of first, second, or third person in all cases? It is clear that reticence in selfreference will often occasion the omission of the Ireference when "I" is the subject; but formal discourse would require the Ireference to be explicitly designated by a selfdeprecatory reference. We have already noted the I
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reference of a wife to a husband (qie
"little fish").
The question this plethora of Ireferences raises is whether they do in fact function as generic firstperson references. The subjectivity inherent in the generic "I" in Western languages, which assumes that the addressee knows who the first person is, does not govern these selfreferences. They behave much more like proper nouns and invoke a specific relationship much more concretely than firstperson subjects do in most languages. Indeed, one might question whether the very concept of "first person" is neutral or free of value bias. There are, of course, first, second, and thirdperson referents in Chinese, and there are singular and plural forms for subjects—yet the distinctions in Chinese are not equivalent to those in Western languages, where the categories of person, number, and tense are an integral part of the grammatical structures of the language (or, at least, they have been so perceived). Take, as an example, a common rendering of the word shuang (meaning "pairs" or "two") as in shuang yen in Chinese. The first instance is a morphological and structural distinction implicit in the language; the second seems an ad hoc designator, a restrictive modifier. In the series (a) eye, (b) eyes, (c) one eye, (d) two eyes, and (e) three eyes, Chinese can provide equivalents for all but one: (a) eye = yan; (c) one eye = i yan
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(
). There is no natural equivalent for (b) eyes. One cannot specify plurality in the abstract: one must designate a specific plurality (whether two or more).
In sum, one questions whether the basic terms with which one studies language are not themselves culturally bound. Are certain nonWestern languages, such as Chinese and Japanese, deficient because they do not have morphemic distinctions for number and tense? Or are Western languages excessive and arbitrary in imposing categories where, on occasion, none may be warranted? A simple illustration demonstrates the point succinctly: when one says "It is raining," no one questions the grammatical correctness of the sentence—there is a subject and a predicate. But, logically, one can ask what is the antecedent of the pronoun "it"—for every pronoun, we have been taught, must refer to a previous noun. The lack of such a noun in all but the most mythological contexts for this phrase does not deter anyone from using this locution and understanding it.20 There is a tendency to assume the universal validity of analytical terms of discourse and to question the validity of intuitive descriptors that do not yield easily to precise definition.21 Nowhere is this a greater problem than in EastWest comparison. It is not Liu Xie's fault for not writing (or thinking) like Aristotle! It may be unhelpful to Western students for traditional Chinese literati to ramble on without conceiving of the advantages of clearly articulating their arguments along logical lines. It is true that Chinese literary criticism—with its selfadmitted informality, its tendency to emanate from the biji tradition, which sees its insights as "liter 19.
Interestingly, Chinese offers two versions for (d): shuangyan , where liang is the indicator of the ordinal number. This phrase is not customarily applied to the eyes of humans when describing behavior; it may be used, however, by doctors, surgeons, and scientists when referring to eyes as objects for study, examination, or experiment. 20.
This field of ordinary language analysis has been brilliantly explored by Gilbert Ryle and J. L. Austin.
21.
Linguistics itself has begun to question both the universality and the precision of its terminology, its taxonomy of language characteristics: see David Crystal (1971:57–76).
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ary jottings" rather than as syncretic syntheses on theoretical subjects—lacks the breathtaking categorical rigor of an Aristotle or a Kant: there are no selfdeclared "summas" in the Chinese literary tradition, for it would be inconceivable folly, displaying an appalling lack of wisdom (to say nothing of bad form), for a Chinese literatus to present himself as the repository of all knowledge, even if he does approach omniscience in his erudition.22 It is not a matter merely of cultural style, but a reflection of fundamentally different attitudes toward knowing and knowledge, that the Chinese have traditionally admired those who know and profess they do not and that the West has been impressed with the achievements of speculative philosophy, whose knowledge evolves out of suasive certainties based on certain epistemological premises. Generic Paradigms Our discussion of disjunctions between Chinese and Western concepts of grammatical categories—whether person, number, or tense—affects the comparison of Western and Chinese literary genres. The triumvirate of classes of literature so familiar in the West today—lyric, narrative, and dramatic—may not serve every important or significant work in the West,23 but the division is normative and useful enough (especially in the United States) to have gained widespread currency. Yet if we look at the traditional analyses (to say nothing of the defenses) of these three classes of literature, we find them neatly corresponding to three "radicals of presentation" (in Frye's terminology): the first, the lyric, is the firstperson genre, where the poet is speaking to himself and—in Mill's telling insight—where he is overheard by the reader; the second, the narrative, involves a secondperson dynamic with a storyteller addressing a present audience; the third, the dramatic, is narration at one remove: there is an authornarrator and there is an audience, but the third parties, the actors, enact what the author 22.
For example, the most erudite of modern Chinese scholars, Ch'ien Chungshu, calls his fourvolume magnum opus "Guan Zhui Pian," which means, disarmingly, "PipeAwl Chapters." 23.
The triumvirate leaves out essays, autobiographies (except as narrative), diaries, proverbs and aphorisms, and the like.
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narrator wants to convey to the audience. The persuasiveness of this tripartite paradigm lies partly in the convenient correspondence between the dialectics of each genre and the conventional grammatical divisions with respect to first, second, and thirdperson discourse. But if, as I have suggested above, the divisions of the "threeperson'ed God" of grammatical personae are not sancrosanct, and far from universal, then these "radicals of presentation" are not likely to prove as convincing or as serviceable with literatures whose languages are not based on the trinitarian paradigm of genre. Chinese poetry does not fit easily or conclusively into the "lyric" paradigm of the West: the ballads of the Shijing share with the Western lyric its incantatory character; the Nine Songs, in particular, with their summons to the soul and their supplications to the gods and the spirits, bear a striking similarity to the tradition in the West that is hallowed by poems that begin with an invocation to the Muses. But neither the ballads in the Shijing nor the songs in the Songs of the South (the Chuci) are personal except in an allegorical way: there is nothing individualized or eccentric about these writings, as there is in the Western lyric. There is no specific biographical Beatrice addressed, no historical personage directly mentioned. This diffuseness in reference does not, of course, prevent personal meanings from being projected into the poem by countless generations of scholars and readers. I am making a distinction between the personal force of these poems, as experiences for the reader, and the individual expressiveness of the historical composer of these poems. The Shijing folk poems were formulaic compositions that articulated personal longing in communal terms; the Chuci poems, on the other hand, even when written by the historical Qu Yuan and reflecting personal recriminations and complaints, hypostatize subjective feeling into objective imagery that is accessible beyond the personal biography of the poet. The Li Sao may be the most personal poem in Chinese, yet even that intensely subjective work only approaches the "egotistical sublime" that one associates with the romantic lyric. On the other hand, the shi poems of the Tang poets are strikingly intimate expressions and intensely personal in their sense of privacy and in their allusiveness: autobiographical inscriptions reinforce the sense of each poem's rootedness in historical time and in a
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specific biographical life. Yet, reading these poems, one does not have the feeling one expects from reading a lyric: that one is "overhearing" a first person speaking to himself. The poet is addressing another poet, not unlike himself, often identified in the inscription; as readers, we are assuming the role of a contemporary sharing the experience, the contextual reality that gave birth to the poem. Far from overhearing the poem, the reader is asked to engage in the dialectic of the poem, to supply the allusion, to recall the circumstances enshrined in the poem, to respond with his reactions (often in the form of an "answering" poem), and his recollections, of the event, which now subsumes the poem before us. The Chinese lyric differs from the Western: it does not employ a persona of an isolated "I'' addressing the universe. More often than not it is addressed hermetically to a second person, sometimes implied, sometimes specified, who is the recipient of the poem and whose appreciation and response the poem elicits. There is, in the Chinese lyric, more the dialectics of a secondperson exchange than a firstperson soliloquy. The division of author and reader, of poet and reader of poetry, is not as endemic to traditional Chinese literature as it has become in the study of literature in the West. There is an aspect of dialogue in traditional Chinese poetry which is overlooked if "lyric" is conceived of as a poem to be overheard. The consequences of this distinction are by no means negligible: in the lyric to be overheard, certain confessional tendencies will be forgiven that would embarrass in direct address; conversely, the Chinese poem will seem to Western readers insufficiently daring, too occasional in its rhetoric, too ordinary and conventional in its discourse. Yet Chinese poetry is, in the best if somewhat confounding sense of the word, occasional: it captures the moment, professes no great intentions beyond the moment, aspires to no universality of truth or insight beyond the desire to capture the "thisness," the immanence—what might be called, borrowing Buddhist terminology, "the Tathagata of the moment." To put it no doubt simplistically, Chinese poetry tends toward the incidental and the commonplace whereas Western poetry aspires to the transcendental and the extraordinary. For most Western philosophers, universals are supernal; for most Chinese, universals are subordinate and sublunary. It is not a question of
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which is the "greater" or "lesser," but rather a matter of the adjustments one must make shifting from one ground of reference to another. Of course, the generic distinctions that are serviceable with one tradition of literature should not be expected to be equally applicable to other traditions. Such forms as the bianwen, combining dramatic dialogue, narrative, and embedded lyrics, defy easy categorization.25 Western theater is heavily involved in religious ritual, with a "tragic sense of life," embodying a sense of unity, whether in the form of the "three unities," as in the Neoclassic period, or in the Wagnerian notion of Gesamtskunstwerk. The main thread of Western dramatic tradition centers on the plot or mythos of the action: there is a strong sense of the implied audience being invited to identify with the action, in order to achieve a catharsis in the "virtual" action (defined by Susanne Langer as being both lifelike yet clearly not life). Traditional Chinese theater is a theater of spectacle that does not court the projected sympathies of the audience by inviting their identification with the tragic character: it is theater that is furthest removed from reality, distanced from everyday life, where fancy rather than imagination is developed, and spectacle rather than "a purgation" through "pity and terror'' is dominant. Instead of unity, Chinese theater provides variety and heterogeneity: acting, singing, dancing, acrobatics, and costume. The form of theater introduced by the Mongols in the Yuan dynasty is zaju, literally, "miscellaneous theater." There is more carnival than catharsis in Chinese theater. Fairminded crosscultural comparisons cannot afford to prejudge Chinese theater as incoherent or the Western theater as 24.
