My Philosophy for Translating Philosophy

Native speakers of every language crave clunky translations of their works and find idiomatic ones absolutely vexing. Every nuance and subtlety of their own idiom unfolds in their mind like a glittering constellation, and they wish for every star to shine in precisely its rightful shade. But constellations can only be seen from a certain angle; from another, some alien shape is traced.

If we suppose that every idea the human mind can form is a star in the sky, then every language is a planet, an anchor from which the universe is seen and measured; the same stars are all there but the lines we draw between them differ. The maps drawn on one planet will be of little help to another without translation, which very literally meant to be moved across to another place in someone else’s language long ago. Really though, no two people have ever spoken precisely the same language, so perhaps we should say the planets are people with all their own utterly unique conceptions, and languages are solar systems full of planets with nearly the same sky.

Literal translations are a great help to a student of the language itself, but often little help to a student of the ideas that language has been used to express. I became a student of languages, especially ancient ones, because I find it a great comfort to trace the constellations and see for myself that in the end, they really are all the same stars; we can all learn to understand each other, no matter how great the gap may seem. I am a student of the language itself so that I may re-express the ideas themselves in a way that makes good, natural sense to someone who shares roughly my language and cultural background.

There is no final or perfect translation: both language and culture are shifting sands, and so the translations must be continuously re-charted. I remember once seeing someone post: “what is the point of Classical Studies? Haven’t we long since translated everything by now?” The ancient texts may be a fixed reference point (not quite true; we are still lucky enough to frequently find new ones) but our relationship to them is always changing. The fact that I am a university-educated queer career woman who has taken to translating some of history’s most notorious advocates of patriarchy and traditional family values ought underscore the point.

I was raised in a creationist Christian environment in the rural United States, where it was taught as a fundamental matter of faith that first, there is exactly one true, correct and perfect English translation of the Bible, namely the King James, and second, that it must be taken quite literally in all its claims. (Some from my background would even go so far as to claim that the King James is the only valid translation of the Bible ever made into any language.) Since it was a matter of faith that the creaking, dusty translation in their hands was final and perfect, my educators who considered themselves the vanguard of Christianity saw no benefit to learning anything about the source languages and cultures, about the well-studied problems in translating one of the world’s most important texts, or even in reading newer and easier-to-understand translations which, definitionally to their faith, could only be inferior and misleading.

The fact that the King James captures a particular stilted register of English spoken at a particular time several centuries ago and a particular place thousands of miles from where I lived, and as such was virtually incomprehensible without extensive training, did not dissuade its advocates from making confused six-year-olds memorize and recite it. Nor did the fact that the Bible’s dozens of writers spoke several different native languages and had many different cultural contexts dissuade them from taking every idiomatic number, fanciful turn of phrase and fairy tale allusion hyper-literally with no awareness or concern for who actually wrote these stories and why. Forty days and forty nights of rain, forty years in the desert, four hundred years of slavery – all very exact measurements that God felt it was important for us to know, clearly! This will be on the test!

Like many ex-fundamentalists, my path out was through better understanding the very text that I had supposedly been reading all my life. I was warned that “the Devil knows the Bible better than you do.” The Devil, it turns out, can engage in basic critical analysis, and so has a richer appreciation of ancient literature than those who uncritically worship its surface form seen from a strange angle.

The King James is the flagship for the perverse idea that ancient texts ought be difficult to understand, that being archaic ennobles them. An ennobled idea that no-one can understand may as well not have been translated at all. The people who wrote the texts wanted to be understood; they meant for their meaning to be clear. Chinese civilization itself fell into the King James trap with ancient Chinese philosophy: teaching children the exact original words for two thousand years as natural language drifted ever further, requiring more and more basis education to make any sense of something which was meant, when it was written, to be easily understood by a child hearing it read aloud. This chain snapped about a century back, and now the usual way to read the Classics is that each paragraph of original text is followed by a restatement in natural modern Chinese.

Having a poetic heart myself, I must say that sometimes archaic language can be wielded to great purpose, its weight pressing hard and hot on the reader’s mind — but this must be careful and deliberate. Throwing around thou and thee because it soundeth profound maketh thee out to be a fool who knows not that these were the opposite of formal pronouns! And if thou canst not articulate for thyself the difference betwixt makest and maketh, I implore thee not to inflict archaic translations on anyone else, for thou speakest not this tongue thyself.

There are no native speakers of Classical Chinese, not for a very long time now. Naturally, however, the modern Chinese languages (Mandarin, Cantonese, Shanghainese and so forth) bear a much closer semblance to it than does English, and the nature of the Chinese writing system papers over the drift in pronunciation so that one may focus on the drifts in semantics and grammar. As such, the modern Chinese speaker considers Classical Chinese texts to be in their language the way that we would consider the King James to be in English. But like the King James, or better like Chaucer, it requires special training to properly understand it on its own terms.

Since I am translating with the aim of making the ideas of ancient Chinese authors legible to a young internet-literate Western reader with a backdrop illuminated by Greek, Roman and Christian traditions, some of my translations absolutely will rub many native Chinese speakers the wrong way. I do not think the way I translate into English, literally rendered into modern Chinese, would be a good translation for Chinese readers; their relationship with their own history and culture fundamentally informs how the works of their own ancestors should be presented. I once heard a Chinese-speaking man relate how he realized that an English translation of Romance of the Three Kingdoms felt utterly lifeless and dull because it did not evoke the vividly colorful cartoon personages familiar to every Chinese child by the time they are old enough to read. Similarly, an English work of literature may lean on the assumption that the reader already has a clear mental image of archetypes like Robin Hood the ethical thief or Benjamin Franklin the zany inventor or Amelia Earhart the lady daredevil; a good translation needs to find a way to paint in the picture, even if those colors are not literally spelled out in the source text.

Finally, just as no translation is ever perfect and final, neither is any one translator’s knowledge of the source language. I have been studying Chinese for about four years, and there are a great many other Western scholars who have studied it for ten, twenty or thirty, and may look upon my amateur efforts and see that I have gone astray. Sharing my translations pushes me to take them very seriously, to think hard and work hard at fully grasping the original text. However, some of them may be a little underbaked. I am open to feedback from anyone who feels they can see where my grammatical analysis went wrong or where I overlooked a crucial bit of cultural context. I only ask that you can accept and respect that my mission is to write idiomatically for a very different audience than the native Chinese student trapped in high school literature class, and that 19th century missionary-translator James Legge is my nemesis.