Hinton's Translation of the Yi is out and I hate it

cjgait · Oct 13, 2015

Maybe it's because I lost my poetic license. Maybe I'm just old and set in my ways. But when a well-known translator of classical and literary Chinese translates hexagram 21 like this I put their book in the 'crap and curiosities' section of my Yi Jing collection:

"Bring people together through the biting foresight of shaman-flower sticks, and you'll penetrate everywhere. Exact the proper punishments and you'll bring forth wild bounty."

Bollocks.

To add insult to injury he uses Wade-Giles wherever there is Chinese to transliterate. Why not use Legge's system? It's even more out of date and far uglier.

At least I didn't have to spend a lot of money on the drekh. The hardcover on Amazon was eleven bucks.

charly · Oct 19, 2015

cjgait said:
Maybe it's because I lost my poetic license. ...

Hi, Chris:

It seems that Hinton didn't lost it. Even more he has a lot of licenses to use.

Taken from Mcmillan:

A master translator's beautiful and accessible rendering of the seminal Chinese text

In a radically new translation and interpretation of the I Ching, David Hinton strips this ancient Chinese masterwork of the usual apparatus and discovers a deeply poetic and philosophical text. Teasing out an elegant vision of the cosmos as ever-changing yet harmonious, Hinton reveals the seed from which Chinese philosophy, poetry, and painting grew. Although it was and is widely used for divination, the I Ching is also a book of poetic philosophy, deeply valued by artists and intellectuals, and Hinton's translation restores it to its original lyrical form.
Previous translations have rendered the I Ching as a divination text full of arcane language and extensive commentary. Though informative, these versions rarely hint at the work's philosophical heart, let alone its literary beauty. Here, Hinton translates only the original strata of the text, revealing a fully formed work of literature in its own right. The result is full of wild imagery, fables, aphorisms, and stories. Acclaimed for the eloquence of his many translations of ancient Chinese poetry and philosophy, Hinton has reinvented the I Ching as an exciting contemporary text at once primal and postmodern.

Pure marketing promises although contradictory:

«Hinton's translation restores it to its original lyrical form.»
«The result is full of wild imagery,»
«Hinton has reinvented the I Ching as an exciting contemporary text at once primal and postmodern.»

Maybe you have quoted a sample of wild imagery. I wonder how can six chinese characters be translated with so many english words if not by a special poetic license.

I will try to understand H.21 in this version.

All the best,

Charly

cjgait · Oct 19, 2015

Well, I think there's a certain point when one violates the terms of a poetic license and moves into plain-out poaching.

bradford · Oct 20, 2015

I guess there's still money to be made from people who don't know any better.

hilary · Oct 21, 2015

Shaman-flower sticks?

:rofl:

Tohpol · Oct 21, 2015

bradford said:
I guess there's still money to be made from people who don't know any better.

(You mean our present "culture"?)

Perhaps I'm being unfair, but such books do remind me of most of Stephen Karcher's stuff ...

charly · Oct 23, 2015

hilary said:
Shaman-flower sticks?

Hi, Hilary:

Following Chris' quote, Hinton says «biting foresight of shaman-flower sticks»

Maybe because the character 噬 shi4, to bite / to gnaw, a compound of mouth + yarrow stalk divination (which in turn is a compound of bamboo over witch, sometimes applied also to male shamans).

Of course divination provides FORESIGHT and YARROW is a plant with many FLOWERS, the SHAMAN is hidden in the name of yarrow divination, more deeply hidden in the character for to bite / to gnaw...

Maybe Hinton is trying to trace the COMPLEXITY of mind. And it's well known that COMPLEXITY is a MONSTER.

Achillea millefolium

... commonly called common yarrow ...

Achillea is in reference to Achilles, hero of the Trojan Wars in Greek mythology, who used the plant medicinally to stop bleeding and to heal the wounds of his soldiers.

The specific epithet of millefolium means thousand-leaved in reference to the foliage.

Common yarrow has a large number of additional common names, including milfoil, thousandleaf, soldier’s woundwort, bloodwort, nose bleed, devil’s nettle, sanguinary, old-man’s-pepper and stenchgrass...

