Chameleon Book
Chameleon Book - a new translation of the Zhouyi by Freeman Crouch.
From the downloadable pdf sample (introduction, appendices, five hexagrams), this looks fresh, bright and intelligent. There are very useful suggestions for divination and imagining yourself into the imagery. (Eg ‘you are soil to be worked, you are a mare’ or ’seeing the self as a kingdom’.)
There’s also a concerted effort to associate hexagrams and lines with historical characters in the epic of the Zhou - not just on the basis of some pet theory, though, but books of solid scholarship like Kunst’s thesis and the Mandate of Heaven. I miss reference to other ‘layers’ (like Yu in hexagram 8 ) - but it’s always good to be reminded how many there are…
Quoting from the site:
“The I Ching emerges in this translation not as a philosophical essay, but as a great poetic work — playful, large-spirited, and occasionally truly funny. But this play of wit addresses serious and often dark matters of state. It is a book about a war — a revolution against a corrupt government. Yet courtship and marriage are the central metaphors for statecraft at many levels. The translator argues that certain features of the use of marriage as metaphor suggest the author of the original I Ching was a woman.”
Intrigued yet? Then get the sample.
(Yes, he does know that the hexagram characters and numbers have gone wrong in the sample. This is down to technical problems with creating the pdf. I can sympathise!)
You can buy the book with Paypal through the website. My copy is on its way over…
October 17th, 2005 at 7:42 pm
[...] - he’s feeling glum about low sales of his I Ching translation. Actually, we should all feel glum about low sales of his book, as it’s remarkably good one. I wrote about it once here, and to my shame have a half-finished review of the whole thing sitting in my draft posts. Meanwhile various people at the ICC have adopted it with enthusiasm, and with reason. It’s concise, lucid, and with some excellent insights that are very useful in divination. [...]