I sat down one morning and for fun started trying to translate The Art of War from scratch, by simply going character by character and looking up the etymology and historical usage of each. Took me about two hours to get through the first page that way, and that was enough to be entertaining so I stopped there.
But, I noticed something, which reminds me of this “bodhi” vs. “enlightenment” contrast.
The text starts out by explaining five core concepts that make up “the art of war”. The first one, I’ve normally seen written in English like this, from the translation by Lionel Giles:
The Moral Law causes the people to be in complete accord with their ruler, so that they will follow him regardless of their lives, undismayed by any danger.
In my version I ended up with:
The Way is how People and Ruler can wish for the same, live and die for each other, and have no fear of danger.
I probably biased it much too far in a different direction, for sure. In reviewing Lionel Giles’ comments about his translation, and translation in general, I think to his credit he was really trying to be more faithful to Eastern culture than his peers, and achieved some success at that, but still had a very western Victorian worldview, seeming to compel him to consider the The Way / Morals as coming from God, and then turns that into a weird implication that “The Way” is necessarily and virtuously authoritarian.
Trying to translate from pre-modern Chinese is fascinating. I’ve made some amateur attempts at it myself, using your same method, and it showed me just how much room there is for interpretation. The reality is that the original text also had some bias towards a particular interpretation, and we don’t share the ontology of the original readers, so almost every translation ends up importing our own worldview in some way because that’s the only way to make sense of it.
I sat down one morning and for fun started trying to translate The Art of War from scratch, by simply going character by character and looking up the etymology and historical usage of each. Took me about two hours to get through the first page that way, and that was enough to be entertaining so I stopped there.
But, I noticed something, which reminds me of this “bodhi” vs. “enlightenment” contrast.
The text starts out by explaining five core concepts that make up “the art of war”. The first one, I’ve normally seen written in English like this, from the translation by Lionel Giles:
In my version I ended up with:
I probably biased it much too far in a different direction, for sure. In reviewing Lionel Giles’ comments about his translation, and translation in general, I think to his credit he was really trying to be more faithful to Eastern culture than his peers, and achieved some success at that, but still had a very western Victorian worldview, seeming to compel him to consider the The Way / Morals as coming from God, and then turns that into a weird implication that “The Way” is necessarily and virtuously authoritarian.
Trying to translate from pre-modern Chinese is fascinating. I’ve made some amateur attempts at it myself, using your same method, and it showed me just how much room there is for interpretation. The reality is that the original text also had some bias towards a particular interpretation, and we don’t share the ontology of the original readers, so almost every translation ends up importing our own worldview in some way because that’s the only way to make sense of it.