Source: Misouri Botanical Garden
Link: http://www.missouribotanicalgarden.org/PlantFinder/PlantFinderDetails.aspx?kempercode=b282

I wonder from where comes «Bring people together». Now I believe to remember that Blofeld instead of to bite translates shi as to gnaw, wich, of course, with the image of RODENT brings attached the association with SEXUAL INTERCOURSE.

Maybe that's why Hintons says «you'll PENETRATE everywhere», I don't dare to imagine how is the another story behind it.

All the best,

Charly

cjgait · Oct 23, 2015

Hi Charly,

Perhaps he makes use of the new verb 'to ridiculate'. It is a combination of extrapolation and ridiculous. In reading through some of the Chinese explanations of various texts over the years, from the Spring and Autumn to the Yi, I have seen quite a bit of ridiculation. But usually the Chinese texts will follow some tradition and be consistent. The flower sticks seem more along the lines of certain Daoist poets who got regally drunk and fell off bridges. Just before keeling over they would write things like Hinton's translation.

An excellent visual essay on ridiculation can be found in Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where Sir Belvedere explains how witches (or in ancient China shamans), were made of wood. You can see from the ancient tradition of burning shamans during times of drought in China that they were clearly made of wood in the full ridiculated logic of the time.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrzMhU_4m-g

charly · Nov 1, 2015

Book Review:

Book Review: I Ching
By Steve Donoghue

I Ching: The Book of Change
translated from the Chinese by David Hinton
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2015

It requires a particularly fervid combination of wisdom and insanity, a screech-pitched intensity of yin and yang, to attempt a translation of the I Ching, the oldest and most recondite of all the so-called “Five Classics” of ancient Chinese literature. And the results can be wildly uneven, as demonstrated by the radical differences between last year’s English-language translation by John Minford for Viking and this year’s new translation for Farrar, Straus and Giroux by David Hinton. For readers feeling a bit beleaguered by the abundance of the translated-literature offerings at their local snooty independent bookstore, the most immediately obvious difference between the two versions will be the fact that Hinton’s is a little over 100 pages long and Minford’s is a little less than 1000 pages long.

It’s a staggering difference, and with any other text, it would be impossible. If you were presented with two different translations of Homer’s Iliad and one was ten times longer than the other, you would immediately choose the longer version on the assumption that the shorter one was severely abridged (or, if you were an undergraduate, you would immediately choose the shorter version on the assumption that there is, in fact, a merciful God).

But in the case of the I Ching, you would then be reckoning without the thousand years of commentary that’s accrued upon the core text, and the commentary is vital, because the core text, as Hinton so circumspectly puts it, “frustrates expectations of coherence.” And the frustration goes much deeper than simple construction, although the simple construction is no jar of cherries:

Prepositions and conjunctions are rarely used, leaving relationships among lines, phrases, ideas, and images unclear. The distinction between singular and plural is only rarely and indirectly made. Verbs are not uncommonly absent, and when present they have no tenses, so temporal location and sequence are vague … And very often subjects and objects are absent, which creates the sense of individual identities blurred together into a shared space of consciousness.

You will perhaps discern from that “shared space of consciousness” business that our current translator pretty much perfectly embodies the aforementioned fervid combination of wisdom and insanity, and there’s no denying the combination breathes inimitable life into his translation of this work he calls “both primordial and postmodern at once.”

As you might expect in a work that consists of random words instead of grammar and syntax, you’re not really supposed to read the I Ching – you’re supposed to use it. You gather the traditional little pile of yarrow-stems (or, if you’re one of the book’s 100 million fans who live in Hong Kong or Leeds or Croton-on-Hudson and don’t have ready access to fresh yarrow-stems, you can use a bunch of coins instead, you swine), use one or another scheme of time-honored mumbo-jumbo in order to separate them into smaller stacks, and once those smaller stacks yield their random numbers, you take those random numbers in their random sequence and you consult their random meanings on a random page of the I Ching. And since you already believe the book is an active and infallible source of divination, presto! You’re performing what’s known as cleromancy.