The notion of "greatness" embodies its own evaluative bias and betrays what I have called a "bias of scale," a notion I developed in a paper (unpublished) delivered before the American Comparative Literature Association at Ann Arbor, Michigan, on 22 March 1986 entitled "Changing the Canon: The Challenge of NonWestern Literatures." 25.
The Japanese renga form might be said to blend lyricism and episodic narration in a sequenced poem that combines both poetic and fictional interest; the tradition of Japanese poetic diaries also integrates the narrative of travel with lyrical evocation.
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monolithic: it is a matter of two different strategies involved. One is to engage, the other is to impress. The "alienation effect" that Brecht so admired in Chinese theater eschews any attempt at imitating life or deluding the audience into imagining that what is being seen on the stage is life: quite the contrary, the action in Chinese theater is larger than life. Elsewhere, I have indicated the generic disjunctions between Western and Chinese paradigms for fiction and narrative.26 Western fiction developed from episodic beginnings and aspired to an ideal of organic unity (particularly, and somewhat speciously, adduced in the late novels of Henry James);27 Chinese fiction retained the structure of oral narration, even imitating it in order to seek umbrage in its less than noble vernacular origins. This model presents narration as a linear sequence, like a linked chain, rather than as a threedimensional whole, with a beginning, middle, and end. Philosophical Paradigms In the West, the dominance of corresponding abstract/concrete pairs, whether ideal/real, or abstract/concrete, or noumenon/phenomenon, reflects a conception of validation posited on separable categorical worlds, whose very plausibility depends on their being autonomous realms of existence. Conflations of the ideal with the real, the abstract with the concrete, the noumenal with the phenomenal, are difficult, if not impossible, to grasp. In any event, they would erode the clarity, hence the usefulness, of these concepts if their very conceptual purity is sullied. 26.
See "A Taste for Apricots: Approaches to Chinese Fiction," in Chinese Narrative: Critical and Theoretical Essays, ed. Andrew Plaks (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977), pp. 53–69. 27.
The attribution of artistic perfection to James's late fiction, particularly The Ambassadors—where perfection is defined as everything in its proper place, nothing missing and nothing extraneous—is no longer tenable: cf. Robert E. Young, "An Error in The Ambassadors," American Literature 22 (1950–1951):245–253; Leon Edel, "A Further Note on 'An Error in The Ambassadors,'" American Literature 23 (1951–1952):128–130; Robert E. Young, "A Final Note on The Ambassadors," American Literature 23 (1951–1952):487–490.
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Furthermore, the logic of validation, and of epistemology, stresses the persuasiveness of correspondence as a factor in truth functions. Validity is easier to establish when there is a correspondence than when there is not, although no prior proof has been given as to the role of correspondence as a warrant of validity. It may be that correspondence is a heuristic, rather than a logical factor—that is, it inspires the human mind with confidence because it is easier to understand (because it reinforces prior knowledge) than because it is inherently valid. Departures from correspondence schemes are viewed with suspicion—are seen as deviations, rather than as data in their own right. The character of knowledge gained by positing a correspondence between an otherworldly and a thisworldly realm is powerfully familiar, of course, with the Platonic vision of the cosmos, where the immutable realm of Ideas exists concurrently with the mutable realm of diurnal reality. This notion of separateness of the permanent and the impermanent; of the universal and the particular, the a priori and the a posteriori, the perdurable and the ephemeral, pervades much of Western philosophy and poetics. These divisions pose serious problems in the translation of the very first line of the Dao De Jing: "Dao ke dao fei chang dao; ming ke ming fei chang ming."
The word chang has the sense both of "that which happens often," "that which always happens," and hence that which is repeated and ephemeral, and the sense of "that which persists, that which lasts." To translate this phrase into English requires an unfortunate and impossible choice. One must render it to emphasize either the abstract or the concrete dimension; in short, one must see it either as Platonic, hence stressing the reality (and importance) of things that are permanent, or as Buddhist, hence stressing the reality (and importance) of things that are impermanent. Here are a few sample translations: The Tao (Way) that can be told of is not the eternal Tao; The name that can be named is not the eternal name. [Chan, p. 139]
Page 264 The Tao that may be called Tao is not the invariable Tao; The names that can be named are not invariable names. [Fung Yulan, p. 178] The Way that can be told of is not an Unvarying Way; The names that can be named are not unvarying names. [Waley, p. 141] The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging name. [Legge, p. 48]
The translations are forced into a systematically distorting choice—for the underlying premise of Chinese philosophy, both Daoist and Confucian, is an epistemology that verifies not by correspondence but by a sense of what might be called "resonant immanence." Something is considered universally true because it is commonplace; an assertion is valid precisely because a trivial anecdote can be offered, not by way of illustration or analogy, but by way of exemplification. The hold of the Lunyu on the Chinese has been precisely the accessibility of its exempla, the very concreteness of its discourse, the immediacy of its validation. Compared to the tradition of speculative philosophers in the West, Confucius would be considered very ordinary; but lest one falls into either the pit of cultural supererogation or that of cultural reductionism,28 one is reminded that Confucius explicitly refused to speculate about things he admitted knowing nothing about. Whether this position is regarded as scientific caution, philosophical scrupulousness, or lack of intellectual daring, a failure of imagination, will depend on how one values the inventions and achievements of speculative philosophy, from Plato to Kant to Hegel to Nietzsche to Husserl to Heidegger. If Confucius created no elaborate and impressive system, still he cannot be faulted for having fallen into the gross error of imposing chimerical constructs on intelligent disciples. It is the genius of ancient Chinese philosophy, Confucian and Daoist, as well as of 28.
The first judges the superiority of one's own culture by assuming one's own cultural premises as universal; the second, flinching from invidious comparisons, posits the equal value and eminence of all cultures and rationalizes the virtues of each.
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later philosophers, including the NeoConfucians, to see the abstract in the concrete, to develop theory in practice, to view the eternal in the diurnal, to regard noumena and phenomena as inseparable. From the Chinese point of view, the first line of the Dao De Jing should read in English as follows: The Tao (Way) that can be told of is not the commonplace and eternal Tao. The notion of "resonant immanence" can be seen in a number of traditional Chinese texts, such as the Hanshi waijuan, the Zhuangzi, the Wenxin diaolong. The suasions of Chinese philosophy do not develop out of abstract reason, or by a logic of correspondences, but by an appeal to the experiential corroboration of the reader. Recall the following text from the Mencius: Therefore, what is relished in the mouth is the same in everybody; the sounds perceived by the ear are heard alike by everybody; the colors of the eye are alike, beautiful to all. When one reaches the mind, is it alone without agreement on such things as "principle" or "righteousness"? The sages arrive at earlier what my mind already confirms, and therefore "principle" and "righteousness" gratify my mind, just as the meats of the table gratify my mouth. [SPPY 11:8b]
There is more than analogy here, more than correspondence: the suasion depends not on the recognition of the "facts" of tasting, hearing, or seeing for anyone who has a mouth, or ears, or eyes. Note how the citation skips neatly over the deviations of apperception in tasting, hearing, or seeing (De gustibus non est disputandem; "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder"); it seems that verification in the mind of the reader is sought for "principle" and "righteousness," in terms as natural (hence as real) as tasting, hearing, and seeing. The argument is: If you can taste, hear, and see, then you must acknowledge the reality of ''principle" and "righteousness." The reality of these experiences, their immanence in our experience, compels us to acknowledge the reality of the abstractions proposed: there is no "proof" beyond the heightening of experience, for if we can, each of us, experience "the meats of the table" gratifying our mouths, we cannot then deny the existence of "principle" and "righteousness." The appeal in this discourse is
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to the immediacy of our own experience, not to an abstract principle beyond our own experience. The order of proof is fascinating: "The sages arrive at earlier what my mind already confirms." The tendency in some Chinese texts to derive mysteries from actual experience may be contrasted with the Platonic practice of imagining an abstract realm that corresponds to concrete experience, or of Aristotle analyzing concrete particulars to discover abstract universals. For a number of significant Chinese philosophers, the division of the abstract and the concrete is untenable: truths derive from the actuality of experience, not in spite of it. Take, for example, the following excerpt from the Liezi, which we have already considered in another connection. Here it may illustrate the Chinese tendency to arrive at abstractions through concrete imagery: Hence there are the begotten and the Begetter of the begotten, shapes and the Shaper of shapes, sounds and the Sounder of sounds, colours and the Colourer of colours, flavours and the Flavourer of flavours. What begetting begets dies, but the Begetter of the Begotten never ends. What shaping shapes is real, but the Shaper of shapes has never existed. What sounding sounds is heard, but the Sounder of sounds has never issued forth. What colouring colours is visible, but the Colourer of colours never appears. What flavouring flavours is tasted, but the Flavourer of flavours is never disclosed. All are the offices of That Which Does Nothing. [SPPY 7:5a–5b; Graham, p. 20]
There is a resolute insistence that diurnal experience, actuality, is the only reality, and there is an inherent skepticism of that which can be abstracted as never existing. Ancient Chinese philosophical texts, whether Confucian or Daoist, share with Aristotelians, empiricists, and logical positivists the notion that no truth is to be credited that is not grounded on actual experience. Where Chinese philosophy departs from Western notions, however, is in the tendency of ancient Chinese discourse to require an assertion to be felt in human terms, not merely abstractly and intellectually recognized. An example from Liu Xie's Wenxin diaolong will illustrate the point: Natural excellence may be compared to the splendors of flowers in the woods; their vivid beauty is like the silkdyed vermilion and green. Silks
Page 267 dyed vermilion and green are deep, rich, and vibrant; the blossoms and the sundrenched trees blaze forth in glory. Brilliant writing radiates in the garden of literature in much the same way. [WHTLC, p. 1]
