Translation or interpretation?

Nelson commented on the ‘Kinder I Ching’ page: “Aren’t you all confusing various ‘interpretations’ with a ‘translation’?”

Well – yes, we are. But then they are already inextricably confused.

Choosing a phrase in one language to represent a phrase in another is already half way to interpretation. You only have to look at the results of a computer translation to appreciate that there’s more to the job than translating word by word, or even phrase by phrase.

(Or, as Babelfish puts it after translating the above into simplified Chinese and then back again to English:
“Chose a phrase to represent a phrase with one language in already was in addition half way to explained. You must only look the computer translation appreciation, has many to the duty cycle translation word by the word, even phrase result by phrase.”)

Just what is being translated, anyway? Not just one word after another, evidently, but what they mean. So is the translator trying to decode the words to unlock their author’s original message, and then find new words to convey that same message? That sounds reasonable… until you start asking where that ‘authorial message’ is to be found, and realise that what we’re really talking about all along is the translator’s idea of what the words convey. Those words somehow form an autonomous entity, where different readers can find different messages according to their own natures and circumstances. So the translator (or do I mean interpreter?) has the task of creating a new ‘word-creature’ in the new language, with that same spectrum of messages there to be found.

Such questions are quite complicated enough in the area where I first met them: dealing with the words of a known author, in another European language, from maybe a few centuries ago. (And a reluctance to get bogged down in such things is one reason why I’m writing this blog, not labouring in academia somewhere. 😉 ) When it comes to Yi there are whole new layers of complexity.

To name but a few…

Yi comes from a complex tradition – probably, at least in part, an oral one. You want your translation to be faithful to the words of the original – but is there an ‘original’? If we keep looking, will we find that one pure, unadulterated text? It seems at least as likely that if we could reach back far enough, what we’d find would be a whole collection of ‘original’ traditions, all brought together and boiled down into the received version we have now. The idea of being ‘faithful to the original’ actually leads people to consider words in this received version as ‘loans’, and to make substitutions for what they think the original must have meant.

The language of the Yi is infinitely more open to interpretation than a modern European one. Just one example: there is no formal punctuation, so translation issues as basic as which words belong together are open to interpretation.

And if we are trying to find ‘words to convey the same message(s) as the original’, then whose messages are these? The authors of the original Yi lived – probably – round about three thousand years ago, and were – probably – many (perhaps many generations). But there is also, unmistakably, a single voice that speaks through all these original authors’ vastly-interpretable words as we consult the oracle today. Who or what speaks, and does this voice have an ‘intent’ of its own? What, if anything, might this ‘intent’ have in common with the intent of those who first wrote (or recited, or chanted…) the words?

At one extreme, Richard Rutt and others ‘just translate’ what they reconstruct to be the original authors’ ideas. And as he sees them, these were a primitive people with no idea of morality except as a matter of social reputation. They didn’t write about ‘trust’ or ‘sincerity’, for instance, but about prisoners to be used in human sacrifice. I think Rutt’s work is something of an academic masterpiece, but I would never dream of using it for divination.

By now it should be clear that Wilhelm’s work is more than just a translation. He’s not translating only ‘words of the text’, but the voice he hears in the Yi – namely that of its Neo-Confucian tradition (perhaps with a German accent).

Taking 37, line 2 as an extreme example: here is the nearest I can offer to ‘just a translation’ of this, word by word:

‘No direction to pursue,
Stay put in the centre and cook.
Constancy, good fortune.’

In Wilhelm/Baynes, with relatively small interpretive additions, this becomes:

‘She should not follow her whims,
She must attend within to the food.
Perseverance brings good fortune.’

And then of course his commentary says that ‘the wife must always be guided by the will of the master of the house, be he father, husband, or grown son.’ (And maybe by the will of the house rabbit, too, if it has that all-important chromosome?) But commentary apart, Wilhelm’s obviously done more here than simply translate.

And Carol Anthony, who started me on this rant in the first place? In the usual sense of the word, her book isn’t a ‘translation’ at all. That is, as far as I know, she hasn’t learned Early Old Chinese, and doesn’t take any interest in Chinese culture. (For instance, she casts the dragon of hexagram 1 as the ‘collective ego’ and villain of the piece.)

What she is translating, though, is what she believes to be the intent of the oracle as a whole – which is at least as valid a project as trying to reconstruct the original authors’ intent, I think. The ‘Sage’ of her ‘Oracle of the Cosmic Way’ has a powerfully judgemental voice, and a complex moral and metaphysical agenda to expound. I know it does a lot of good for a lot of people – I just can’t recognise it as Yi.