Hinton’s translation of the ancient glosses on the various hexagrams of the I Ching are clear and often quite lovely (“At rest in obstruction, a great sage finds good fortune. Is he lost, is he lost? He’s tethered always to the mulberry burgeoning from seed,” and so forth), but the best part of his I Ching, for non-cleromancers, will be the subtle and energetic ways he understands the text’s deeper ways of changing its readers:

The I Ching‘s assumption that one can influence one’s fate also reflects this transformation. Rather than simply obey political power and implore the spirits to shape your fate in positive ways, the question of wisdom arises, and the empowerment that wisdom offers: act wisely and good things happen, act unwisely and bad things happen. The I Ching hexagrams embody change in a schematic form, so they allow us to locate ourselves in the unfolding of change.

At the beginning of the universe, Hinton relates at the outset of his book, there were two great dragons with human heads, Root-Breath and Lady She-Voice, two primordial creatures who embodies “constant transformation, writhing through all creation and all destruction, shaping itself into the ten thousand things tumbling through their traceless transformations.” They gave birth not only to mankind, but to the arch-hexagrams that would later become the workings of the I Ching, and as Hinton tells the tale, that constant transformation is the birthright of all the book’s users. “So you see,” he writes, “we are descended from dragons: we have dragon hearts pumping dragon blood, dragon minds thinking dragon thoughts.”

Wisdom and insanity. Yin and yang. And, because Confucius smiles on the innocent, a nice skinny I Ching for the backpack.

From: Open Letters Monthly
Link: http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/book-review-i-ching/

IT TOUCH ALL THE MEMBERS OF THE «CHANGES TRANSLATORS´ CLUB»
From now, the «Club of Fervide Wise Insane Translators of the Changes»
Partner conscription is open.

Yours,

Charly

cjgait · Nov 2, 2015

Yah, 'Root-Breath'. Filthy condition, that.

And the Zhou Yi is not the oldest of the classics, that title belongs to portions of the Book of Songs and possibly sections of the Book of Documents.

charly · Nov 3, 2015

cjgait said:
Yah, 'Root-Breath'. Filthy condition, that.

And the Zhou Yi is not the oldest of the classics, that title belongs to portions of the Book of Songs and possibly sections of the Book of Documents.

Hi, Chris:

Maybe we need to know something about DINOSAUR BRAINS and LIZARD LOGIC before trying to understand Hinton´s translation.

Source: http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-047161808X.html

Root-Breath and Lady Her-Voice are the usually known as Fu Xi and Nü Wa, the old incestuous gods always drawn with intertwined snake tails, meaning, of course, ALWAYS F_CKING, but that´s another story.

See in words of Hinton himself who were Root-Breath and Lady Her-Voice. See attached image from Google Books.

(TO BE CONTINUED)

Yours,

Charly

charly · Nov 3, 2015

About Lady Her-Voice

See Anne Birrell; Chinese Mythology, an Introduction:
From Google Books, page 163/164

Ch.

charly · Nov 3, 2015

Here the core text (Zhouyi) of H.21 translated by Hinton:

View attachment 1493

From Google Books

We need to know how to read Hinton:
(what Hinton says ≅ what Hinton gives to understand)

bring people together ≅ IF WE MAKE PEOPLE JOIN
through the biting foresight ≅ USING LOVE BITES (SAY, PASSIONATE) FOREPLAY
of shaman-flower sticks ≅ OF COURSE, ALLUSION TO FLOWER POWER / MAKE LOVE NOT WAR
And you'll penetrate everywhere ≅ AND YOU WILL MAKE LOVE WITH EVERYBODY
Exact the proper «punishments» ≅ KNOWING HOW TO IMPOSE A GOOD F_CK
And you will bring forth wild booty ≅ WE'LL GET A LARGE HARVEST OF WILD FLOWERS (=WOMEN) (1)

Maybe Hinton's insaneness is but a sexual obsession.

At least I believe so.

Yours,

Charly
_______________________________
(1) say, instead of women as WAR BOOTY, women as LOVE BOOTY. In ancient China women were taken as war booty:
奴 nu2, compound of WOMAN + HAND means SLAVE, for both male or female. In war all women were taken as slaves, all men as corpses.
取 qu3, compound of EAR + HAND means TO FETCH, allusion to the custom of taking ears from the killed enemies, also means TO MARRY A WOMAN, TO FETCH A WOMAN.
孚 fu2, compund of CHILD below HAND, anciently meant TO CAPTURE
俘 fu2, later addition of MAN radical to CHILD below HAND, means WAR PRISONER, mostly men to be sacrified. Men caught like children.

charly · Nov 7, 2015

Attached image disapeared from previous post.