It would be a serious misreading of this text to see Liu Xie as merely intending a metaphor between "the blossoms of nature" and the "flowers of literature," though the translation does easily accommodate such an interpretation. The aptness of the comparison does not lie in a correspondence between the characteristics in nature and in literature: the force lies in the similarity of experience in one's reaction, on the one hand, to nature and, on the other, to literature. One accepts the validity of the comparison, not by seeing it as a metaphor, equating subjunctively two disparate entities, but only by identifying indicatively the response to nature and to literature as one and the same. The homology borders on identity: "Brilliant writing radiates in the garden of literature in much the same way." One might posit, by way of contrast, a poetics of correspondence (which one finds in Plato) alongside a poetics of resonance (which might be found in, among others, Wang Shizhen , 1634–1711). In the first case, poetry establishes a truth through the sometimes allegorical, sometimes symbolic, sometimes metaphoric, description of concrete details: the experience described and preserved in the poem always points to something else—whether moral truth, or aesthetic beauty, or romantic sentiment. The Western reader of Chinese poetry often searches in vain for the "point," especially if he is reading in translation, because the poem is not mimesis in either the Platonic or the Aristotelian sense—that is, it is not an imitation of ideal reality twice removed, nor is it the creation of the imagination. It is both the recording and the reenactment of an indicative moment, its realization in words. For Chinese philosophers, truths are always contingent: one's knowledge is always compromised. There is little or no desire to extrapolate human truths beyond human experiences, even if the cosmic experiences are explained in terms of familiar human realities. We might posit on the one hand the truth of life and, on the other hand, the Dao of existence, and we might see a model of mimesis contrasted with a model of immanence. In the first instance, the model of mimesis, the unknown is conceived of as corre
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sponding to the known; it is real and valid the more that correspondence can be established and reiterated. In the second instance, the model of immanence, the only reality is whatever is, at the moment, now, thus. In the first instance, the Truth is adducible, discoverable, and expressible, if elusive; in the second instance, the Dao is everpresent, its existence undeniable, but it cannot be deduced, its secret cannot be discovered, and its meaning cannot be articulated. The Truth is replicable, accessible, and powerful: "Know the Truth and it will set you free." But the Dao is inimitable and unreproducible: "The Dao that can be said is not the commonplace and eternal Dao." Conclusions Our survey of polar paradigms has, if we have succeeded, made no invidious comparisons. The purpose in exploring these polarities has been to extend the basis for discussion, not from one vantage point or another, but from both. Our "horizon of expectations" must include more than one perspective. The result will not be, as some indolent intellects too readily assume, a relativity of values but a more rigorous, indeed a more open, recognition of values with due acknowledgment of tacit premises. Each set of premises, what Stephen Pepper calls "world hypotheses," highlights another aspect of reality. As heirs to the traditions in both East and West, we are the beneficiaries of a multiple perspective, but along with the panoptic perspective is the challenge to check our own myopia. The bigot with perfect eyesight should not be preferred to the blind man with perfect vision. The virtues and the limitations of both traditions should become more apparent in any comparison. Our task is not to disown our own heritage but rather, in comparing it with another heritage, to truly discover it, to see it in relief against the background of a different context. Too often what is accepted as universal is only that which is customary and commonplace in one's own provincial realm. But commonplaces are not the same everywhere, and what is common to one may be uncommon to another. We can continue to pursue the mysteries; we may even call our speculations the truth. What we discover may, in fact, be true with the facts on which we have based our theories. But in the construction of any
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lasting theory, in the development of any durable understanding, analysis and intuition must proceed as one: the paradigms of mimesis must be alloyed with the paradigms of resonance. The study of comparative literature relating to East and West solves a problem in heuristic epistemology. If physicists and journalists now routinely acknowledge that the objectivity so vaunted by eighteenthcentury rationalists and nineteenthcentury logical positivists is no longer possible, that all discourse is influenced by the speaker and distorted by the receiver, that all knowledge reflects as much on the knower as on what is known, then how can one achieve the dispassionate and disinterested state required of any disciplined pursuit of knowledge? The answer is, certainly from the perspective of the human sciences, that a pluralistic perspective must be adopted. We can become objective only to the extent that we can recognize that we are subjective, and measure meaningfully the degree to which each of us is subjective. And we can begin to transcend this subjectivity only as we adopt the subjective vision of the other as our own. Our objectivity then becomes not a denial of our individual point of view but an understanding of many points of view. By an act of analytical intuition, we must adopt a synoptic and a panoptic perspective. We must see ourselves as we are and, by viewing and understanding the other, also see ourselves as we are not.
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Epilogue: Self As Other in Translation ". . . in short, he almost reasoned me out of my own country . . ." —Oliver Goldsmith, The Citizen of the World, Letter 33
There is a volume of Chinese stories published in English translation by the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing with the title Stories from the Thirties.1 The implicit assumption of the Englishspeaking reader is that the volume contains the stories from an eminent period in American literature, the 1930s, which represent the high water mark of such now worldfamous American writers as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and John Dos Passos. But the Englishspeaking reader will be disappointed, or at least disconcerted, to discover that this volume includes such Chinese writers as Ye Shengtao, Zhang Tianyi, and Luo Shu.2 The "thirties," from the international perspective, is perhaps more prominent in literary circles as a U.S. phenomenon: certainly one cannot think of as coherent a group of English or French or Russian writers who are designated as "writers of the thirties." The 1890s have a particular significance for English and Spanish literature that they do not have for other countries; in China, wan Qing or "Late Qing" might be the more natural designation, although this would include works through the second half of the nineteenth cen This chapter is based on a presentation at the University of Paris, Sorbonne, in August 1985, at the 11th Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association. 1.
Stories from the Thirties, vol. I (Beijing: Panda Books, 1982).
2.
The fact that, out of twentyfour stories included, some eight are not even dated from the 1930s, but from the 1920s, only indicates how loosely the term "thirties" is being used.
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tury as well as those leading up to 1911, with the downfall of the Qing dynasty and the end of two thousand years of imperial rule. The point of this example is not to point out an obvious flaw in translation: indeed, the translation from the Chinese to the English is impeccable. What the disparity points out is that the context of meaning has shifted when changing from one language to another, even if the words themselves have not.3 My Chinese colleagues were indifferent to my concerns: from their perspective, a volume of short stories for sale in China, even if it is in English, would suggest their own (Chinese) writers more readily than the American writers of the thirties. I agreed—provided the Chinese publishers of this English version of Chinese stories had no wish to sell their wares to an Englishreading audience outside China. But as I was asked precisely to place the title with an American publisher, my mild remonstration, involving a punctilious point of semantics, was by no means irrelevant. What this anecdote underlines is the importance of the implicit assumptions made in an "I" or "we" selfreference. To put it most simply, the "I's" or "we's" in any language presume a selfreference to those who are native or fluent in that language. That very presumption posits (even as it precludes the insider's awareness of) the hermetic nature, the exclusive noncommunicativeness, of language for the outsider. The furor among semanticists of the women's rights movement stems from precisely the presumed selfreference of the "I'' and "we" to be male. That it was "innocent" makes it, of course, all the more galling. This chapter explores what may be called a schizophrenics of reading, where "self" and "other" coexist in responding to the text, where the "deictic" marker of the here and now is decisively compromised, creatively "ambiguated," in a dialectical tension of meaning and mismeaning (as opposed to "misunderstanding"). It explores the extent to which languages are deictically exclusive, eliminating from consideration readers, audiences, works in all 3.
Note that titles such as "Stories from the Fifties," or "Stories from the Sixties," would not create the same "static" in translation: indeed there were Chinese stories written in the 1950s and 1960s as there were American. The chronological designation for both is equally neutral, with perhaps a tincture of difference caused by historical events—although the decade of the 1960s in China and the United States had striking parallels!
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other languages. And it investigates a deictically dialectic reading of a work written in a deictically exclusive medium. We begin with L. H. Gray's statement, made over fifty years ago, that "pronouns differ from nouns in that they are essentially deictic" (1939:173). Pronouns presume the I and weidentity as implicitly shared between author, work, and text: indeed, so far as the language is concerned, no other here and now exists. As a parable of readerresponse analysis for translation, let us consider that most cosmopolitan and yet most provincial collection of pseudoletters, Oliver Goldsmith's The Citizen of the World, originally published as "Chinese Letters" in a series that began in The Public Ledger on 24 January 1760. The 123 letters may be divided according to author: 107 were written by "Lien Chi Altangi," "a Chinese Philosopher Residing in London"; 4 by his most frequent interlocuter, Fum Hoam, "first president of the Ceremonial Academy at Pekin in China''; 8 from Lien Chi Altangi's son, Hingpo, "a slave in Persia"; and 4 are occupied with preface, introduction, and conclusion. The Citizen of the World was intended for a cosmopolitan London audience of the 1760s who were entertained by such precursors as Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes (1721), Lord Lyttelton's inferior imitation, Persian Letters (1735), and Marquis d'Argens' Lettres chinoises (1739). Perhaps the source and inspiration for all these works was L'Espion Turc, a collection of lectures which first appeared in France in 1686 and was then translated and published in eight volumes from 1687 to 1693. Describing the activities of a Turk living in France, L'Espion Turc was written by an Italian exile in Paris by the name of Giovanni Paolo Marana. The root source of the doubling and tripling of perspectives, like mirror images within mirror images, provides the underpinnings for the success of the genre, for it manages to add freshness by "defamiliarizing" the ordinary and making the exotic familiar. 4.
Not all languages are all deictically exclusive: Japanese, in particular, consciously incorporated Chinese elements early in its development, as well as Western terms in its modern phase. It also has the ability to sustain a tension between different—even opposing—modes of discourse. For a fascinating exploration of double perspectives within the same composite language, see Sumie Jones, "Language in Crisis: Ogyu Sorai's Philological Thought and Hiraga Gennai's Creative Practice" (Miner 1985:209–256).
