Professor Edward Shaughnessy has been appointed as an ICS Visiting Professor for the 2013-2014 academic year. He is currently the Department Chair of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, University of Chicago, and the Lorraine J. and Herrlee G. Creel Distinguished Service Professor of Early China. His research expertise lies in the cultural and literary history of the Zhou period, and he is committed to the study of its archaeologically recovered textual materials, from oracle-bone and bronze inscriptions through to the bamboo-strip manuscripts.

A couple of weeks ago, shortly after arriving at the ICS, I was reading online discussions of translating, and especially of translating the Chinese classics, when I chanced upon comments from somebody – I don't remember who, but he seemed to be somebody of some cultural authority within the Chinese sphere – saying that he had noticed the Gideon's bibles placed in hotel rooms when he has traveled abroad and that he hopes someday international travelers will open their nightstand or desk drawers to find also a copy of the Chinese classics. The writer was not such a dreamer that he expected these to be in Chinese (although it would perhaps be practical as a first experiment to put the classics in hotel rooms in China, where it would make sense that they be in Chinese). No, he was thinking of some sort of authorised English version that would make the classics available to a wide international readership. For such a translation project, it may be possible in the China of today to find a sponsor almost approaching the unchallenged status of King James. But it is unlikely that even such a sponsor could find a translator or translators who could produce English as compelling as that of the King James Bible and even unlikelier that the sponsor would be satisfied with it if they did. By this, I intend no value judgment regarding the relative merits of the Bible and the Chinese classics, either as scripture or as literature, or of the qualifications of whatever translators might be found. Nevertheless, I very much suspect that such a translation project today would begin to falter from the very beginning.

Let me illustrate this with just the first phrase of the first classic: the Zhou Yi 周易 or Yi Jing 易經, best known in the West as the Classic of Changes. As most readers of this newsletter will know, the Yi Jing is organised around sixty-four "hexagrams", each of which is supplied with a brief text, divided between a hexagram statement and six line statements. The hexagram statement of the first hexagram, Qian 乾, is just four characters long: 元亨利貞, each individual word of which is apparently simple, but it would be very difficult to produce an authoritative translation. The earliest explanation of the passage, incorporated as well into one of the canonical commentaries that since the Han dynasty have been part of the classic, is that the four characters represent four "virtues": yuan 元 representing something like "leadership", heng 亨 "comradeship", li 利 "harmony" and zhen 貞 "steadfastness". The translation offered by James Legge (1815-1897), the great Scottish translator of the Chinese classics, reflects this understanding: "Khien (represents) what is great and originating, penetrating, advantageous, correct and firm." However, evidence throughout the text has suggested to most other readers that the characters should instead be understood as just two verb phrases, yuan heng 元亨 and li zhen 利貞. It is this understanding that lies behind the other most commonly encountered Western-language translation of the Yi Jing, that of Richard Wilhelm (1873-1930): "THE CREATIVE works sublime success, Furthering through perseverance." Both of these translations, as different as they are, are "correct" in that they both represent time-honored Chinese interpretations of the passage. Nevertheless, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to synthesise them to produce a single translation that incorporated both understandings. Moreover, we now know that the problem of translating these four characters is even more difficult than just trying to find a single syncretic rendering.

It is often said that the archaeological discoveries made in China over the course of the last century or more necessitate a complete re-evaluation of early Chinese history; indeed, it is standard today to put this in terms of "rewriting" Chinese history. This need to rewrite extends also to the Chinese classics, including especially the Yi Jing. The discovery of oracle-bone inscriptions at the beginning of the twentieth century already prompted a radically "new" way of understanding the Yi Jing, beginning with this very first passage of the Qian hexagram. Virtually every divination recorded on the oracle bones prominently features the word zhen 貞, meaning something like "to divine" (a full discussion of how it means this would require much more space than this newsletter would provide). Because the earliest traditions regarding the Yi Jing held that it was used in the performance of divinations (indeed, it is supposed to have been exempted from the Qin "burning of the books" because of its "practical" nature as a divination manual), scholars were quick to associate the zhen 貞 of the oracle-bone inscriptions with the zhen 貞 of the Qian hexagram's 元亨利貞. Rather than meaning "correct and firm", pace Legge, or "perseverance", as Wilhelm would have it (both renderings of which come from the single Chinese gloss of zheng 正 "upright"), "new" Yi Jing scholars suggest that here too, it has something to do with divination, although different scholars have had different understandings of just what it means. Some see li zhen 利貞 as an exhortation (or at least authorisation) to perform a divination (i.e., "beneficial to divine"), whereas others have suggested instead that it must be a "beneficial prognostication". Greater familiarity with the language of oracle-bone inscriptions and later divination materials shows this latter suggestion to be almost surely wrong; the word for "prognostication", zhan 占, the graph depicting a mouth under a divination crack, is always differentiated from zhen 貞 "to divine", and in those materials as also elsewhere in the Yi Jing, li 利 is invariably used before verbs rather than nouns (i.e., "beneficial to do something" rather than "a beneficial something"). Nevertheless, it remains puzzling why a hexagram statement, usually thought to be the response one receives from having conducted a divination, should then encourage one to divine yet again.

Thus, without even examining further the other words in this first passage of the Yi Jing, each of which has also been subject to different interpretations (the word heng 亨, for instance, is particularly interesting and was the topic of my ICS public lecture "A Special Use of the Character 鄉 in Oracle Bone Inscriptions and Its Significance for the Meaning of Early Chinese Divination: With Comments on the First Line of the Yi Jing"), we see already some of the difficulties that translators would encounter in trying to produce an authorised version of the Chinese classics. Should the translation reflect traditional interpretations (but when they differ, and even contradict each other, how does one choose among them?), or should it be based on the latest understanding of the language and historical context of the texts themselves? Any decision in this respect would surely leave many readers – even some of those who simply find the translation in their hotel room nightstand – feeling dissatisfied. A translation complete with footnotes that attempted to explain the problems would doubtless cause them to return the book to the nightstand, turn off the light and go back to sleep.