#Yi jing in english how to#
#Yi jing in english free#

That is why I always spend the first few days of my Introduction to Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese trying to dissuade all those students who I think are not prepared for the excruciating challenges they will face during the coming year in my class, and, indeed, for as many years as they persist in reading texts written in this dead language. Many of them are brutally difficult to fully understand in their entirety. What Legge says about the difficulty of understanding the I ching and rendering it into another language, to varying degrees, is true of all other texts written in Literary Sinitic / Classical Chinese.

2nd edition (1899), Oxford: Clarendon Press reprinted numerous times. If, after all, they shall conclude that in what is said on the hexagrams there is often ‘much ado about nothing,’ it is not the translator who should be deemed accountable for that, but his original.įrom: Legge, James (1882). I hope, however, that I have been able in this way to make the translation intelligible to readers. What I have done in this way will generally be seen enclosed in parentheses, though I queried whether I might not dispense with them, as there is nothing in the English version which was not, I believe, present in the writer’s thought. But it will be necessary for him to introduce a word or two now and then to indicate what the mind of the writer supplied for itself. It will be his object to express the meaning of the original as exactly and concisely as possible. The canon hence derived for a translator is not one of license. This is the rule which Mencius followed in interpreting the old poems of his country :⎯ ‘We must try with our thoughts to meet the scope of a sentence, and then we shall apprehend it.’ In the study of a Chinese classical book there is not so much an interpretation of the characters employed by the writer as a participation of his thoughts ⎯there is the seeing of mind to mind.

#Yi jing in english free#

When the symbolic characters have brought his mind en rapport with that of his author, he is free to render the ideas in his own or any other speech in the best manner that he can attain to. It is vain therefore for a translator to attempt a literal version.

#Yi jing in english how to#

How to surmount this difficulty occurred to me after I had found the clue to the interpretation ⎯in a fact which I had unconsciously acted on in all my translations of other classics, namely, that the written characters of the Chinese are not representations of words, but symbols of ideas, and that the combination of them in composition is not a representation of what the writer would say, but of what he thinks. But their version is all but unintelligible, and mine was not less so. Regis and his coadjutors (Introduction, page 9) in their Latin version. Much of what I wrote was made up, in consequence, of so many English words, with little or no mark of syntactical connexion. When I made my first translation of it in 1854, I endeavoured to be as concise in my English as the original Chinese was. There is hardly another work in the ancient literature of China that presents the same difficulties to the translator. But notwithstanding the account of the origin of the book and its composition by king Wăn and his son, which I have seen reason to adopt, they, its authors, had to write after the manner of diviners. I suppose that there are sinologists who will continue, for a time at least, to maintain that it was intended by its author or authors, whoever they were, merely as a book of divination and of course the oracles of divination were designedly wrapped up in mysterious phraseology. The peculiarity of its style makes it the most difficult of all the Confucian classics to present in an intelligible version. In this regard, it is worth quoting at some length the words of James Legge (1815-1897), the Victorian translator of all the Confucian classics, a monumental achievement that still stands today as an invaluable resource for anyone who wishes to acquaint him/herself with these essential texts of early Chinese civilization. Of all the Chinese classics, the I ching is the one that most Sinologists do not want to touch because of its maddening opacity. We shall probably finish the first draft within a year. For the last two decades or so, my brother Denis and I have been working on a translation of the Yìjīng 易經 (Classic of Changes).