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This genre is often referred to as pseudoletters. What has not been adequately noticed is that Goldsmith has created "pseudoreaders"—precursors, and more explicit versions of, Wolfgang Iser's "implied readers." Who are the pseudoreaders in The Citizen of the World? There is, first of all, "Fum Hoam," the protypical Confucian official. (Might his name be Goldsmith's version of the Cantonese pronunciation of "from home''?) Then there is Hingpo, Lien Chi Altangi's son, whose romantic escapades in Persia form the principal "oriental tale" in the sequence of letters; there is also an unnamed merchant in Amsterdam; finally, there is Lien Chi Altangi himself, the author of most of the letters, who is on the receiving end of twelve letters, four from Fum Hoam, eight from his son. By this manipulation of pseudoreaders, Goldsmith is attempting to stretch the sensibilities of his actual readers, the London cognoscenti who affect cosmopolitanism. Goldsmith manages to ingratiate himself with the actual reader, even as he won over contemporary readers (including the stern and censorious Dr. Johnson), by implying the most pleasing selfimage for the reader. Wayne Booth is one of the few to comment on this. Of the many appeals (in both senses of the word: supplication and pleasure), Booth lists as foremost the "appeals to the reader's selfesteem": As citizens of London, I pick up the Public Ledger and I find myself congratulated for being: (a) An Englishman—that is, citizen of a nation that on the whole is the most generous, most enlightened, the most advanced, best governed, in a word the most "polite" of all; (b) A cosmopolitan—that is, like the author I am a citizen of the world. Though patriotic, I am too sophisticated to talk without irony of my patriotism, and I really take all mankind into my tolerant, amused vision; (c) A penetrating critic of the folly and greed that surround me, even here in England. I am the kind of person who can savor both the comic misreadings committed by Lien Chi Altangi and the comedy of British idiosyncrasy viewed in a universal light. [Booth 1976:S90]
Indeed, the psychology of reading does involve a reinforcement of the reader's selfesteem, but the three elements Booth identifies can be just as easily conflated: the reader who is "a citizen of London," who enjoyed the "Chinese letters" which satirized folly and
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greed in The Public Ledger, is indeed "a citizen of the world." Of course, the pleasure consistently afforded this reader undermines the verisimilitude of the pseudoletters, as many critics have pointed out.5 Indeed, it is remarkable that the achievement of The Citizen of the World, despite the fact that three different persona compose the pseudoletters, and four different persona receive them, stems from the brilliance with which the author has created the persona of "Goldsmith," who is—in a sense—an implied rather than explicit pseudoauthor of the "Chinese Letters."6 Yet Goldsmith's accommodation of the reader distracts from certain conceptual experiments which are instructive, even if, ultimately, they were not fully developed. In Letter 16, Lien Chi Altangi cites "a Christian doctor" who quotes all manner of pseudodoxia about other peoples: "It was not impossible," says the Christian doctor, "for a whole nation to have but one eye, in the middle of the forehead" (which he finds in Ethiopia). He describes the people of India, "who have but one leg and one eye, and yet are extremely active, run with great swiftness, and live by hunting.'' How one can run on one leg, he never reveals or explains. "When the Ptolemies reigned in Egypt," the doctor continues, "those men with dog's heads taught grammar and music." "Did ever the disciples of Fohi broach anything more ridiculous?" Altangi concludes. The wry recitation of preposterous but familiar mythology, reported ironically and skeptically to the Lien Chi Altangi persona, doubles and triples the ironic texture of the passage: the fanciful claims are themselves amusing, but purportedly seen through the eyes of a Chinese who is equally bemused, making the actual reader share, for a moment at least, the foreign perspective of the Chinese 5.
"In general, the oriental decorations of the book are quite external" (Conant 1908:198); "Goldsmith is sometimes inconsistent in using the device of the persona when the Chinese Philosopher becomes more English than Chinese" (Patrick 1971:91). 6.
"Each virtue binds us further to 'Goldsmith' each time it is exemplified. And each new exemplification reinforces our conviction about the chief virtue of all: imaginative richness. . . . Once a strong literary character like that of 'Goldsmith' has been established, even his way of being dull is interesting: it adds to our knowledge of his total character" (Booth, pp. S95– S96). "Because of Goldsmith's style, amiable readers find their amiable author interesting" (Dai 1979:192).
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persona. This agreement—of the familiar self with a radically disOriented other, is crucially different from the many instances where Goldsmith forgets the persona and, as it were, drops his mask.7 Another technique—doubled perspective—involves a mirror within a dream, in Letter 46, on "the LookingGlass of Lao." Here a magic mirror reveals the true character of the women who gaze upon it. The irony of the contrast between superficial and authentic beauty is made clear in the last "reflection" recorded, where the most unblemished image renders a woman who "had been deaf, dumb, and a fool from the cradle!" The woman who is not flattered by the truthtelling image in the mirror is "resolved, not to mend her faults, but to write a criticism on the mental reflector.'' Letter 76, written by Hingpo to his father, presents an allegory on "the Region of Beauty" versus "the Valley of the Graces." These parables are Goldsmith's way of skillfully distracting the reader's attention from surmising that he had never been in the countries in which his fiction is set (a technique whose lesson has not been lost on many travel writers since). In most of the letters from son to father, there is little if any description of Persia, which one might expect: the romance of the son with Zelis, and the circumstances of his captivity, divert the reader's attention. Here the charming distraction is a fable on the monotony of Beauty and the subtle variety of Grace. The relevance of the tale is cleverly established at the outset with Hingpo's description of Zelis, clearly a creature of grace rather than beauty: "Nature has not granted her all the boasted Circassian regularity of feature, and yet she greatly exceeds the fairest of the country in the art of seizing the affections." The aptness to Hingpo is established generically rather than individually, since we know very little of his character, though we are informed about his circumstances. These speculations on the techniques and limitations of multiple perspective in Goldsmith provide the framework for a dialectic consideration of the deictics of translation. Several conflicting factors are at play: the reader must find the text familiar and accessible, even if the reality (the text to be translated) is not; the reflection on the reader's reality from the perspective of the persona in the text 7.
"Every now and then [Goldsmith] remembers to hold the mask before his face and to drop a sudden remark in character, and the result is a humorous incongruity" (Conant, p. 191).
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will, in most cases, make the work more interesting ("even his way of being dull is interesting"); and the translator must establish, even across different persona developed in a work, a sense of relatedness to the targetlanguage reader. The instance of Goldsmith's Citizen of the World is a test case: language cannot supersede itself; it cannot appeal beyond itself to sensibilities accessible only through another language. The relevant point is not that Goldsmith failed to imitate a different and often opposite perspective faithfully, or that he succeeded in attracting or appealing to a substantial, and discriminating, audience. It is rather that language will always fail to address effectively those outside itself: each language, to a greater or lesser degree, is hermetically sealed. These considerations of Goldsmith's compromised attempts at multiple perspective—of the deictic proclivities of language, acting more like pronouns than nouns— have a special relevance to translation and the schizophrenics of reading. The ability to see the self as other and the other as self may be construed as nothing more than the usual imaginative projection that takes place with any vicarious experience, an experience that is already familiar in the reading of fiction. But the deictic hermeticism of language—its exclusivity, its xenophobia—would suggest that this imaginative projection through translation is of a different order and of a complexity that exceeds mere vicarious experience. There is an important difference: in the one instance, the identity of the self is reinforced and extended; in the other, the self is estranged, seen in alterité, defamiliarized. For reading translations is no longer the preoccupation of a "targeted" audience, ignorant of the original or of the experiences described. The world today is more pluralistic than in the eighteenth century. Rather than the preBabel ideal of one comprehensible language for all, we are approaching a kind of polyglossia in which we recognize other languages, other ways of thinking about the world. With the increasing role of "exiles" and "exilic" literature in each culture, the Lien Chi Altangis of this century are no longer implausible fictional creations, but "naturalized citizens.''8 8.
It is perhaps peculiarly American that the process of "naturalization," i.e., making natural, should be a conscious and deliberate—not to say highly unnatural—process. By now, of course, the literature on exiles—involving such
(footnote continued on next page)
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Lien Chi Altangi was a fictional creation; his reallife counterpart would have been an oddity in eighteenthcentury England; but naturalized citizens in the twentieth century are legion, virtually everywhere. With these concerns, we can proceed beyond those questions on translation that occupied us to very little effect heretofore: Is translation possible? What constitutes an accurate translation? What can, and cannot, be translated? To these concerns, we pose perhaps more basic questions concerning the phenomenology of translation: What is being translated? A text? A reader's experience? An interpretation? Is translation mere verbal equivalency? Or is it an organic catalyst for interpretation? If language is perceived in the Heraclitan flux, where it is not possible to step in the same river twice, if language is understood, in Gadamer's sense, as "radically historical," then readers of any work even in the same language are translating, interpreting, transforming the work. The process of translation as well as the reading of translation, is merely the more selfconscious act of reading. It may be that translation is the ultimate form of literary evaluation—for only from seeing it from the outside can one see a work for what it is. Knowing can be differentiated into native command and abstract understanding: the first embodies what is known, and knowledge becomes familiarity (like knowing something like "the back of one's own hand"); the second defamiliarizes what is known, and knowledge becomes analytical insight (like knowing how to operate on someone else's hand). Translation involves the second kind of knowing: the native, even if he understands and appreciates the translation in the target language, will encounter it as something strange, often to be deplored, occasionally to be relished (like contemporary Japanese preferring The Tale of Genji in English translation, even to the many modern Japanese versions). An analysis of translation that uses "deictic dialectics" will distinguish between errors in interpretation and systematically misleading features of language. Translations of "I" or ''we" will be lexically accurate, but deictically misdirected. We can no longer (footnote continued from previous page) major figures as Conrad, Joyce, Nabokov, and such significant contemporary writers as I. B. Singer, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Milan Kundera—is vast. The phenomenon should not, however, be construed as a merely modern development; cf. Eoyang (1982a).
