#‘though I cannot read Chinese. I’ve spent two years in China so I’m pretty confident in translating

[dkniade]

Start ID.

It is hard to imagine how anyone can get the idea that it is possible to translate a Chinese text without knowing Chinese. The requisite hubris is astounding. Chinese people do not attempt to translate Shakespeare without knowing English. In certain cases, such as when a rare text has been translated only into some other language, it may be defensible, as a stop-gap, to publish an indirect English translation that relies on another translation, rather than on the original text. (For instance, the Ming novel Rou putuan 肉蒲團 was unavailable in English for many years, so Grove Press published an English translation of the German translation by Franz Kuhn.) But those are special circumstances that do not apply to the Daode jing. There are plenty of serviceable English translations as it is.

Before considering these books in detail, it is worth observing that the authors justify their publications with apologies that are revealing in themselves. Mitchell, for example, announces that "the most essential preparation for my work was a fourteen-year-long course of Zen training, which brought me face to face with Lao-tzu and his true disciples and heirs, the early Chinese Zen Masters." This devotion may be admirable, but a course of Zen training, however rigorous, does not in itself qualify one to translate the Daode jing. The Daode jing is not a Buddhist text. In any case, it is only in an unclarified metaphorical sense that Mitchell's Zen experience could have brought him "face to face with Lao-tzu and his true disciples and heirs." Who are the "false" heirs? Who, for that matter, is Lao-tzu? (Mitchell seems to believe that there was a man named Lao-tzu who lived long ago and wrote a great book.) Far from allaying concerns, the exposition of his credentials only raises further questions about his peculiar conception of the text's history.

Bynner, for his part, writes: "Though I cannot read Chinese, two years spent in China and eleven years of work with Dr. Kiang in translating The Jade Mountain have given me a fair sense of the 'spirit of the Chinese people' and an assiduity in finding English equivalents for idiom which literal translation fails to convey." It is striking that Bynner felt obliged to put the phrase "spirit of the Chinese people" in quotation marks; his own conscience seems to have balked at such a self-serving platitude. To suggest, moreover, that two years spent in China in the twentieth century should provide an adequate understanding of the Chinese world over two thousand years earlier belittles one of the most vibrant civilizations on the planet. No one would propose in earnest that a sojourn in Italy would constitute sufficient training for an American to discourse on Ovid and Livy. If Mitchell's and Bynner's claims seem less than outrageous, it is only because they manipulate Americans' general unfamiliarity with the cultures of East Asia.

To Miles belongs the most ludicrous pronouncement of all. In his acknowledgments, he thanks "several Chinese students, whom I cannot name because reprisals might be taken against their families on the mainland if their work with me became known. Communist Chinese bureaucrats have, at least since the days of the Red Guards, forbidden the Chinese people to possess or read the Confucian and Taoist classics, as well as most ancient Chinese literature."

This he writes in 1992, long after "the days of the Red Guards," at a time when state-sponsored presses in the People's Republic of China have published thousands of books and articles on "ancient Chinese literature," including every Confucian and Daoist classic, and representing an array of diverse approaches. A writer who contends that helping a foreigner read the Daode jing would make Chinese citizens vulnerable to reprisals is either uninformed or disingenuous.

End ID.

From "Those Who Don't Know Speak: Translations of the Laozi by People Who Do Not Know Chinese" by Paul R. Goldin