Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).
I finally could use the Yi for divination when I found myself what the lines really meant. Wilhelm is good, other translations often as well, and not speaking here about bad ones. Even with good ones it is not easy. But with really studying the text, finding the wide range of meanings, the 'base' of them, only then I could really make sense of it.
Hi, Luis:I'm very puzzled by several things in this thread:
... A little surprised by some of the statements that implicitly devalue others' efforts to approach and understand the Yi, thus taking the position of believing their own approach is the correct one and even thinking "divination" is all that is worthy of discussion about the classic. ...
If he had a Ph.D. from Cambridge in Classical Chinese it might have been worth considering his "translation".
Lars:... a phsyciatrist... asked if he should marry her and then explained in detail how he had ended the relationship because he got 31 no lines. ... I told him 31 is usually understood to be an encouragement about marriage and he suddenly became very pale. Fortunately he had a very nice wife
取 ... 耳 ear + 又 hand / action indicator → compress one's fingers about the ear of an enemy in taking him prisoner, symbolic of military exploits → take; grasp; take away; seize; rob; remove; eliminate → obtain; get (a prize / grade / salary etc.) ...
From: KanjiNetworks
An Etymological Dictionary of Chinese Character Interpretations
By Lawrence J. Howell and Hikaru Morimoto
at: http://www.kanjinetworks.com/
...Yup, Jaimito was a Zhou prince...
Dear Bamboo:... and some people get so engrossed in the characters and the meanings and the relationships, that divination becomes a dim secondary interest. The exploring and learning becomes its own kind of divination...
Dear Bamboo:
Trust me, diviners or readers are, in the case of YI, almost the same. Who goes to read a book like the YI if not interested in divination? There are many more interesting books of poetry or narrative for reading and studying.
I believe that you are looking form your own point of view, like a YiJing user and little have made for seeing from the other point of view. For some people wondering about words, meanings and new airs is a passion, not an intellectual excercise. So said Brad?
Aren´t you willing of taking a bit of this sort of toxic beverage? Why don´t you try to see the same landscape from another point of view? Does scare you to read the chinese text, even a short sequence, with your own eyes, no matters what you was said?
It´s a good trip and little dangerous. You can get help in any point of the way. It´s cheap, nothing onerous. But beware, can happen (1) exiting indemned or (2) falling in love with a YI that you still little know and not exiting at all.
Why don´t you try?
Yours,
Charly
Hi, Bamboo:... you misunderstood me Charly... I have my own little book of Chinese figures, actually very old, and found in my father's things after he died. It is something I love to pore over... If I had another fifty years to live, I might even consider making it a serious study, like my dad did...
Thanks for the lecture from you all. But of course it will take me somewhere! don't be silly! Being able to read classical Chinese is an indispensable prerequisite for translating! There were not really much Sinology at the time of Karlgren and all the others you mention, they were the ones who created the whole basis of the Sinology. So point not taken!As I and others have mentioned before, Classical Chinese alone, as a subject of study and expertise, will take you nowhere regarding the Yijing.
So you believe that even if we could translate it almost perfectly it’s so difficult to understand that you need a PhD in psychology etc. to understand it? I agree it's difficult, but that is because it’s so ancient. We didn't really have the means to translate texts like this before, because it is very time consuming to make databases of all the old characters from the most ancient text on oracle bones etc. Also oracle bone texts and bronze vessel texts were usually very simple, not really representing the everyday language. What about all the many other more ordinary texts that were lost: poems, messages, war strategies, deeds, farming manuals etc? if we had those it would be much easier to know the language, but they were written on bamboo, leather and silk and were of course lost. The bone and bronze texts are really not very good for learning the ancient language, but it's all we got and the people working with it have come far already. If Legge and Karlgren were alive today they would have had a much better chance. In my opinion you don’t have to be a psychic to understand this text, it was written in plain daily-life ancient Chinese.The Yijing is its own "species" as a literary work and its proper translation must be supported by several different scholarly disciplines.
I believe that the word "alone" was meant to be the most important word in Luis' sentence, and that seems to have been skipped over. The academic study of Classical Chinese alone does not confer any philosophical perspective. or any sense of how grammatical context shapes a word's meaning.