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afford to be concerned with only what "we" think; we must recognize not just how "they" think, but also how much of us is them. The homogenized society of eighteenthcentury London no longer exists in the centers of modern civilization. We inhabit a world where xenophobia, whether linguistic or not, becomes selfhatred, where alienation is selfdestruction. More than ever, we need to recognize the contiguity of our fates, that we are human, and that our experience of being human involves more than the individual. These discriminations should not be thought to erase useful distinctions: they are rather to highlight meaningful differences. We can take seriously claims by translators as to the untranslatability of texts, even when they present translations; these need not be taken as ironic or even earnest exculpations of guilt. A translator of Adorno into English has remarked: Where the meaning of the original work is not external to its language, translation can no longer be conceived as the reproduction of meaning in a more or less transformed linguistic setting. With the abstraction of meaning from the particular universe of discourse in which it constituted itself, the meaning is no longer that which it was. [Adorno 1981:14]
The objective, then, is not so much to translate as to indicate—to point to deictically—the areas of untranslatability. Sounding perhaps as much like Adorno as one can in English, his translator, Samuel Weber, writes: "If Adorno is translatable at all, something which can by no means be taken for granted, it is precisely by virtue of his untranslatability" (p. 14). And later: "The untranslatability of Adorno is his most profound and cruel truth." In the end, we are all heirs of translation: even the intolerant hermetic traditions—like Christianity—where would they be without translation? It is a curious irony of history that there are antiSemites in America who will quote the Old Testament in the King James Version of the Bible with no appreciation for, even awareness of, the fact that the source text is in Hebrew, the language of the "accursed race." Reading translations need not be dis 9.
This is an adaptation of an apothegm of that profound popular philosopher, Walt Kelly's Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and they are us!"
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missed as impostures of misunderstanding which lose sight of the original—provided we do not vainly search for "equivalents" in another language. With every generation, we need to recognize, in the full cultural and linguistic reverberations of the observation, that "we are not what we once were." We are what once was considered "they": self sees itself increasingly as other; and other increasingly is seen as the self.10 The modern counterpart to the mirrorwithinamirror persona that we encountered in Letter 46 of The Citizen of the World occurs at the end of Tzvetan Todorov's intriguing excursion into a future embodied in the past, suggestively titled The Conquest of America. Todorov speaks of the condition of the modern exile, whom he describes as "a being who has lost his country without thereby acquiring another, who lives in a double exteriority." Todorov quotes the ideal of Hugh of St. Victor in the twelfth century: The man who finds his country sweet is only a raw beginner, the man for whom each country is as his own is already strong; but only the man for whom the whole world is as a foreign country is perfect. [Todorov 1985:250]
To that text, Todorov adds a beautifully objective parenthetical comment which, though it refers to himself, sees the self nevertheless as the other: (I myself, a Bulgarian living in France, borrow this quotation from Edward Said, a Palestinian living in the United States, who himself found it in Erich Auerbach, a German exiled in Turkey.)
One is reminded of L'Espion Turc, the late seventeenthcentury "spy novel," which is about a Turk, written by an Italian exile living in Paris.11 10.
A current manifestation of this development is the widespread sense of déjà vu even when foreign travel is involved: belief in reincarnation, a generation after The Search for Bridey Murphy, has resurfaced. 11.
When this paper was offered as a presentation in Paris at the 11th Congress of the International Comparative Literature Association in August 1985, it concluded with the following sentence: "It is, of course, appropriate that Todorov's quote be offered here in Paris, even in translation."
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Appendixes
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Appendix A— Bethge/Mahler/Wang Wei Hans Bethge Text (1907)
Gustav Mahler Text
(X) In Erwaltung des Freundes—MengKaoJen Die Sonne scheidet hinter dem Gebirg, In all Täler steigt der Abend nieder Mit seinen Schatten, die voll Kühlung sind.
Der Abschied X1 Die Sonne scheidet hinter dem Gebirge. 2 In alle Täler steigt der Abend nieder 3 Mit seinen Schatten, die voll Kühlung sind. 4 O sieh! Wie eine Silberbarke Schwebt 5 ± Der Mond am blauen Himmelssee herauf. 6 Ich spüre eines feinen Windes Weh'n 5 Hinter den dunkeln Fichten!
O sieh, wie eine Silberbarke schwebt Der Mond herauf hinter den dunkeln Fichten, (5) Ich spüre eines feinen Windes Wehn.
7 Der Bach singt voller Wohllaut durch das Dunkel + Die Blumen blassen im Dämmerschein. 8 + Die Erde atmet voll von Ruh' und Schlaf. 9 ± Alle Sehnsucht will nun träumen. 8–9 ± Die müden Menschen geh'n heimwärts. + Um im Schlaf vergess'nes Glück + Und Jugend neu zu lernen! 10 Die Vögel hocken still in ihren Zweigen. 11 Die Welt schläft ein!
Der Bach singt voller Wohllaut durch das Dunkel Von Ruh und Schlaf . . . Die arbeitsamen Menschen Gehn heimwärts, voller Sehnsucht nach dem Schlaf. Die Vögel hocken müde in den Zweigen. (10) Die Welt schläft ein . . . Ich stehe hier und harre Des Freundes, der so kommen mir versprach. Ich sehne mich, o Freund, an deiner Seite Die Schönheit dieses Abends zu geniessen,— Wo bleibst du nur? Du lässt mich lang allein! (15) Ich wandle auf und nieder mit der Laute Auf Wegen, die von weichem Grase schwellen,— O kämst du, kämst du, ungetreuer Freund!
+ Es wehet kühl im Schatten meiner Fichten. 11–12 Ich stehe hier und harre meines Freundes; + Ich harre sein zum letzten Lebewohl.
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13 Ich sehne mich, o Freund, an deiner Seite 14 Die Schönheit dieses Abends zu geniessen. 15 Wo bleibst du! Du lässt mich lang allein! 16 Ich wandle auf und nieder mit meiner Laute 17 Auf Wegen, die vom weichen Grase schwellen. + O Schönheit! O ewigen Liebens Lebenstrunk'ne Welt! Y1 ± Er steig vom Pferd und reichte ihm den Trunk 2 Des Abschieds dar. 2 ± Er fragte ihn, wohin er führe 3 Und auch warum es müsste sein. 4 Er sprach, seine Stimme war umflort: Du, mein Freund. 5 Mir war auf dieser Welt das Glück nicht hold! 6 ± Wohin ich geh'? Ich geh'. Ich geh', wand're in die Berge. 7 Ich suche Ruhe für mein einsam Herz. + Ich wandle nach der Heimat, meiner Stätte. 8 Ich werde niemals in die Ferne schweifen. + Still ist mein Herz und harret seiner Stunde! 10 ± Die Liebe Erde allüberall + Blüht auf im Lenz und grünt aufs neu! + Allüberall und ewig blauen licht die Fernen! 11 Ewig . . . ewig . . .
(Y) Der Abschied des Freundes—WangWei Ich steig von Pferd und reichte ihm den Trunk Des Abschieds dar. Ich fragte ihn, wohin Und auch warum er reisen wolle. Er Sprach mit umflorter Stimme: Du mein Freund. Mir war das Glück in dieser Welt nicht hold. (5) Wohin ich geh? Ich wandre in die Berge, Ich suche Ruhe für mein einsam Herz. Ich werde nie mehr in die Ferne schweifen,— Müd ist mein Fuss, und müd ist meine Seele.— Die Erde is die gleiche überall, (10) Und ewig, ewig sind die weissen Wolken . . .
parts omitted + parts added ± parts modifieds
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Appendix B— Meng Haoran—Wang Wei/Bynner Chinese Texts
W. Bynner English Version (1929)
At the MountainLodge of the Buddhist Priest Ye Waiting in Vain for My Friend Ting—Meng Haoran Now that the sun has set beyond the western range, Valley after valley is shadowy and dim . . . And now through pinetrees come the moon and chill of evening, And my ears feel pure with the sound of wind and water. Nearly all the woodsmen have reached home, Birds have settled on their perches in the quiet mist . . . And still—because you promised—I am waiting for you, waiting, Playing my lonely lute under a wayside vine. In Summer at the South Pavilion, Thinking of Hsing—Meng Haojan The mountain light suddenly fails in the west. In the east from the lake the slow moon rises. I loosen my hair to enjoy the evening coolness And open my window and lie down in peace. The wind brings me odours of lotuses, And bambooleaves drip with a music of dew . . . I would take up my lute and I would play, But, alas, who here would understand? And so I think of you, old friend, O troubler of my midnight dreams! At Parting—Wang Wei I dismount from my horse and I offer you wine, And I ask you where you are going and why. And you answer: "I am discontent And would rest at the foot of the southern mountain. So give me leave and ask me no questions. White clouds pass there without end.
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Appendix C— Shijing 143 (Waley/Karlgren)
Waley's Version
Karlgren's Version
A moon rising white Is the beauty of my lovely one, Ah, the tenderness, the grace! Heart's pain consumes me.
The moon comes forth bright; how handsome is that beautiful one, how easy and beautiful; my toiled heart is grieved.
A moon rising bright Is the fairness of my lovely one. Ah, the gentle softness! Heart's pain wounds me.
The moon comes forth brilliant; how handsome is that beautiful one, how easy and tranquil; my toiled heart is anxious.
A moon rising in splendour Is the beauty of my lovely one. Ah, the delicate yielding! Heart's pain torments me.
The moon comes forth shining; how brilliant is that beautiful one, how easy and handsome; my toiled heart is pained.
(Book of Songs, 1937)
(Book of Odes, 1950)
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Appendix D— Shijing 40 (Pound/Waley) Pound's Version
Waley's Version
North gate, sorrow's edge, purse kaput, nothing to pledge
I go out at the northern gate; Deep is my grief. I am utterly povertystricken and destitute; Yet no one heeds my misfortunes. Well, all is over now, No doubt it was Heaven's doing. So what's the good of talking about it?
I'll say I'm broke none knows how, heaven's stroke. Government work piled up on me. When I go back where I lived before, my dear relatives slam the door. This is the job put up on me, Sky's "which and how"? or say: destiny. Government work piled up on me. When I come in from being out my homefolk don't want me about; concrete fruit of heaven's tree not to be changed by verbosity.
The king's business came my way; Government business of every sort was put on me. When I came in from outside, The people of the house all turned on me and scolded me. Well, it's over now. No doubt it was Heaven's doing, So what's the good of talking about it? The king's business was all piled up on me; Government business of every sort was laid upon me; When I came in from outside, The people of the house all turned upon me and abused me. Well it's all over now. No doubt it was Heaven's doing, So what's the good of talking about it?