For comparison, the almost literal translation of Greg Whincup:

BITING THROUGH

Biting through.
Biting through is blessed.
It is favorable to apply punishments.

From Greg Whincup´s page
http://pages.pacificcoast.net/~wh/hexag21.htm

Ch.

charly · Nov 7, 2015

H.21 Inner trigram Thunder: AROUSING

Hintons translation from Google Books

For comparison, the almost literal translation of Greg Whincup:

BITING THROUGH

lowest line

He wears fetters that cover his feet.
This averts harm.

second line

He bites into flesh so deeply that it covers his nose.
No harm
.

third line

He bites into dried meat and hits poison.
A little trouble, but no harm.

From Greg Whincup´s page
http://pages.pacificcoast.net/~wh/hexag21.htm

Ch.

charly · Nov 13, 2015

Outer trigram Fire: PASSION

Hinton's translation
From Google Books

Whincup's almost literal:

fourth line

He bites into dried meat and finds an arrowhead of bronze.
It is favorable to persevere against adversity.
Good fortune.

fifth line

He bites into dried meat and finds yellow bronze.
It is dangerous to continue.
No harm.

top line

He wears a cangue that covers his ears.
Inauspicious.

Source: Greg Whincup's page
Link: http://pages.pacificcoast.net/~wh/hexag21.htm

It's noticeable the Hinton's focus on PUNISHMENT (even maybe with a touch of satisfaction) and that there is no line UNAUSPICIOUS.

Ch.

charly · Nov 15, 2015

For compaison with a modern non literal translation:

Hinton:

From: Google Books.

Li Yan: (1)

Shi He (Diagram 21)

If you have enough to eat and drink,
you may handle lawsuit cases smoothly.

Li Yan: The Illustrated Book of Changes, Beijing

Say, Justice is not blind.

Yours,

Charly
______________________________________
(1) About Li Yan, see LISE here: http://www.yijing.nl/books/Yan-illustr.html
Ch.

cjgait · Nov 15, 2015

Well, Charly, you apparently need to feed the judge to get a good judgement.

It really doesn't matter, though. Hinton's is a random translation. Rather like Cage's use of the Yi for music. Only Cage was mixing chaos and order to create art. Hinton is taking that which is in order and throwing in random crap off the top of his head and calling it art.

peterg · Nov 16, 2015

Li Yan's Illustrated Book of Changes (post#17) is available as a free pdf at Labirinto Ermetico on this page https://www.google.ie/?gws_rd=ssl#q=li+yan+illustrated+book+of+changes
I had been looking for it but couldn't remember the name.
I also like the (old wood block ?) drawings in Jou Tsung Hwa's Way To Divination and find them more attractive.

charly · Nov 18, 2015

peterg said:
Li Yan's Illustrated Book of Changes (post#17) is available as a free pdf at Labirinto Ermetico on this page https://www.google.ie/?gws_rd=ssl#q=li+yan+illustrated+book+of+changes
I had been looking for it but couldn't remember the name.
I also like the (old wood block ?) drawings in Jou Tsung Hwa's Way To Divination and find them more attractive.

Hi, Peter:

Thanks for the link. I love Jou although it is not very useful for verifying termporary translations.

Li Yan is a productive translation but a short one and he avoids to be bewitched by the possibilities of punishment and torture, something that I highly esteem.

See 21.2 Biting tender meat, sinking the nose ...

Bite a large chunk of meat which touched your nose.
No bad thing at present.

Li Yan

Say, honoring meat in a banquet. Maybe almost rude, but nothing serious.

The word used in the chinese received text means to put fire off, to suffocate fire, to innondate, to submerge, to sink and also to destroy, to anihilate. I wonder why to choose the worst.

Li Yang is not too literal, but a more literal should bring some disreputable images to dirty brains of readers.

Something like:

Biting tender flesh, sinking one's nose in it

Of course it can be associated with some ancient sexual rites, even more if one remembers that was said in a chinese clasic that «women defeat men like water defeats fire», but that´s another story.

All the best,

Charly

Hinton's Translation of the Yi is out and I hate it

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