Maybe this would be an appropriate analogy to what Luis said: Mathematics alone, as a subject of study and expertise, will take you nowhere in the study of science". Mathematics completely lacks the real-world observation that science requires, and yet science also goes nowhere without mathematics.
Thanks for the lecture from you all. But of course it will take me somewhere! don't be silly! Being able to read classical Chinese is an indispensable prerequisite for translating!
Ah, but you seem to have missed my point, so, how can you take it? What I clearly implied is that "academic credentials (i.e. a pretty diploma on your wall)" (yup, that's going to be difficult to miss...) in Classical Chinese is not a requisite for a person with the drive to, not only learn Classical Chinese outside of an established institution, but also apply said learning, as one more tool, in the translation of the classics. That's why I used the examples of Legge, Karlgren, Wilhelm and Needham: THE MEN HAD NO ACADEMIC DEGREES IN CLASSICAL CHINESE TO BACK UP THEIR KNOWLEDGE. Not only because they didn't exist but because an established university degree in the field was never a necessity for anybody to properly learn the language and they only needed their personal interest and their drive to learn it. Still, to these days, the men are beacons in the field of Sinology.There were not really much Sinology at the time of Karlgren and all the others you mention, they were the ones who created the whole basis of the Sinology. So point not taken!
I'm defending only what I know to be very thoughtful and careful translations, that not only provide the "translated words" but also the rationale behind their choice of words. Also, in that list you are compiling in the other thread, and by your words above, you appear to be placing all those books in the same class, the class of "translations." Only a very small percentage of those books are actual translations. The rest are the personal interpretations (not translations) of their authors upon the already translated words by that small percentage, and usually only upon the Legge and/or Wilhelm translations. If you are going to take the 95% or so of the books in that list as a measure of "accuracy in translation" it is no small wonder you would interpret the field of Yijing translation to be in a dismal state. Heck, I would too.And it seems to me you keep defending that translations can be extremely different and still all make sense. So basically you like what translators have put into the text, not the original text itself. In that sense you actually don't show much respect for the original text do you?
Well, welcome to the club. Nothing really peculiar in that fact. I hope you are not mistaken in believing some of us started studying the Yijing when this online forum came about. For the rest, read above.Of course I don't mean that being able to read the original text is the only measure, I myself spent nearly twenty years studying this book every single day viewing it from different angles. But without being able to read it I'd surely be stuck; with 113 different translations to choose from.
You are the only one quoting the need for PhD's in different fields; certainly not me... What I said is that "knowledge" in different fields, which can be obtained regardless of being inside or outside of academia, is indeed necessary to properly translate the text of the Yijing and that the sole ability to read Classical Chinese, as a singular discipline, falls way short of the necessary set of tools to do so. I don't know how to express it more clearly...So you believe that even if we could translate it almost perfectly it’s so difficult to understand that you need a PhD in psychology etc. to understand it? I agree it's difficult, but that is because it’s so ancient.
I'm sorry to point this, but you are evidencing a certain lack of knowledge in ancient Chinese epigraphy and paleography and the philology that derived from that study. Do you really believe that those Shang and Zhou men inscribing plastrons and scapulae, the "literati" of their time, documenting their official contemporary affairs in that way, would reserve a better and clearer way of writing their thoughts for their "day-to-day life"? That they reserved a "plainer" Chinese for themselves? That they used some sort of "telegraphic" format for their official business and they would write the other stuff, not only in a plainer format, but more elaborately in their daily communications? Seriously? Please, pick up a few books and scholarly articles by David Keightley, David Nivison, Victor Mair, and Shaughnessy, to name a few.We didn't really have the means to translate texts like this before, because it is very time consuming to make databases of all the old characters from the most ancient text on oracle bones etc. Also oracle bone texts and bronze vessel texts were usually very simple, not really representing the everyday language. What about all the many other more ordinary texts that were lost: poems, messages, war strategies, deeds, farming manuals etc? if we had those it would be much easier to know the language, but they were written on bamboo, leather and silk and were of course lost. The bone and bronze texts are really not very good for learning the ancient language, but it's all we got and the people working with it have come far already. If Legge and Karlgren were alive today they would have had a much better chance. In my opinion you don’t have to be a psychic to understand this text, it was written in plain daily-life ancient Chinese.