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Appendix E— Shijing 75 (Pound/Waley) Pound's Version
Waley's Version
Live up to your clothes, we'll see that you get new ones. You do your job, we'll bring our best food to you 'uns.
How well your black coat fits! Where it is torn I will turn it for you. Let us go to where you lodge, And there I will hand your food to you.
If you're good as your robes are good We'll bring you your pay and our best food.
How nice your black coat looks! Where it is worn I will mend it for you. Let us go to where you lodge, And there I will hand your food to you.
Nothing too good, bigosh and bigob For a bureaucrat who will really attend to his job.
How broad your black coat is! Where it is worn I will alter it for you. Let us go to where you lodge, And there I will hand your food to you.
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Appendix F— Shijing 90 (Pound/Waley) Pound's Version
Waley's Version
Cold wind, and the rain, cock crow, he is come again, my ease.
Wind and rain, chill, chill, chill! But the cock crowed kikeriki. Now that I have seen my lord, How can I fail to be at peace?
Shrill wind and the rain and the cock crows and crows, I have seen him, shall it suffice as the wind blows?
Wind, rain and the dark as it were the dark of the moon, What of the wind, and the cock's neverending cry; Together again he and I.
Wind and rain, oh, the storm! But the cock crowed kukeriku. Now that I have seen my lord, How can I fail to rejoice? Wind and rain, dark as night, The cock crowed and would not stop. Now that I have seen my lord, How can I any more be sad?
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Appendix G— Shijing 23 (Pound/Waley) Pound's Version
Waley's Version
Lies a dead deer on yonder plain whom white grass covers, A melancholy maid in spring is luck for lovers.
In the wilds there is a dead doe; With white rushes we cover her. There was a lady longing for the spring; A fair knight seduced her.
Where the scrub elm skirts the wood, be it not in white mat bound, as a jewel flawless found, dead as doe is maidenhood.
Hark! Unhand mygirdleknot, stay, stay, stay or the dog may bark.
In the wood there is a clump of oaks, And in the wilds a dead deer With white rushes well bound; There was a lady fair as jade. ''Heigh, not so hasty, not so rough; Heigh, do not touch my handkerchief. Take care, or the dog will bark."
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Index A Abrams, M. H., 242 acculturation, 109 Adorno, Theodor, 279 Affective fallacy, 153 Africa, 46, 81, 161 Albertus Magnus (12001280), 50 aletheia, 151 All Men Are Brothers. See Shuihuzhuan ALPAC (Automated Language Processing Advisory Committee), 34, 35 American, 13, 15; English, 138 Americanisms, 161 Amerindian, 21 Analects, The, 64, 170, 171, 174 Anchor Bible, The, 38, 42 Andrewes, Lancelot, 27, 39 Anglicisms, 162 AngloChinese College, 170 Anglophiles, 8 AngloSaxon, 21, 117, 118, 162 Aquinas, Thomas, 50 Arab, 62, 164 Arabic, 6, 23, 53, 56, 59, 60, 161, 167; numbers, 9 Aramaic, 6, 14, 58, 122, 192 Argentina, 10 Aristophanes, 52 Aristotle, 50, 55, 83, 219, 235, 266; and De Interpretatione, 133 artificial intelligence, 38, 242 Art of Chinese Poetry, The, 70 Asia Minor, 119 Augustine, 121 Australia, 81 Austria, 9 authenticity, 2123 avantgarde, 243 Averroës, 50, 55, 56 Avicenna, 50, 55 Ayscough, Florence, 9294 B Babel, 411, 91, 124; Tower of, 47, 80, 82, 109 Bacon, Francis, 213 Bai Juyi, 250 Balzac, Honoré de, 165 barbarians, 4652 Barbarian Within, The, 49 barbarikos, 47, 61 barbaroi, 47, 52, 61 BarHillel, Yehoshoa, 34 Baring, Evelyn (Lord Cromer), 119 Barthes, Roland, 214 Basho, 135 Bates, E. S., 39 Beauvoir, Simone de, 52 Beckett, Samuel, 11, 195 Beerbohm, Max, 117 Beethoven, Ludwig von, 16 beizhi ("I, lowly functionary"), 98 Bengali, 10, 27, 156 Benjamin, Walter, 24, 25 Bergson, Henri, 8485 Bethge, Hans, 177183, 188; and Die Chinesische Flöte, 148 bi ("comparison"), 254, 255 bianwen ("oral text"), 261 Bible, 4, 6, 7, 9, 21, 23, 24, 39, 44, 58, 86,
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107, 123, 140143, 153; Authorized Version, 4, 14, 25, 27, 39, 40, 41, 42; Ecclesiastes, 4243, 82; Genesis, 4, 3944, 57; Geneva Bible, 39; John, 57; King James Version, 39, 57, 86, 122123, 192; Luke, 57; Mark, 57, 141142; Matthew, 57, 141142; New Testament, 14, 39, 44, 57, 58, 122, 141; Old Testament, 14, 4042, 44, 57, 122, 141, 167, 188, 279; Proverbs, 58; Revelation, 40; Revised Standard Version, 39; Rheims version, 39; Septuagint, 122, 141; translations, 27; Vulgate, 122 Birch, Cyril, 70 Blake, William, 243 n. 7 Bloom, Harold, 187 Bodhidharma, 228 Bohemia, 65 Boisacq, Emile, 49 Boissonade, Prosper, 48 Book of Changes, The. See Yijing Book of Odes, The. See Shijing Book of Songs, The. See Shijing Booth, Wayne, 127 Bordeaux, 46 Borges, Jorge Luis, 10, 77; and Pierre Menard, 77 Bramah, Ernest: and The Wallet of Kai Lung, 148 Brecht, Bertholt, 147, 262 Brodsky, Josef, 10, 11 Browning, Robert, 11 Buck, Pearl, 100101 Buddha, 89 Buddhism, 167; Chan, 217 Buddhist: canon, 6, 27, 57, 59; terminology, 260 Bunyan, John, 43 Burgundy, 46 Butor, Michel, 10 Bynner, Witter, 69, 71, 181 Byzantine Empire, 59 C Canada, 8, 33, 36 Canglang shihua, 228 Cao Pi, 73 Cao Xueqin, 149 Cao Zhi, 73 capitalist, 14 Carroll, Lewis, 86 Castillo, Debra, 8, 14 Catholic church, 25 Catholics, 10, 80 Celtic, 162 Champagne, 46 Chan, Wingtsit, 173174 Chan Buddhism, 233 Chaucer, Geoffrey, 9, 19, 65, 165, 213; and Boccaccio, 65 chen ("I": ministerofficials addressing emperors), 97 Chesterton, G. K., 11 Ch'ien Chungshu. See Qian Zhongshu China, 7, 162164, 243; Han dynasty, 164; Ming dynasty, 163; Qing dynasty, 163; Southern Dynasties, 227; Southern Sung dynasty, 163; Tang dynasty, 54, 163, 164, 227, 259; Yuan dynasty, 163, 164, 261; Zhou period, 165 Chinese, 7, 8, 12, 36, 57, 59, 60, 61, 133, 163, 171, 253258, 260265; aesthetics, 237, 245; Buddhism, 66; painting, 244; philosophy, 171, 264, 265 Chinese University of Hong Kong, 36 Chow Tsetsung, 221 Christ, 107 Christianity, 7, 15, 27, 28n. 1, 55, 167, 176, 188 Chu Hsi. See Zhu Xi Chuangtzu. See Zhuangzi Chuci, 259 Chungyung. See Zhongyong Cicero, 27 Cihai, 254 Claudel, Paul, 214 Clemens, Samuel (Mark Twain), 11 coeval translations, 145, 148, 160, 192, 193, 196, 206 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 179 communication theory, 29 computer: languages, 80; science, 7; technology, 3738 Confucian: classics, 192; texts, 216 Confucius, 58, 64, 83, 87, 107, 170, 171, 191, 217, 264; and Lunyu (The Analects), 87 Conquest of America, The, 280 Coverdale, Miles, 40 n. 10 cybernetics, 242 D Dali, Salvadore, 16 Danish, 37
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Dante Alighieri, 19, 8687, 251; and Commedia, 86 Dao De Jing, 71, 78, 88, 218, 220, 263, 265 d'Argens, Marquis: and Lettres chinoises, 273 Dashti, Ali, 23 Daxue (The Great Learning), 170 Dead Sea Scrolls, 14, 123 Decadents, 9 defamiliarization, 188 Defoe, Daniel, 165 deixis, 13 Denmark, 65 Derrida, Jacques, 5; and La voix et le phenomène, 78 Descartes, René: and Discourse on Method, 171 de Sola Pinto, Vivian, 60 de Waard, Jan, 14 Dewey, John, 159 di ("barbarians" in the North), 48 Dickens, Charles, 165 Dickinson, Emily, 11, 92 Die chinesische Flöte, 148, 177 digital technology, 242 distantiation. See Verfremdungseffekt dizi ("I": inferiors addressing superiors), 97 Doctrine of the Mean, The. See Zhongyong Donne, John, 44 Don Quixote, 77 Dos Passos, John, 271 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 165 Dream of Red Mansions, A. See Honglou meng Dryden, John, 24, 94 Du Fu, 83, 106, 129, 247, 248, 249, 250, 252; poems by, 85, 106, 247 Dutch, 37 E EastWest comparison, 240, 252, 266267 Eliot, T. S., 10, 27, 56, 134, 186, 252; and The Waste Land, 10 Elizabethan writers, 49 Elsinore, 65 Encountering Sorrow. See Li Sao endotropic, 59, 161, 162, 164, 165, 167 England, 10; eighteenthcentury, 278, 279; and Elizabethan period, 49, 60, 65, 87, 162; and Romantic period, 19, 135; and Victorian period, 106, 117, 162 English, 7, 9, 10, 13, 15, 25, 27, 38, 51, 52, 122; literature, 39 episteme, 121 Erasmus, 7 Erwartungshorizont. See horizon of expectations Escarpit, Robert, 187 Esdras, 128 esoteric perspective, 139 Esperanto, 8, 91, 124 Etiemble, René, 8, 67 Europe, 46, 50 European Economic Community, 37; headquarters, 33 European universities and research units, 37 EUROTRA, 37 exoteric perspective, 139 exotropic, 59, 161, 162, 164, 167 extratextuality, 160 F Fang, Achilles, 186 Faulkner, William, 10 feng ("airs"), 254 Fielding, Henry, 165 FirFlower Tablets, 92 FitzGerald, Edward, 22, 74, 156, 188, 192; and Rubaiyat, 22, 196 Fitzgerald, F. Scott, 10, 271 flavor ("wei"), 222, 224 Forster, G. M., 21 France, 33, 161 Francophile, 10 Francophones, 8, 161 Franks, 48 Frawley, William, 1920, 30 French, 21, 27, 51, 161; language, 7, 8, 9, 37, 52, 60, 67, 122, 161 French Academy, 161 Frisk, Hjalmar, 49 Frost, Robert, 19, 142 Frye, Northrop, 140, 167, 235, 258; and The Great Code, 140 fu ("exposition"), 254, 255 fully automated highquality translation (FAHQT), 34 G Gadamer, HansGeorg, 22, 64, 229 Galen, 84 García Marquez, Gabriel, 11, 52, 196 Geertz, Clifford, 188
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geli (form), 228 Gembun'itchi, 166 Genji monogatari, 61 Georgetown University, 33, 34, 37 German, 7, 9, 27, 37, 51, 52, 83, 122 Germany, 33 Gesamtskunstwerk, 244, 261 Giles, Herbert, 70, 92 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 11, 44; and Weltliteratur, 11, 44 Golding's Ovid, 65 Goldsmith, Oliver, 271, 273; and The Citizen of the World, 148, 271278, 280 Gombrowicz, Witold, 53 Gourmont, Remy de, 213214 Granet, Marcel, 184 Gray, L. H., 273 Great Learning, The. See Daxue Greek, 6, 14, 39, 59, 60, 61, 62, 120, 122, 161, 165, 167; culture, 59; heritage, 55; letters, 9; mythology, 3; tragedians, 48 Greenslade, S. I., 40 Gregory the Great, 62 guajun ("I, unworthy lord"), 98 guaxiong ("I, unworthy elder brother"), 98 Guide to the Perplexed, 50 H Haggard, H. Rider, 165 Haitian, 161 Haloun, Gustav, 184 HAMT (humanaided machine translation), 32 Hanshan, 71, 8990 Hanshi waijuan, 217, 219, 265 Hausa, 28 Hawkes, David, 74, 75, 149; and A Little Primer of Tu Fu, 129 Hebrew, 6, 14, 28, 39, 51, 59, 122, 167, 188 Hegel, Georg Friederich, 264 Heidegger, Martin, 25, 142, 146, 147, 150, 151, 229, 264 Hemingway, Ernest, 10, 271 Hinduism, texts of: translated, 27 history: Babelian, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8; postBabelian, 411, 44, 146; preBabelian, 4, 7, 8, 44, 146, 277; of translation, 4, 22 Hölderlin, Heinrich, 24 Holland, Norman, 153 Homer, 23, 26, 52, 57, 63, 64, 243 Hong Kong, 170 Honglou meng; 74, 149 Horace, 212 horizon of expectations, 152, 170, 171, 188, 268 Hsia, C. T., 149 hsin ("heartmind"), 245 Hsin Ch'ichi. See Xin Qiji Hsiyu chi. See Xiyouji hubris, 5 Hume, David, 211 hun (the "spiritual" soul), 84, 85 Hung, William, 149 Huns, 161 Husserl, Edmund, 264 I Iberian, 21 Ibn Rushd. See Averroës Ibn Sina. See Avicenna Ibsen, Henrik, 9 identity, 1521 Iliad, 34, 63, 86 Imagists, 12 imitations, 192 implicit metaphors, 210 indeterminacy, 34 Indonesian, 28 Ingarden, Roman, 17, 153 Interlingua, 91 international commerce, 7 intratextuality, 160 intraworldly beings, 147 Iraq, 119 Ireland, 9 Iser, Wolfgang, 152159, 169 Islam, 28, 51, 53, 54, 59 Islamic civilization, 55, 60 Italian, 9, 27, 37, 60, 122, 161 Italy, 33 J Jackson, J. H., 100101 Jade Mountain, The, 70 Jakobson, Roman, 32 James, Henry, 10, 262 Jameson, Fredric, 143 Japan, 33, 60, 162, 163, 243; Fujiwara period, 61; Kamakura period, 61; late Heian period, 60; Meiji Period, 54, 61; Tokugawa period, 61 Japanese, 6, 10, 1213, 15, 131, 163, 241; and kambun, 61
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Jauss, Hans Robert, 152 Jerome, Saint, 24, 42, 57, 122 Johnson, Samuel, 211 Jonson, Ben, 179, 212 Josephus, 128 Journey to the West, The. See Xiyouji Joyce, James, 9, 10, 143, 277 n. 8; and Finnegans Wake, 9; and Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, 9 Jullien, François, 214, 235 junzi ("literatus"), 83 K Kafka, Franz, 11 Kant, Immanuel, 264 Karlgren, Bernhard, 184 katakana, 120, 163 Kaufman, George S., 50 Kawabata, Yasunari, 52 Keats, John, 17, 19, 26, 135, 159, 179; and "Endymion," 17; and the Odes, 17 Kelly, Louis, 24, 25, 27 Kermode, Frank, 141142; and The Genesis of Secrecy, 140 Kew Gardens, 46 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 85 Kiang, Kanghu, 69 Kierkegaard, Søren, 11 King's College, Aberdeen, 170 Kohut, Heinz, 187 Koine Greek, 6, 58, 122, 141, 192 kong ("emptiness"), 231 Konishi, Jin'ichi, 132 Konkretisation, 153 Koran, 6, 28, 59, 167 Korea, 243 Kott, Jan, 23 Kundera, Milan, 52 L Langer, Susanne, 261 language, 1011; as code, 3238; native, 11 Laokoön, 243 Latin, 7, 9, 14, 52, 56, 59, 60, 120, 161, 162, 167 Lau, D. C., 68 Lau, Joseph, 132 Lawrence, D. H., 120 Legge, James, 92, 107, 170177, 188, 192; and Confucian Analecta, 171 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm von: and Novissima Sinica, 171 Lem, Stanislaw, 52 L'Espion Turc, 273, 280 Lesser, Simon, 153 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 243 LéviStrauss, Claude, 214 Lewis, Bernard, 51, 53, 5455, 62 Li Bai, 250; Du Fu poem about, 85 Li Mengyang, 243 Li Po. See Li Bai Li Sao, 259 Liehtzu. See Liezi Liezi, 219, 266 Lin Shu, 164, 165 Lincoln, Abraham, 25 ling ("spirit"), 231 lingua franca, 161 linguistics, 38 LISP (list processing), 38 literary aesthetics, 210 literatus, 83 Liu Hsieh. See Liu Xie Liu, James J. Y., 68, 70, 149, 231 Liu, Wuchi, 68 Liu Xie, 221, 223, 224, 225, 234, 256, 266 Lo, Irving, 68 LoBello, Nino, 103 logos, 108 London Missionary School, 170 Lord, Albert, 57, 86 Lowell, Amy, 9294 Lu Chi. See Lu Ji Lu Ji, 222223 Lucretius, 212 Lunyu, 170, 171, 172, 264 Luo Shu, 271 lushi ("regulated poetry"), 238 Lushi chunqiu, 236 Luther, Martin, 24, 123 Lyttelton, Lord George: and Persian Letters, 272 M MacDonald, Hugh, 60 machine translation, 3138 MacKenna, Stephen, 24 Mahler, Gustav, 148, 177183, 188 MAHT (machineaided human translation), 32 Maimonides, Moses (11351204), 50 Malaysia, 8 man ("barbarians" in the south), 48 Manchus, 164
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Mandarin, 7 Manyoshu, 60 Marana, Giovanni Paolo: and L'Espion Turc, 273, 280 mathematics, 9, 80 Mattheissen, F. O., 60 mechanical engineering, 242 Medes, 47 Meiji, 12 Mencius, The. See Mengzi Meng Haoran, 178179, 182 Mengzi, 170, 216 Men of the Marshes, The. See Shuihuzhuan METAL (METALanguage) project, 33 metalanguage, 193 metaphor, 127, 252 miao ("subtlety"), 231 microprocessors, 38 Middle Ages, 48, 50, 54, 59 Mill, John Stuart, 258 Milosz, Czeslaw, 11 Milton, John, 9, 39, 218 Miner, Earl, 132 Minford, John, 149 Mishima Yukio, 11, 52, 166 Miyoshi Masao, 61, 166 Modal paradigms, 240 Modern Egypt, 119 Mongols, 161, 164, 261 Monkey, 70, 100, 145 Montesquieu: and Lettres Persanes, 148, 273 More, Sir Thomas, 7 Morse code, 37 Müller, F. Max, 108, 170 Murasaki Shikibu, 61, 143 music, 16 N Nabokov, Vladimir, 10, 52, 195: and version of Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, 196 Natsume Soseki, 166 natural language processing (NLP), 38 Neruda, Pablo, 11 New Criticism, 153, 250, 251 Newton, Isaac: and Principia, 171 New York Times Book Review, The, 103 Nicholson, Harold, 117119 Nida, Eugene, 14, 29, 81 Nietzsche, Friederich, 12, 24, 264 nihil obstat, 25 North Africa, 47 North America, 46 North's Plutarch, 65 Novalis, 24 Nozick, Robert: and Philosophical Explanations, 122 nujia ("I": women slaves, to male masters), 98 nursery rhyme, 138 O Occident, 121 Odyssey, 86 Ogden, C. K., 83 Omar Khayyam, 19, 22, 23, 60, 156, 188 Ong, Walter, 49 onomatopoeia, 104 ontological analysis, 239 Orczy, Baroness Emma, 165 Orient, 121 Orientalism, 53 originals, 16, 19 ostraenie ("defamiliarization"), 143, 147, 188 Ostrogoths, 48 Oxford English Dictionary, 43 P Pali, 6, 27, 59 papyrus, 242 Paradise Lost, 39 Parry, Milman, 57, 86 Paul, Saint, 66 Payne, Robert, 69, 115 penmanship, 243 People's Republic of China, 131 Pepper, Stephen, 268 Perry, Admiral Matthew, 162 Persia, 276 Persian, 28, 47, 53, 59, 192 Petrarch, 7 philosophers: German idealist, 25 Philosophical Investigations, 109, 115 Phylloxera vastatrix, 46 physiology, 211 Pilgrim's Progress, The, 43 Pindar, 67, 92 Plato, 64, 109, 116, 228, 263, 264; and Dialogues, 64, 171; and Theaetetus, 139, 146 Plato's cave, 142 Platter, Thomas: quotation by, 65 po (the corporeal soul), 84 Poe, Edgar Allan, 19, 67