Unless you have access to an older extant version of a nearly complete Zhouyi/Yijing, unknown to us, than the Mawangdui, I think the text deserves some respect as a reference for translations. Are you perhaps placing all your bets on the Zhou yi zhe zhong (周易折中), compiled in 1715, as the real and truly accurate version of the ancient Zhouyi when that has some 2000 years worth of transcriptions by different philosophical schools through the ages? I mean, it is really a personal choice and all serious contemporary translations are based on it, but thinking that something compiled in 1715 is the exact image of the ancient Zhouyi is a huge leap of faith.The Mawangdui text is still surprisingly regarded by some people as a valid edition that can be used to pick characters from whenever there is something they don't understand.
Please read above as to why they might be using the Mawangdui text as a reference. You speak of possible copyist errors and I wonder how many more copyists it took, over millennia, to compile the Zhouyi Zhe Zhong in 1715 versus the Mawangdui text, which was buried about 168 B.C. ...The Mawangdui text sounds just like the other versions, and I don't know many people today that are silly enough to still think it was not made by a copyist who listened to the text from someone who knew it by heart! And yet we still see people take characters from it to make fit how they like. We also still see cutting and twisting definitions from dictionaries not at all relevant for this period.
Who said those serious enough to actually attempt to "translate" the Yijing in a rigorous way do not check other text examples? You must be talking about the other 95% of books with the title "I Ching" that are sold everywhere. Anyone that can toss three coins, have an presumed gift for fortune telling, and can write more than two sentences in a coherent way, can publish one of those. Well, I agree, that's mostly junk and not translations.We even see ”translators” who don’t even bother to check a wider range of text examples than found in the dictionaries. Should be basic stuff really.
Is this what you see as a broad academic and insightful approach?
This does not invalidate all of their findings, but it does suggest that they be used with a greater degree of humility than anybody has seen so far in academic circles.
Hi All,
However, in the end the miracle remains that the divination techniques of the Yi work over the millennia to provide each person who consults the Oracle their own counsel that can make sense to them in their own terms and understanding. Nothing else comes even close to that universal capacity...
Frank
I firmly believe it can be done with a combination of clever reading skills and respect for the original.
(sigh...is my English really that bad?
1. You need to be able to read what you translate. I haven't been flashing anything, only stressing the importance of education, you can't learn this from sitting with Matthews at home.
2. I believe the Zhou Yi is a whole lot simpler to read than we think. We just can't see it without a context. The context is a little difficult to establish, but I believe it can be done.
3. I think that if we try to dig into the grammar and translate on a basis of a framework, we can determine which edition is most original. I think 1715 edition is very accurate and original; only need to slightly adjust one single character.
Kinky eh?
4. Mawangdui was just a grave text like grave money of clay etc. Shaughnessy's translation makes absolutely no sense. Seen anybody use it for divination?
5. I don't believe you have to take a myriad of things into consideration to understand and translate this text. It is good to know the surroundings of the subject but it can also take our focus away from the basic problems of reading it. I firmly believe it can be done with a combination of clever reading skills and respect for the original.
6. I believe no one has the right to put any personal ideas into this text themselves like Karcher do. We need to be objective.
7. I agree that we get answers from lesser translations, but I think it is not optimal.
Better translations, more nuanced and precise answers.
These viewpoints shouldn't provoke anybody.
If I sounded a little harsh it was because I don't think you have the right to lecture me.
This is an open forum, if we attack each other, it will soon be very lonely here, members will be afraid to post anything but flattery. I appreciate your opinions and also Bradford's hard work, but we should let each other express opinions freely. Even if I don't agree with the more general trend here, I feel I benefit tremendously from the discussion.
sigh...is my English really that bad?
Clarity,
Office 17622,
PO Box 6945,
London.
W1A 6US
United Kingdom
Phone/ Voicemail:
+44 (0)20 3287 3053 (UK)
+1 (561) 459-4758 (US).