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Poggioli, Renato, 72, 132, 135, 150 poiesis, 251 polyglossia, 277 Ponape, 82 Pope, Alexander, 43, 208; and Iliad, 23, 34, 63 Portuguese, 11 Poulet, Georges, 159 Pound, Ezra, 10, 24, 68, 70, 93, 184187, 188, 190192, 195209; and The Cantos, 10 PreRaphaelites, 9 Protestants, 80 Proust, Marcel, 143, 214 Psalm, 41 Pseudepigraphal books, 123 pseudoesoterica, 131 psychology, 211 Public Ledger, The, 273275 Pushkin, Alexander: and Eugene Onegin, 196 Q Qian Zhongshu, 165 Qing Empirical Research School, 164165 qixiang ("spirit"), 228 Qoheleth, 42 Quan Song Ci, 96 Quan Tangshi, 89 Quebecois, 21, 161 Quechua, 81 Quine, W. V., 24, 34, 35, 36 R Rabassa, Gregory, 132, 196 Rembrandt, 15 Renaissance, 50, 54, 55, 252 Rezeptionsästhetik, 152, 158 Ricci, Matteo, 66 Richards, I. A.: and Mencius on the Mind, 84 Rimbaud, Arthur, 237 Roman: alphabet, 9; Catholicism, 66; Empire, 59; language, 120; world, 27 Romans, 48, 164 Romantic, 14; period, 26 Romantics, 9 Rome ("barbarians" in the west), 48 Rooney, Andy, 1213, 15, 31 Rosenzweig, Franz, 24 Rubaiyat, 19, 22, 23, 60, 192. See also Omar Khayyam Runciman, Steven, 59 Ruskin, John, 247248 Russell, Bertrand, 83; and Principia Mathematica, 171 Russia, 27 Russian poems, 11 Ryle, Gilbert, 155, 172 S Sacred Books of the East, The, 108, 170 Said, Edward, 53, 119 Sanskrit, 6, 27 Sappho, 67, 92 Saracen territories, 47 Sarton, George, 50 savor ("wei"), 222, 224 Schleiermacher, Friederich, 24 science, 7, 9 Scott, R. B. Y., 42 Scott, Sir Walter, 165 Seidensticker, Edward, 153, 157, 196 Shakespeare, William, 11, 26, 65, 77, 83, 87; on stage, 65 Shakespeare Our Contemporary, 23 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 19 Shen Yue, 228 shih ("scholar or soldier"), 245 Shiji, 51, 251 Shijing, 87, 127, 184187, 191, 238, 254, 259 Shklovsky, Victor, 143, 147, 157 shuangyen ("eyes"), 256 Shuihu chuan. See Shuihuzhuan Shuihu juan. See Shuihuzhuan Shuihuzhuan, 100, 235 Sicily, 51, 65 Siemens, A. G., 33 Sikong Tu, 226, 232 Sima Qian, 51, 251 Simon, André, 46 Simon, Claude, 10 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 10 Smart, Christopher, 252 Smith, Ernest Bramah, 148 Snyder, Gary, 71 Socrates, 139, 146 Solomon, 58 song ("encomia"), 254 Songs of the South. See Chuci Sophocles, 52 South America, 81 Southern Baptists, 194
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Soviet Union, 33 Spain, 51 Spanish, 10, 33, 161 Speiser, E. G., 40 Spengler, Oswald: and Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 121 Spenser, Edmund, 88, 165: and The Faerie Queene, 88, 213 Ssuk'ung Tu. See Sikong Tu Steinbeck, John, 11 Steiner, George, 24, 85, 187: and After Babel, 116 Stendhal, 65 Stevens, Wallace, 89 Story of the Stone, The. See Honglou meng surrogate translation, 148, 160 Swift, Jonathan, 165, 212 Switzerland, 8 Syriac, 57, 58 SYSTRAN machine translation project, 33 T Tagore, Rabindranath, 10, 12, 156 Taira Kiyomori, 162 taiyi ("the Great Unity"), 88 Tale of Genji, The, 153, 157, 164, 196, 278 Tangshi sanbaishou, 129 Tao Qian, 236 Tao Te Ching. See Dao De Jing TAUM (Traduction Automatique, Université de Montréal), 36 techne, 121 Thackeray, William, 43 Theaetetus, 41, 155 Theravada, 6 Tibetan, 6, 57 Tipitaka, 6 tizhuang ("style"), 228 Todorov, Tzvetan, 280 Tongcheng school, 164 tourism, 69 ToynbeeIkeda Dialogue, 132 translation: and history, 3, 22; pragmatics of, 24; publishers of, 6970; theory, 24, 27 translators, 52 Travels of Marco Polo, 115 Tripitaka, 6 Troy, 57 Ts'anglang shihhua. See Canglang shihua Ts'ao Hsüehch'in. See Cao Xueqin Tu Fu: China's Greatest Poet, 149. See Also Du Fu Turkey, 119 Turkish, 28, 53, 55 Twain, Mark. See Clemens, Samuel Tyndale, William, 40 U Ugaritic, 57 United Nations, 38 University of Texas: and the METALanguage project, 33 Upanishads, 6, 10 Urdu, 27 V Valéry, Paul, 24, 78, 134, 213 vanity, 4243 Van Meegerens, Hans, 18 Vedic, 10 Venice, 65 Verfremdungseffekt, 147, 149, 150 Verona, 65 Vienna, 65 vine louse. See phylloxera vastatrix Virgil, 63, 92, 251 Visigoths, 48 Voltaire: and Zadig, 148 Vulgate, The, 57 Vygotsky, Lev, 9596 W Wagner, Richard, 244 Walden, William, 102103 Waley, Arthur, 68, 70, 71, 92, 100, 109, 153, 157, 184187, 188191, 195209; and A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems, 184; and The Book of Songs, 184; and The No Plays of Japan, 184; and The Tale of Genji, 184 Wang, C. C., 74 Wang Guowei, 249 Wang Shizhen, 249, 267 Wang Wei, 178183, 244 Wangsun Chia, 172 wansheng ("I, the laterborn, the younger"), 98 Water Margin. See Shuihuzhuan Watson, Burton, 71, 112n. 5, 236 weather forecasts, 36 Weaver, Warren, 32 Weber, Samuel, 279 wei ("flavor" or "savor"), 222, 224 Wells, H.G., 11
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weltanschauungen, 242 wen (''pattern," "ornament," "literature"), 234 wenren ("literatus"), 250 Wenxin diaolong, 221, 223, 234, 265, 266 White Pony, The, 115 Whitman, Walt, 92 Wimsatt, William, 250, 251 Wittgenstein, Ludwig von, 72, 78, 83, 91, 109, 128, 133, 168; and On Certainty, 189; and Philosophical Investigations, 115; and Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus, 83, 111115, 171 Wordsworth, William, 253 WrightPatterson Air Force Base: and the SYSTRAN project, 33 wuxin ("nomind"), 89 X xiansheng, ("you, the earlierborn, the elder"), 98 xin ("heartmind"), 84 Xin Qiji, 95 xing ("evocation"), 254, 255 xingqu ("savor"), 229 Xiyouji, 100, 145 Xuanzang, 66 Y ya ("elegantiae"), 254255 Yang, Gladys, 75, 100, 149 Yang Hsienyi, 75, 100, 149 Yang Hsiung. See Yang Xiong Yang Xiong, 223 Yao Nai, 233 Ye Shengtao, 271 Yeats, William Butler, 10, 68 Yellow Emperor, 111 Yen Fu, 164, 165 Yen Yu, 227, 229, 231 yi ("barbarians" in the east), 48 yi ("meaning"), 231 yi ("we": lit. "ants"), 98 Yijing, 116, 133, 220, 223, 227 yinjie ("musicality"), 228 Yu, Anthony, 99100, 146, 149 Yuan Mei, 230, 231 Yuan Zongdao, 229 yuwei ("lasting flavor"), 234 Z zaju ("miscellaneous theater"), 238, 261 Zamenhof, L. L., 8 Zhang Tianyi, 271 Zhang Zai, 233 zhen (the royal "we"), 98 Zhongyong, 107, 170 Zhou Zuoren, 235 Zhouli, 254 Zhu Xi, 176 Zhuangzi, 88, 111, 112, 113, 168, 218, 219, 235, 264 zousheng ("we": lit. "little fish"), 98
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About the Author Eugene Chen Eoyang is professor of comparative literature and of East Asian languages and cultures at Indiana University, where he founded the East Asian Summer Language Institute. Early in his career, as an editor at Doubleday Anchor Books, he launched the Anchor Bible, publishing ten volumes. Fiftyone volumes have since appeared. He is cofounding editor of the Journal Chinese Literature: Essays, Articles, Reviews (CLEAR), a major contributor to Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry, and the translator and editor of The Selected Poems of Ai Qing.
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Production Notes Bilingual Composition and paging were done by Asco Trade Typesetting Ltd. The text typeface is Baskerville and the display typeface is Helvetica. Offset presswork and binding were done by The MapleVail Book Manufacturing Group. Text paper is Writers RR Offset, basis 50.